Twenty-two people have been killed and 117 injured in Israeli air strikes on central Beirut on Thursday evening, Lebanon’s health ministry said.

BBC reporters heard loud explosions echoing from the site of the strikes in Bachoura, a small Shia area in the capital. Rescuers were seen digging through rubble at the scene.

Ambulances rushed many injured to the American University hospital.

Unconfirmed media reports suggested the apparent target was Wafiq Safa, assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s brother-in-law and a high-ranking security official in the group. Hezbollah’s media office has not commented.

The Israeli strikes hit residential buildings in Bachoura’s two densely packed neighbourhoods, Nweiri and Basta.

They came after two relatively calm days in the Lebanese capital, which has felt unusual after intensive strikes in recent weeks.

There was no warning beforehand, and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has not commented.

This is the third time Israel has launched air strikes on the city outside of the southern suburb of Dahieh, where it has struck repeatedly, killing Hezbollah commanders and destroying munitions caches.

One woman outside the hospital, who did not want to be named, said she was in the building next-door to the blasts.

She said a building which was hit was entirely residential, and about four or five floors high. One of her relatives was being treated for head injuries.

The Beirut attack came hours after two Indonesian peacekeepers were injured in southern Lebanon when an Israeli tank fired at a watchtower, according to the UN.

An observation tower at a UN base in Naqoura was directly hit, causing the peacekeepers to fall, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) said in a statement.

Unifil is a peacekeeping mission created in 1978, monitoring hostilities and helping to ensure humanitarian access to civilians in southern Lebanon.

The UN said Israeli forces had “repeatedly hit” UN positions in the last 24 hours. Israeli soldiers are also accused of deliberately shooting at the cameras and lights at two other Unifil bases.

The IDF said its troops had fired from the area around the base after ordering members of the base to remain in “protected places”.

Both peacekeepers were not seriously injured but remain in hospital, the UN said, adding that deliberate attacks on its peacekeepers were a “grave violation of international law”.

In a separate incident, Israeli soldiers fired at a base in Naqoura, “hitting the entrance to the bunker where peacekeepers were sheltering, and damaging vehicles and a communications system,” the UN added.

An Israeli drone was also spotted flying above the bunker entrance.

Also in Naqoura, Hezbollah said it fired rockets at Israeli soldiers on the ground and used guided missiles to destroy a tank heading towards the area, leading to casualties.

There are now four divisions of Israeli soldiers fighting inside Lebanon as it continues its ground operations against Hezbollah, launched on 30 September.

A spokesperson for Unifil told the BBC on Thursday the force was “alarmed” and “deeply concerned” by the Israeli army’s activity in the area where peacekeeping troops are based.

Positions hit by Israeli forces are well known as UN sites, Andrea Tenenti said, adding it would be important to have a discussion with Israeli authorities “to understand what happened”.

Unifil has been operating in southern Lebanon, between the so-called “Blue Line” – the unofficial boundary separating Lebanon from Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights – and the Litani river, about 30km (20 miles) to the north.

Last week, Unifil refused to leave its positions near the Blue Line after being ordered to do so by the IDF.

There are about 10,000 Unifil military peacekeepers in Lebanon, from 50 contributing countries. There are also about 800 civilian staff.

Indonesia, where the injured peacekeepers are from, supplies more than 1,200 troops to Unifil, more than any other country.

The defence minister in Italy, which contributes more than 1,000 troops to Unifil, said the incidents were “intolerable” and must be “carefully and decisively avoided”.

Around 190 rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel by Hezbollah on Thursday, the IDF said.

Earlier on Thursday, the Lebanese ministry of public health said an Israeli air strike on the village of Karak in eastern Lebanon had killed four people, injuring 17.

Lebanon’s government says as many as 1.2 million people have fled their homes over the past year.

Hostilities in the region have escalated steadily since Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel on 8 October 2023, the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people. A further 251 were taken to the Gaza Strip as hostages.

Since 7 October, nearly 42,000 people have been killed during Israel’s offensive in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Crystal Coleman sits outside the remnants of her home in St Lucie County, Florida, and wonders where she and her daughter will spend the night.

One of at least a dozen tornadoes spawned by Hurricane Milton tore through this low-income community in south Florida, killing at least five residents. At least 16 people are known to have died across the US state.

Crystal is happy to be alive but at a loss over what to do next.

“All of a sudden the door to my attic flew off, all the objects in my house started flying around,” Ms Coleman told BBC News on Thursday.

“It was devastating, we were very scared. It felt like the tornado was inside of our house.”

Her neighbourhood is one of many across the state that were devastated by Milton as it barrelled across the state, leaving widespread damage and millions without power.

The tornadoes spawned as Milton approached the state Wednesday evening, an occurrence that forecasters say sometimes follows tropical weather.

Parts of Crystal’s roof were torn off, and the windows blown out. Further up the street on Thursday, workers at a non-profit organisation were handing out hundreds of hot meals. The power is out and there’s no running water. People are grateful for a hot meal, a smile, and a helping hand.

Devastation litters the main road. A tractor trailer on its side. The canopy ripped off a petrol station. Trees uprooted. Some residents say they’ve contacted the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) for help, but for now, they’re most worried about shelter and food for their families tonight.

Milton’s devastating path is still being assessed by workers across the state, who caution the death toll is likely to continue rising in the coming days.

The storm brought heavy rains of up to 18in (45cm) in some areas. Neighbourhoods and roads remain flooded, businesses, homes and stadiums were torn apart by the winds – but Florida Gov Ron DeSantis said the state did not experience “the worst-case scenario”.

Many evacuated, including some 80,000 people who stayed in shelters overnight, he said.

“My sense is that a lot of the people did leave who were in the evacuation zones,” DeSantis said.

Nevertheless, crews still deployed for hundreds of rescues across the state in large vehicles, boats and helicopters. That includes more than 400 people alone who were rescued from a severely flooded apartment complex in Pinellas County and a US Coast Guard rescue of a ship captain who ended up in the water clinging to a floating cooler 30 miles (48km) from shore.

Maria Bowman, 60, hunkered down in her bright pink mobile home in North Fort Myers, rode out Milton’s fierce winds.

Her home, 600m from the Caloosahatchee River and at risk of storm surge, was in Evacuation Zone A – the category for the most at-risk areas.

She felt her home rattle as Milton came ashore. Her power cut out around 22:00.

“It sounded like an explosion,” she told BBC News. “Boom. No electricity.”

Ms Bowman, who says she’s dealt with numerous hurricanes, says she’s ready to leave the state.

“It’s too many hurricanes,” she said. “One day you survive it, the next time no. Who knows.”

Gov DeSantis warned that flooding remained possible in the coming days. He noted the death toll could continue to rise as the impact of the storm becomes more clear.

• Where is Hurricane Milton heading?
• Why Hurricane Milton caused tornadoes
• ‘My anxiety’s through the roof,’ says woman who did not evacuate
• Evacuees: ‘Waiting out Milton was gamble we weren’t willing to make’
• BBC Verify: No, Hurricane Milton was not ‘engineered’

Tampa Mayor Jane Castor has voiced relief that her city has not seen the type of storm surge that was feared.

But the region saw destruction.

In nearby St Petersburg, the Major League Baseball stadium that is home to the Tampa Bay Rays was severely damaged. Wind tore apart the stadium’s dome, which shines bright orange when the team wins a home game.

A crane also broke apart and collapsed in the middle of downtown St Petersburg, crashing into high rises as the storm blew through.

Castor and other officials have spent days urging people in Milton’s path to flee their homes or risk death.

Milton made landfall as a category three hurricane on Wednesday evening local time, bringing 124mph (200km/h) winds. Earlier in its life, it was categorised more than once as a category five hurricane – which denotes the most powerful type of storm.

The arrival of Milton comes two weeks after the south-eastern US was pummelled by Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 200 people and left many more missing. Clean-up operations are ongoing.

Milton, which has diminished into a post-tropical cyclone, has passed through Florida and traveling through the Atlantic Ocean, north of the Bahamas.

• Does US lack relief money for Hurricane Milton?
• How Hurricane Milton compares to Hurricane Helene
• Is climate change making hurricanes and typhoons worse?
• Hurricanes: A look inside the deadly storms

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.

Marina Perederii’s home in the small mining city of Vuhledar in eastern Ukraine was her pride and joy.

17 Sadovaya Street was little more than a shell when she and her husband bought it.

They lovingly renovated the house, painting cherry blossom and doves – symbols of love and well-being – in their bedroom. They built a swimming pool in the garden and a sauna in the basement.

“Everything was planned with such passion,” she tells the BBC World Service. But the peace wasn’t to last.

In February 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Marina’s husband went to fight while she took their children and ran. Before fleeing, she recorded what she thought could be her last glimpse of their home.

“My dear house, I don’t know if you will stand or not. I don’t know if we’ll ever return here… or if we’ll even survive at all,” she said in a video.

The next time she saw her home was a year later in February 2023, through the eyes of a Russian soldier, in bodycam footage posted on social media.

A marine going by the name Fima was in her living room, flicking through photos of Marina and her family. “Beautiful,” he said, looking at one photo.

It was a chilling image that made her angry. “I wish I had taken the albums with me,” Marina says.

Ukraine spent two and a half years defending Vuhledar before Russia took control of the city at the start of October.

During the long battle, in late January 2023, Fima had led a group of soldiers to the suburbs and got caught in heavy fighting on Sadovaya Street. He and some others entered Marina’s home.

As his bodycam footage went viral back home, Fima was hailed as a hero. Official documents show that he was recalled from the front in February 2023 because of a leg wound.

But what the footage didn’t show was that the Russians were keeping a Ukrainian soldier captive in Marina’s basement, who was starving and in desperate need of medical care. His name was Oleksii.

Before the war, Oleksii worked as an IT specialist. When Russia invaded his country, he volunteered to fight and later became a drone operator in Vuhledar. His love of dancing earned him the nickname Dancer.

When the Russians broke through Ukrainian lines in late January 2023, Oleksii and his comrades tried to retreat, but some of them, including Oleksii were shot.

Wounded, they were taken from house to house by Russian soldiers, with Oleksii eventually ending up in the basement of Marina’s home.

He was held captive for almost a month – Russian footage uploaded online shows him wrapped in one of Marina’s carpets.

When the Russian soldiers eventually retreated, they left Oleksii behind. In all he spent 46 days in Marina’s house and for much of that time he had barely any food or water.

Injured, starving and dehydrated, he was unable to leave the building.

“I was able to find some crumbs on the floor,” he tells the BBC World Service from Kyiv.

“There was a piece of cracker, which a mouse stole from me at night. I hid it, and then the mouse probably stole it because I couldn’t find it.”

But hunger was nothing compared to thirst. One day, after the Russians had left, the desperate need for water almost killed Oleksii.

He tore panels from the sauna in the hope that there might be water inside the pipes. He managed to break one open and drank some of the liquid inside, but it was antifreeze. Those few sips caused internal burns and were nearly fatal.

Then, in March that year, when Ukrainian forces retook parts of Vuhledar and reached Sadovaya Street, another video from Marina’s home went viral. It shows ex-New Zealand soldier Kane Te Tai entering number 17 and finding Oleksii.

“New Zealand, New Zealand, it’s me!” Oleksii shouts at his colleague, who had travelled to fight for Ukraine. Te Tai died in battle just two weeks later.

Oleksii was carried out of the house and to safety.

Had he been left just a few more days, Oleksii says he wouldn’t have made it.

Several other Ukrainian and Russian soldiers are known to have died in and around Sadovaya Street during the battle for Vuhledar.

“Thank God Oleksii survived. But the fact that people died in my house, it shocked me,” she says. “There is only death in there.”

The BBC World Service asked the Russian Ministry of Defence about Oleksii’s treatment but received no response.

Half a year after Oleksii’s rescue, his Russian captor was being lauded at home. He was no longer just referred to by his call sign, Fima, but by his first name, Andrei. State TV footage shows him re-enacting the Vuhledar assault and sharing his experiences with primary school children, where teachers present him as a hero.

The BBC compared this footage with photographs of Andrei from hundreds of social media profiles and found a match – the same hairline, the same mole on the neck, and clear evidence of a leg injury.

Number 17: My House of Horrors

A BBC Eye investigation from the World Service reveals how a family home in eastern Ukraine became the backdrop of three lives caught up in war: the fleeing homeowner, the starving prisoner and the Russian soldier.

Watch on BBC iPlayer (UK Only) or on the BBC World Service YouTube channel (outside UK)

His full name is Andrei Efimkin – a 28-year-old born in Russia’s Far East.

We contacted him and asked about the video from Sadovaya Street, particularly where he flicked through the photos of Marina’s family. He told us he was playing a “psychological trick” on himself due to the incoming gunfire.

“I grabbed the album and started looking at the photos to distract myself,” he said.

“You know, actually, I felt so cold-blooded. For a second, to be honest, these thoughts ran through my mind – about who lived here.”

But when asked about Marina directly, Efimkin said he didn’t want to answer any more questions and ended the call.

Marina is now in Germany. As time passes, she is trying to build a new life, learn a new language and find bits of work here and there – but she still grieves her lost home in Vuhledar.

“It’s so hard. I can still see my house in my dreams, it’s always in my head. I still hope that Ukraine will win and everything will be fine, we will come back,” she says.

“My land is there, the air is mine.”

But back on Sadovaya Street there is almost nothing left of her beloved house, which once again is no more than a shell.

It can be recognised in drone footage shot from the air by a blue spot, where her swimming pool used to be, standing out against a backdrop of grey rubble.

“Now I think about it, I definitely chose the wrong industry.”

Xiao Chen*, who works in a private equity firm in China’s financial hub, Shanghai, says he is having a rough year.

For his first year in the job, he says he was paid almost 750,000 yuan ($106,200; £81,200). He was sure he would soon hit the million-yuan mark.

Three years on, he is earning half of what he made back then. His pay was frozen last year, and an annual bonus, which had been a big part of his income, vanished.

The “glow” of the industry has worn off, he says. It had once made him “feel fancy”. Now, he is just a “finance rat”, as he and his peers are mockingly called online.

China’s once-thriving economy, which encouraged aspiration, is now sluggish. The country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has become wary of personal wealth and the challenges of widening inequality.

Crackdowns on billionaires and businesses, from real estate to technology to finance, have been accompanied by socialist-style messaging on enduring hardship and striving for China’s prosperity. Even celebrities have been told to show off less online.

Loyalty to the Communist Party and country, people are told, now trumps the personal ambition that had transformed Chinese society in the last few decades.

Mr Chen’s swanky lifestyle has certainly felt the pinch from this U-turn. He traded a holiday in Europe for a cheaper option: South East Asia. And he says he “wouldn’t even think about” buying again from luxury brands like “Burberry or Louis Vuitton”.

But at least ordinary workers like him are less likely to find themselves in trouble with the law. Dozens of finance officials and banking bosses have been detained, including the former chairman of the Bank of China.

On Thursday, the former vice-governor of the People’s Bank of China, Fan Yifei, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, according to state media.

Fan was found guilty of accepting bribes worth more than 386 million yuan ($54.6m; £41.8m).

The industry is under pressure. While few companies have publicly admitted it, pay cuts in banking and investment firms are a hot topic on Chinese social media.

Posts about falling salaries have generated millions of views in recent months. And hashtags like “changing career from finance” and “quitting finance” have gained more than two million views on the popular social media platform Xiaohongshu.

Some finance workers have been seeing their income shrink since the start of the pandemic but many see one viral social media post as a turning point.

In July 2022, a Xiaohongshu user sparked outrage after boasting about her 29-year-old husband’s 82,500-yuan monthly pay at top financial services company, China International Capital Corporation.

People were stunned by the huge gap between what a finance worker was getting paid and their own wages. The average monthly salary in the country’s richest city, Shanghai, was just over 12,000 yuan.

It reignited a debate about incomes in the industry that had been started by another salary-flaunting online user earlier that year.

Those posts came just months after Xi called for “common prosperity” – a policy to narrow the growing wealth gap.

In August 2022, China’s finance ministry published new rules requiring firms to “optimise the internal income distribution and scientifically design the salary system”.

The following year, the country’s top corruption watchdog criticised the ideas of “finance elites” and the “only money matters” approach, making finance a clearer target for the country’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign.

The changes came in a sweeping but discreet way, according to Alex*, a manager at a state-controlled bank in China’s capital, Beijing.

“You would not see the order put into written words – even if there is [an official] document it’s certainly not for people on our level to see. But everyone knows there is a cap on it [salaries] now. We just don’t know how much the cap is.”

Alex says employers are also struggling to deal with the pace of the crackdown: “In many banks, the orders could change unexpectedly fast.”

“They would issue the annual guidance in February, and by June or July, they would realise that the payment of salaries has exceeded the requirement. They then would come up with ways to set up performance goals to deduct people’s pay.”

Mr Chen says his workload has shrunk significantly as the number of companies launching shares on the stock market has fallen. Foreign investment has decreased in China, and domestic businesses have also turned cautious – because of the crackdowns and weak consumption.

In the past his work often involved new projects that would bring money into his firm. Now his days are mostly filled with chores like organising the data from his previous projects.

“The morale of the team has been very low, the discussion behind the bosses backs are mostly negative. People are talking what to do in three to five years.”

It’s hard to estimate if people are leaving the industry in large numbers, although there have been some layoffs. Jobs are also scarce in China now, so even a lower-paying finance job is still worth keeping.

But the frustration is evident. A user on Xiaohongshu compared switching jobs to changing seats – except, he wrote, “if you stand up you might find your seat is gone.”

Mr Chen says that it’s not just the authorities that have fallen out of love with finance workers, it’s Chinese society in general.

“We are no longer wanted even for a blind date. You would be told not to go once they hear you work in finance.”

The government is investigating 37 UK-linked businesses for potentially breaking Russian oil sanctions – but no fines have been handed out so far, the BBC can reveal.

Financial sanctions on Russia were introduced by the UK and other Western countries following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Conservative shadow foreign office minister Dame Harriett Baldwin said sanctions were designed to “shut down the sources of finance for Russia’s war machine” and “bring this illegal invasion to an end sooner”.

But critics have claimed they are ineffective after the latest figures showed the Russian economy was growing.

The Treasury said it would take action where appropriate, but pointed to the complexity of the cases as a reason they take considerable time.

The sanctions include a cap on the price of Russian oil, designed to ensure that oil can keep flowing without Russia making large profits.

The cap prohibits British businesses from facilitating the transportation of Russian oil sold above $60 a barrel.

Data obtained by the BBC using Freedom of Information laws shows the Treasury has opened investigations into 52 companies with a connection to the UK suspected of breaching the price cap since December 2022.

As of August, 37 of those investigations were live and 15 had concluded, but no fines had been handed out.

The identities of the businesses are unknown but it’s understood some are likely to be maritime insurance firms.

Dame Harriett told the BBC “there is probably more that could be done” by the government and the oil sector itself “because it does appear that UK importers are still bringing in oil that originated in Russia”.

The anti-corruption organisation Global Witness said it was “quite astonishing” that no fines have yet been handed out, and described the oil cap as “a sort of paper tiger” that is failing to crack down on rule breaking.

Louis Wilson, the head of fossil fuel investigations at Global Witness, called for “bold action” to be taken against companies breaching sanctions.

He said if the UK government “prevents British businesses from enabling Putin’s profiteering, then I think you’ll start to see others following that lead”.

Investigations into potential breaches of the oil cap and other financial sanctions are carried out by a Treasury unit called the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI).

OFSI received an extra £50m of funding in March to improve enforcement of the UK’s sanctions regime

But Mr Wilson said companies under investigation find it “pretty easy to come by” a document that gets them out of trouble.

He described the documents as “basically promises, voluntary bits of paper” and said they can be easily obtained even if the company was involved in transporting oil sold above the price cap.

“What’s likely is either these businesses will find the paperwork that they need to get through this process, or we’ll see the UK government drop these cases quietly,” he said.

He claimed the US were reluctant to make the Western sanctions regimes harder “because they’re scared that if they do enforce the rules it will stop the Russian oil trade and that will send oil prices higher”.

Dame Harriett said it was important that when OFSI “find deliberate wrongdoing they are exacting financial penalties”.

A spokesperson for the Treasury said it would take enforcement action “where appropriate” and it was “putting sanction breachers on notice”.

They added that the cap was reducing Russia’s tax revenues from oil, adding that data from the country’s own finance ministry showed a 30% drop last year compared to 2022.

The former chair of Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee launched an inquiry into the effectiveness of sanctions on Russia in February.

Dame Harriett said she “received evidence that the oil price cap is being evaded by refining Russian oil in refineries based in third countries and then the oil is being exported into the UK.”

Earlier this year the BBC reported on claims about how much oil this so-called “loophole” is allowing into the UK.

But parliamentary committees are disbanded once an election is called and the findings of the Treasury committee inquiry were never published.

It’s understood no decision has yet been made as to whether the new Treasury Select Committee will recommence the work.

OFSI issued its first Russia-related penalty last month, when it fined a concierge company £15,000 for having a sanctioned individual on its client list.

London-based firm Integral Concierge Services was found to have made or received 26 payments that involved a person whose assets have been frozen as part of the Russia sanctions.

Twelve tourists who were trapped in a disused Colorado gold mine for hours have been rescued, officials say.

The group were touring Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine in Cripple Creek, a privately owned tourist attraction, when a lift malfuncioned.

One person died and 11 people, including two children, were rescued earlier. Four had minor injuries.

The hour-long tour takes visitors 1,000ft (305m) down the shaft into the south-west side of Pikes Peak, according to the tour company’s website.

Officials say the lift descending into the gold mine had a mechanical issue around 500ft beneath the surface, creating a “severe danger for the participants”.

“We did have one fatality that occurred during this issue at 500ft,” Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell said earlier. He did not give details.

“There is an elevator issue to resolve before they could be brought up,” Sheriff Mikesell told reporters.

Rescue teams used radio to communicate with the 12 others who were stuck near the bottom of the mine.

“They have chairs, blankets, water and are at a safe temperature,” Sheriff Mikesell said. “This was due to an equipment malfunction. The mine did not collapse.”

Several agencies, including search and rescue teams, responded to the incident with heavy equipment.

Hours later, Governor Jared Polis said: “I am relieved that 12 of the people trapped in the Mollie Kathleen Mine have been safely rescued.”

According to the tour company’s website, entering the 1890s gold mine is comparable to riding in a lift, complete with the sounds of mining machinery.

Visitors to the Mollie Kathleen view several exposed gold veins in their natural state, the website says.

The website adds that revenue from the tours is used to “maintain the mine in safe operable mining condition”.

Officials say the last time an “incident” occurred there was in 1986, though they did not provide more detail.

On TripAdvisor, several people described the lift as a miners “cage”. The posts, which the BBC could not verify, said conditions could be tight and claustrophobic.

William Snare, a former hoist operator at the mine, told the Colorado Springs Gazette that the lift could carry between nine to 15 people. He said it took two minutes to descend, and four to five minutes to return to the surface.

The mine was named after Mollie Kathleen Gortner, the first woman in the Cripple Creek Gold Camp to strike gold in 1891.

The tours were set to close this Sunday for the season.

Ratan Tata, the philanthropist and former chairman of Tata Group who has died aged 86, played an instrumental role in globalising and modernising one of India’s oldest business houses.

His ability to take bold, audacious business risks informed a high-profile acquisition strategy that kept the salt-to-steel conglomerate founded 155 years ago by his forefathers relevant after India liberalised its economy in the 1990s.

At the turn of the millennium, Tata executed the biggest cross-border acquisition in Indian corporate history – buying Tetley Tea, the world’s second largest producer of teabags. The iconic British brand was three times the size of the small Tata group company that had bought it.

In subsequent years, his ambitions grew only bigger, as his group swallowed up major British industrial giants like the steelmaker Corus and the luxury car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover.

While the acquisitions didn’t always pay off – Corus was bought at very expensive valuations just before the global financial crisis of 2007, and remained a drag on Tata Steel’s performance for years – they were big power moves.

They also had a great symbolic effect, says Mircea Raianu, historian and author of Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism. He adds that they “represented ‘the empire striking back’ as a business from a former colony took over the motherland’s prize assets, reversing the sneering attitude with which British industrialists looked upon the Tata Group a century earlier”.

The Tata Group’s outlook had been “outward-oriented” from the very beginning, according to Andrea Goldstein, an economist who published a study in 2008 on the internationalisation of Indian companies, with a particular focus on Tata.

As early as in the 1950s, Tata companies operated with foreign partners.

But Ratan Tata was keen to “internationalise in giant strides, not in token, incremental steps”, Ms Goldstein pointed out.

His unconventional education in architecture and a ring side view of his family group companies may have played a part in the way he thought about expansion, says Mr Raianu. But it was the “structural transformation of the group” he steered, that allowed him to execute his vision for a global footprint.

Tata had to fight an exceptional corporate battle at Bombay House, the group headquarters, when he took over as the chairman of Tata Sons in 1991 – an appointment that coincided with India’s decision to open up its economy.

He began centralising increasingly decentralised, domestic-focused operations by showing the door to a string of ‘satraps’ (a Persian term meaning an imperial governor) at Tata Steel, Tata Motors and the Taj Group of Hotels who ran operations with little corporate oversight from the holding company.

Doing this allowed him not only to surround himself with people who could help him execute his global vision, but also prevent the Tata Group – protected thus far from foreign competition – from fading into irrelevance as India opened up.

At both Tata Sons, the holding company, as well as individual groups within it, he appointed foreigners, non-resident Indians and executives with contacts and networks across the world in the management team.

He also set up the Group Corporate Centre (GCC) to provide strategic direction to group companies. It provided “M&A [mergers and acquisitions] advisory support, helped the group companies to mobilise capital and assessed whether the target company would fit into the Tata’s values”, researchers at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore wrote in a 2016 paper.

The GCC also helped Tata Motors raise money for high-profile buyouts like Jaguar Land Rover which dramatically changed the global perception of a company that was essentially a tractor manufacturer.

“The JLR takeover was widely seen as ‘revenge’ on Ford, which had derisively refused to acquire Tata Motors in the early 90s and then was beaten to the punch on the deal by Tata Motors. Taken together, these acquisitions suggested that Indian corporates had ‘arrived’ on the global stage just as growth rates were picking up and the liberalising reforms bearing fruit,” says Mr Raianu.

Today, the $128bn group operates across 100 countries with a substantial portion of its total revenues coming from outside India.

While the Tata Group made significant strides overseas in the early 2000s, domestically the failure of the Tata Nano – launched and marketed as the world’s cheapest car – was a setback for Tata.

This was his most ambitious project, but he had clearly misread India’s consumer market this time.

Brand experts say an aspirational India didn’t want to associate with the cheap car tag. And Tata himself eventually admitted that the “poor man’s car” tag was a “stigma” that needed to be undone.

He believed there could be a resurrection of his product, but the Tata Nano was eventually discontinued after sales plummeted year on year.

Succession at the Tata Group also became a thorny issue.

Mr Tata remained far too involved in running the conglomerate after his retirement in 2012, through the “backdoor” of the Tata Trust which owns two-thirds of the stock holding of Tata Sons, the holding company, say experts.

“Without assigning Ratan Tata blame for it, his involvement in the succession dispute with [Cyrus] Mistry undoubtedly tarnished the image of the group,” says Mr Rainu.

Mistry, who died in a car crash in 2022 was ousted as Tata chairman in 2016 following a boardroom coup that sparked a long-running legal battle which the Tatas eventually won.

In spite of the many wrong turns, Tata retired in 2012, leaving the vast empire he inherited in a much stronger position both domestically and globally.

Along with big-ticket acquisitions, his bid to modernise the group with a sharp focus on IT has served the group well over the years.

When many of his big bets went sour, one high-performing firm, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), along with JLR carried the “dead weight of other ailing companies”, Mr Raianu says.

TCS is today India’s largest IT services company and the cash cow of the Tata Group, contributing to three-quarters of its revenue.

In 2022, the Tata Group also brought back India’s flagship carrier Air India into its fold approximately 69 years after the government took control of the airline. This was a dream come true for Ratan Tata, a trained pilot himself, but also a bold bet given how capital intensive it is to run an airline.

But the Tatas seem to be in a stronger position than ever before to take big bold bets on everything from airlines to semiconductor manufacturing.

India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi appears to have clearly adopted an industrial policy of creating “national champions” whereby a few large conglomerates are built up and promoted in order to achieve rapid economic outcomes that extend across priority sectors.

Along with newer industrial groups like Adani, the decks are clearly stacked in favour of the Tata Group to benefit from this.

An abrupt silence swamped the courtroom in Avignon as three large television screens, positioned high on three walls, flickered back to life. One could sense people bracing themselves.

In a bleak trial about extraordinary allegations of drugs and rape, it was time to show more of Dominique Pelicot’s carefully curated home videos.

Those videos, filmed by Pelicot and kept on a hard drive that he labelled “abuse”, document assaults on his ex-wife, Gisèle, over the course of a decade.

Fifty men are accused of raping her after she was drugged and left unconscious in the couple’s bed by her husband.

Now 72, Gisèle Pelicot has waived her anonymity so the full details of what she was subjected to can be revealed to the French public. Her lawyers fought to have videos of the crimes screened in court.

Although the judge had earlier said people “of a sensitive disposition” would be able to leave, one of Gisèle Pelicot’s legal team said many had decided to “look the rape straight in the eye”.

Many of the men recruited by her ex-husband on the internet insist they did not believe what they were doing was rape.

Dominique Pelicot sat behind a glass panel, slumped in his chair. His grey hair neatly cut, his left hand raised to block his view of the screen.

Gisèle Pelicot sat on the opposite side of the court, her head against the wall, her eyes occasionally closed. A blank, unreadable expression on her face.

On the screen, in near silence, a short, pale man wearing only blue underpants and black socks, could be seen approaching a bed.

The camera wobbled as it followed him. Behind the man, a woman lay on her left side, almost naked, on a crumpled white sheet. And then, without edits, without any blurring, the sex acts began.

At times, later in the video, you could clearly hear the woman snoring.

In court, Dominique Pelicot appeared to place both hands over his ears. For years he had laced his wife’s food and drink with an anti-anxiety drug, which made her unconscious and seriously affected her health.

This and other videos, shown in court and on Gisèle Pelicot’s insistence to the public watching from an overflow room near by, lie at the heart of the prosecution’s case.

Prosecutors argue that all 50 men who accepted online invitations from Pelicot to visit the family home in the village of Mazan, near Avignon, must have known his wife was unconscious.

Therefore, they must have realised that she was not a consenting partner in some kind of sex game in which she merely pretended to be asleep. Therefore, they must have intended to rape her.

But a string of defence lawyers and their clients have now sought to challenge that.

The man visible on screen in this particular video was a 43-year-old carpenter, named in court as Vincent C.

He stood now in front of the judges in a separate glass-walled area at the rear of the courtroom, with his head bowed down, looking away from the screen.

“Do you recognise the facts of aggravated rape that you are accused of?” asked lead judge Roger Arata – an affable figure with a large white moustache.

“No,” Vincent C replied.

His explanation, delivered haltingly, amounted to a hazy assumption that, since Dominique Pelicot had told him his wife was a consenting partner in a sex game, he had not given the matter any more thought.

At this point Gisèle Pelicot left the courtroom for a few minutes, saying “I can’t bear that man”.

Vincent C acknowledged the experience was “weird,” and unlike anything he had encountered with other couples. And yet, he went on, “I didn’t say to myself: this isn’t going well… I don’t think [about much else] in those moments.”

However, having spoken to his mother and to lawyers, and watching the trial unfold, Vincent C said he had come to understand more about French law, the meaning of rape and the gravity of his actions.

“Now that I am being told how the events unfolded, yes, the acts I committed would amount to rape.”

“Are you aware that Gisèle Pelicot was a victim of your acts?” asked the judge.

“Yes.”

Pelicot has himself admitted all the charges against him.

Outside the courtroom, a lawyer representing another of the accused men distinguished between Pelicot and the others.

“Today it’s clear that Dominique Pelicot’s position is to try to dilute his responsibility by dragging down 50 other men. [Gisèle] is the victim. The question is whether the others were complicit in it or were tricked into participating,” said Paul-Roger Gontard.

While some of the accused have admitted to rape, others have claimed to have spoken or interacted with Gisèle Pelicot in the bedroom.

“So, there are grey zones in this trial,” Mr Gontard continued, pointing to the fact that the videos themselves had already been edited by Pelicot himself, meaning that evidence potentially helpful for the defence could have been cut out.

“He selected what he wanted to keep. He selected the shots. But don’t let that fool you. Everyone says he’s very manipulative.

“Many [of the accused] thought it was a libertine project with the couple, only to discover it was actually a sinister and criminal scheme devised by the husband.

“The question today is when did they realise something was wrong? This realisation varies among [the accused]. The question often arises – why didn’t they leave? It’s not that simple to leave at that moment when faced with a clearly dominant personality in a situation where they are naked and recorded by a camera,” the lawyer added.

Ten minutes’ drive from the courthouse, in a small house in a suburb of Avignon, another of the accused, who has already testified in the trial, agreed to speak to the BBC on condition of anonymity. The man, a nurse by profession, portrayed himself as a victim of Dominique Pelicot.

“I was terrified… I was reduced to the state of an instrument. He was the one who told me: ‘do this.’ I said to myself, this man is not normal, he is a psychopath. It is an ambush, a trap. He is going to kill me in this house,” said the accused man.

He also claimed that Gisèle Pelicot had “reacted to simple caresses… she scratches herself with a co-ordinated movement”, which he said led him to believe that she was conscious and merely pretending to sleep.

When I challenged him, suggesting he was simply seeking to present himself as a victim to avoid culpability, he insisted that was not the case.

He lashed out, repeatedly, at the way the trial was being conducted, at alleged “pseudo-feminists”, and the “hysteria” the media had generated.

Speaking forcefully, but occasionally sobbing, he maintained he was not a rapist. However, he acknowledged that “I will never be considered innocent in this case. I will always carry my guilt with me. I know that.”

The trial in Avignon is set to continue for many more weeks, with a verdict due shortly before Christmas.

Only half of the accused have so far been called to testify, but already this case has revealed, in the grimiest detail, the horrors to which Gisèle Pelicot was subjected, and her extraordinary courage in declining her right to privacy.

The case has also highlighted longstanding debates about French laws and attitudes surrounding rape, and the extent to which a woman’s consent is, or should be considered, a factor in court.

Many of the men have admitted wrongdoing and, like Vincent C, even apologised to Gisèle Pelicot in the courtroom, but they have also insisted that since they didn’t intend to rape, they should not be found guilty of it.

South Korean author Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The 53-year-old fiction writer is a former winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her 2007 novel The Vegetarian.

At the ceremony she was praised “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.

The Nobel Prize committee has awarded the literary award since 1901 and this marks the 18th time a woman has won the prize.

She has won 11m krona (£810,000) which is the amount awarded to each Nobel Prize winner this year.

Han is the first South Korean winner of the prize, who was described by the Nobel Prize board as someone who has “devoted herself to music and art”.

The statement also added that her work crosses boundaries by exploring a broad span of genres – these include violence, grief and patriarchy.

A turning point for her career came in 2016, when she won the International Man Booker prize for The Vegetarian – a book which had been released nearly a decade before, but was first translated into English in 2015 by Deborah Smith.

It depicts the violent consequences for a woman who refuses to submit to the norms of food intake.

Han’s other works include The White Book, Human Acts and Greek Lessons.

Swedish Academy permanent secretary Mats Malm said at the ceremony that “she wasn’t really prepared” to win the prize.

Committee chair Anders Olsen also said she “confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life”.

He praised her “poetic and experimental style”, and called her “an innovator in contemporary prose”.

The chair added she has “unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead”.

Han is the first female recipient of the literature prize since 2022, when it was awarded to French writer Annie Ernaux.

She is also the first female Nobel laureate this year.

The prize is awarded for a body of work, rather than a single item – there is no shortlist and it is notoriously difficult to predict.

Han is the daughter of novelist Han Seung-won and was born in the South Korean city of Gwangju.

She moved to capital Seoul at a young age and studied Korean literature at a university in the city.

Her first published works were five poems in 1993, and she made her debut in fiction the following year with a short story.

Han, who has taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and is writing her sixth novel, has been published in more than 30 languages.

Last year’s prize was won by Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, and previous winners include Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Bob Dylan.

President William Lai has pledged to uphold Taiwan’s self-governing status in his most high-profile public address since taking office earlier this year.

In a thinly-veiled reference to China’s claim over the island, Lai said he would “uphold the commitment to resist annexation or encroachment upon our sovereignty.”

At the same time, Lai promised to maintain “the status quo of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait” and pledged to cooperate with Beijing on issues such as climate change, combating infectious diseases and maintaining regional security.

Responding to Lai’s speech, a spokeswoman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it “exposed his intransigent position” on Taiwan independence.

Lai was speaking to a crowd in Taipei to commemorate Taiwan’s National Day, only nine days after Communist China celebrated its 75th anniversary.

“The Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinates to each other,” he said, in a reference to the governments of Taipei and Beijing respectively.

“On this land, democracy and freedom are thriving. The People’s Republic of China has no right to represent Taiwan,” he added.

Lai previously told visitors there would be “no surprises” in his national day address, in a bid to reassure them that he would not do anything further to agitate Beijing.

The disclaimer followed several speeches by President Lai over the past few months that some viewed as being provocative.

“The speech was much softer and less snarky than his recent speeches,” Lev Nachman, a political scientist at the National Taiwan University, told the BBC in reference to Thursday’s address. “It gives China far less ammunition to use against him.”

“Nevertheless,” he added, “Beijing will still find many reasons to hate this speech.”

Mr Nachman said he expected a strong reaction from Beijing in the form of more military exercises in the next few days.

Calling him “intransigent” on independence, a spokeswoman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs criticised Lai’s speech and his “sinister intention to escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait in order to seek political gains.”

“No matter what the Lai Ching-te Administration says or does, it will not be able to change the objective fact that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to the same China, nor will it be able to stop the historical trend that China is bound to be reunified, and will be reunified eventually,” Mao Ning told reporters on Thursday, using Lai’s Chinese name.

Last week, Lai said it was “absolutely impossible” for China to be the “motherland” of Taiwan because the island’s government was founded in 1911, decades before the current Communist regime of mainland China was founded in 1949.

“On the contrary, the Republic of China may actually be the motherland of citizens of the People’s Republic of China who are over 75 years old,” Lai said at a concert to mark Taiwan’s National Day on Saturday.

Taiwan maintains the constitution of the Republic of China, which was founded on the Chinese mainland. When it lost a long civil war with the Communists in 1949, the Republic of China government fled to Taiwan and has been based there ever since.

Last month, Lai also questioned China’s assertion that its claim over the self-ruled island was based on territorial integrity. If that were the case, he suggested, Beijing would also be pushing to reclaim other so-called historic lands that once belonged to the Chinese empire.

“If China wants to annex Taiwan… it’s not for the sake of territorial integrity,” Lai said, in an interview to mark his first 100 days in office.

“If it is really for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t China take back Russia?”

Lai referenced the 1858 Treaty of Aigun, which saw China concede large swathes of Manchuria to Russia. The concession occurred during what China refers to as the “century of humiliation,” when Western powers and Japan exploited the weakened Qing Dynasty.

On Wednesday, China’s government responded by saying President Lai was escalating tensions with “sinister intentions”.

“Lai Ching-te’s Taiwan independence fallacy is just old wine in a new bottle, and again exposes his obstinate stance on Taiwan independence and his sinister intentions of escalating hostility and confrontation,” said the statement from China’s Taiwan Affairs Office.

After his election in January, Lai succeeded Taiwan’s previous president Tsai Ing-wen, who also came from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

Lai’s public comments until now are regarded by many political observers as going further than anything said by his predecessor, who was much more cautious in her public speeches.

In spite of his administration’s more confrontational tone, however, Lai has stressed his position of maintaining the “status quo” between Taiwan and China.

He insists Taiwan has no need to declare independence because it is already an independent sovereign nation that has never been controlled by the People’s Republic of China.

Lai also devoted a considerable amount of Thursday’s speech to domestic issues such as energy, climate change and housing.

South Korean pop star Hanni has made a surprise announcement, saying she will testify to the country’s National Assembly in a hearing about bullying in the music industry.

The singer, who is part of the girl group NewJeans, said she had made the decision without telling her managers or her record label, Ador.

“I believe going forward is the right thing to do, no matter how much I think about it,” she wrote to fans on social media.

It comes after she and the other four members of her band raised concerns about their treatment by Ador during an impromptu YouTube livestream on 11 September.

The group were the eighth biggest-selling act in the world last year, scoring international hits with feathery, throwback songs like SuperShy and OMG.

However, their mentor and record label chief executive, Min Hee-Jin, was removed earlier this year over allegations that she had planned a hostile takeover that would make NewJeans and Ador independent of their parent label, Hybe. Min has denied the accusations against her.

In the band’s YouTube video, which has since been deleted, they demanded Min’s reinstatement; and made claims of workplace harassment.

Hanni said that when she greeted the members of another band at their record label offices, their manager had instructed them to “ignore her”.

The 20-year-old reported the incident to Ador’s new chief executive, Kim Joo-Young – but said her concerns had been brushed off.

“She told me it was too late and that I had no evidence. Seeing her ignoring the issue made me feel like there was no one to protect us,” Hanni alleged during the livestream.

The accusation sparked a war of words between fans of NewJeans and the girl group Illit – who were rumoured to be the antagonists.

As the row escalated, the agency managing Illit, Belift Lab, was forced to issue a denial.

“Illit’s managers never instructed anyone to ‘ignore’ NewJeans members, and the Illit members have always greeted NewJeans when passing by,” the agency said.

Belift said they had reviewed a video that showed Illit’s members bowing to Hanni on the day of the incident – but that footage of their subsequent interactions was not available.

The agency also denied claims from the parents of NewJeans members that this later footage had been deleted on purpose.

The row eventually caught the attention of South Korea’s Environment and Labour Committee, who have summoned both Hanni and Kim Joo-Young to testify to an audit on workplace harassment later this month.

In her statement, Hanni told fans: “I’ve made my decision. I’m going to go the National Assembly. A parliamentary inspection!

“I’m going alone. They still don’t know… neither my managers nor the company.”

The singer thanked fans for their support, and reassured them that they don’t “need to worry”.

“I’m doing this for myself and for the members [of NewJeans], and also for the Bunnies [fans],” she added.

“No, it’s not difficult. I want to do this.”

The British rapper and online personality Yung Filly has been charged over rape allegations in Australia.

Real name Andres Felipe Valencia Barrientos, he is best known for his work with the YouTube collective Beta Squad and has presented shows on BBC Three.

He was arrested in Brisbane on Tuesday and extradited to Perth the following day to attend a court hearing.

Barrientos, 29, was charged on Thursday and has had his bail application approved. His representatives have been contacted for comment.

The full charges include four counts of sexual penetration without consent, three counts of assault occasioning bodily harm and one count of impeding a person’s normal breathing or circulation by applying pressure on or to their neck.

It is alleged he brought a woman in her 20s back to his hotel room after he had performed at the nightclub Bar1 in Perth.

The attack is alleged to have taken place on 28 September.

He was represented in Perth Magistrates Court by barrister Seamus Rafferty SC, who applied for bail on Barrientos’ behalf.

The 29-year-old, who was in Australia touring his music, has also appeared in the UK on Soccer Aid on ITV and The Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up To Cancer on Channel 4.

Barrientos also won a MOBO Award for best media personality in 2021.

A deluge of misinformation online about back-to-back hurricanes in the US has been fuelled by a social media universe that rewards engagement over truth.

The scale and speed of false rumours about Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton has been unlike many of the frenzies I’ve investigated online before.

Viral posts have ranged from seemingly innocuous questions about the legitimacy of forecasts and rescue efforts, to false claims – repeated by Donald Trump – that hurricane relief funds are being spent on migrants who entered the US illegally.

Others spread false images of the wreckage – faked pictures of children fleeing devastation that were generated by artificial intelligence (AI), old clips showing different storms or computer-generated (CGI) videos. And then there were those who shared false and evidence-free conspiracy theories about the government manipulating – or “geo-engineering”- the weather.

“Yes they can control the weather,” wrote Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene last week on X.

• Fact-checking claims about hurricane response efforts
• No, Hurricane Milton was not ‘engineered’
• WATCH: Floridians assess hurricane damage

Most of the viral misinformation has come from social media profiles which have blue ticks and a track-record for sharing conspiracy theories. Several accounts which spread Hurricane Milton misinformation this week had previously shared posts suggesting real-life events were staged or rigged, from elections to political violence, the pandemic and wars.

I messaged dozens of accounts which shared false and misleading posts on X related to both hurricanes. Their accounts seemed to be able to go viral precisely because of changes made at X since Elon Musk became owner. While the blue-check used to be given out only to people who had been verified and vetted, users are now allowed to purchase these ticks. The algorithm, in turn, gives their posts greater prominence. They can also then profit from sharing posts, regardless of whether they are true or not.

X’s revenue sharing policy means that blue-tick users can earn a share of revenue from the ads in their replies. On 9 October, the site announced that “payouts are increasing”, and accounts would now be paid based on engagement from other users who pay to get Premium membership, not the adverts in their responses.

This has incentivised some users to share whatever it is that will go viral – however untrue. Several of those I messaged acknowledged to me that they benefitted from getting engagement from their posts and sharing content they know will get attention.

It’s true, most social media companies allow users to make money from views. But YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook have guidelines which allow them to de-monetise or suspend profiles that post content that spreads misinformation, and say they label posts when they are misleading. X does not have guidelines on misinformation in the same way.

While it has rules against faked AI content and “Community Notes” to add context to posts, it removed a previous feature which allowed users to report misleading information.

X did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Misleading posts which go viral on X can also travel over to the comment section of videos on other sites, too, showing how an idea shared on one site can spread through the social-media ecosystem.

“Wild Mother”, a social media influencer who regularly shares unproven theories across different sites, said that four years ago, her comments were filled with “people calling me names, denying it”.

“And now, I was surprised to see that nearly every comment is in agreement,” she said, referring to a recent post discussing conspiracy theories about geo-engineering and the recent hurricanes.

There is a real-world impact to this kind of disinformation, which can undermine trust in authorities – in this case – during a complex rescue and recovery operation following Hurricane Milton.

Although misinformation has always spread during natural disasters, there’s a crucial difference between now and previous storms. For one, the falsehoods being shared are spreading to more people – fewer than three dozen false or abusive posts were viewed 160 million times on X, according to the Institute of Strategic Dialogue think tank.

They have also taken on a sharper political edge because of the impending US presidential election.

Many of the most viral posts come from accounts which support Donald Trump, ISD found. And they are taking aim at foreign aid and migrants.

Several posts and videos have even targeted relief workers, who are accused of “treason” for taking part in untrue, outlandish plots.

The anger and distrust this can foster risks inhibiting efforts on the ground. Ahead of an election, it also risks undermining wider faith in how systems and government work, and of overshadowing any legitimate criticism of governments’ efforts.

While Wild Mother, and people like her, choose to view this as a sign that “more and more people are waking up to reality”, I see it as a sign that these conspiracy theories are gaining a wider audience.

She tells me how “a well informed collective is much harder to control”. In other words, the more people who believe these kinds of evidence-free conspiracy theories, the harder it is to combat them.

This ultimately comes down to the way the algorithms across social media sites favour engagement above all else. These conspiracy theories, false claims and hate can reach hundreds of thousands of people before anyone realises they’re are untrue – and those sharing them can be rewarded with views, likes, followers or money in return.

For days, residents of Florida’s Gulf Coast were warned to evacuate as Hurricane Milton approached – less than two weeks after the south-eastern US was thrashed by Hurricane Helene.

But from her home in Tampa, squarely in the path of the coming storm, Chynna Perkins decided to stay.

By Thursday morning, she said she, her husband Sterling and their pets had weathered the storm but lost power.

As the storm came and went, Perkins talked the BBC through her situation with a series of voice notes and calls, describing how Milton barrelled through her neighbourhood of West Tampa.

Her decision to stay was a matter of gut instinct, she said, after years living through Florida’s storms. Twenty-five miles (40km) east of the sea, and half a mile west of Tampa’s Hillsborough River, she felt protected from any storm surge.

“And then, as far as evacuation zones, we’re in one of the last ones. So, you know, I’m not concerned,” she said.

The couple had also worried about finding accommodation. “With two dogs over 200lbs (91kg), it’s a big thing,” she said.

Here is her account of the storm as it came and went.

The morning in Tampa was typical, Perkins said. “When I woke up, it was grey, light drizzle.”

She and Sterling had spent days preparing. They bought canned goods, sandwich supplies, water and extra dog food. They filled their bathtubs with water, charged their phones, emergency lamps and batteries.

“Our neighbourhood is boarded up,” she said. The historic homes in her West Tampa neighbourhood were half-hidden by plywood.

Her own home, a modern and neat single-storey house painted white, had temporary Kevlar covers on all the doors and windows. “We’re prepared as much as we can be,” she said.

For now, she felt safe. “There’s no reason for us to be on the road taking up resources, and hotel rooms, and contributing to traffic and congestion,” she said.

• Follow live updates on this story
• Where is Hurricane Milton heading?
• Why Hurricane Milton is causing tornadoes
• Evacuees: ‘Waiting out Milton was gamble we weren’t willing to make’
• BBC Verify: No, Hurricane Milton was not ‘engineered’

Within hours, the weather seemed to have shifted for the worse. The skies above Perkins’ home had turned entirely grey.

“Rain and wind are definitely picking up, you can hear it,” she said, walking outside on her patio, where small pools of water had begun to form on her back lawn.

At 17:30 EDT (21:30 GMT), the rain became more intense, carried by the whipping wind diagonally through the sky.

“The wind is really starting to pick up,” Perkins said again. The gusts roared over her voice, nearly drowning her out on the phone.

By this point, Milton’s eye was creeping towards the coast, just about an hour away from landfall.

“The wind is really starting to whip,” Perkins said. “We’re getting 20-30 minutes of really strong rain, then a dead period.”

“My anxiety has been through the roof this whole time. I’m trying not to throw up thinking about it. It is very, very eerie, just to see and hear how powerful it is,” she added.

“The anxiety comes from the waiting game. We’ve known for four days that this hurricane is coming. I just want to get through it so I can stop feeling this way.”

Soon after Milton reached Florida, the lights went out.

“We’re still good, minus losing power, which we expected,” Perkins said. “It feels like we’re in a tornado, without the whistling sound. We’ve already seen a few transformers blow in our neighbourhood just by looking out the back porch.”

They have no generator, so they played a game of Jenga in the dark. Sterling took up a temporary post by the sliding glass door that leads to their backyard. “He kind of went into the mode of ‘what happens in a worst case scenario,’” Perkins said.

She did not expect the storm to be so powerful. But she did not regret staying.

“There’s a kind of a relief, in the sense that it’s here.”

“OK, morning after,” Perkins said, sending a video clip of her backyard. “We’ve got clear skies.”

It was windy still, she said, but no sight of any fallen trees and no real damage to her home.

“We fared the storm well,” she said. “You can hear people’s generators already kicking on and chainsaws in the background, so it sounds like people are already getting to work.”

But there was no power yet. Perkins’ home is close to Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, where members of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department are being housed.

“I’m hoping that means we’ll get power sooner, rather than later.”

• Does US lack relief money for Hurricane Milton?
• How Hurricane Milton compares to Hurricane Helene
• Is climate change making hurricanes and typhoons worse?
• Hurricanes: A look inside the deadly storms

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At least 28 people have been killed and 54 injured in an Israeli air strike on a school sheltering displaced families in the central Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Red Crescent says.

Videos from the scene at Rufaida al-Aslamia school in the town of Deir al-Balah show a cloud of smoke and dust rising up as people rush to help the injured.

Witnesses said there were two air strikes that hit two rooms in the school where food aid was being stored and distributed.

The Israeli military said the “precise strike” targeted Hamas fighters operating inside a “command-and-control centre” at the school.

It also said it had taken numerous steps to mitigate harm to the civilians living there.

“This is a further example of the Hamas terrorist organisation’s systematic abuse of civilian infrastructure in violation of international law,” it added. Hamas has denied the allegation.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry also put the death toll at 28 and denounced what it called a “new massacre” by the Israeli military.

A list published by al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah suggested that at least two of those killed were children, five were women and three were men in their 60s.

Another person named on the list was Ahmed Adel Hamouda, 58, whose widow said he had worked in the school’s administration.

“They killed my only support in life. They killed the support of our three disabled daughters, Rahab, Alaa and Reem,” she said.

Eyewitness Khaled al-Sultan told BBC Arabic’s Gaza Today programme that he saw “horrible things that are beyond description”.

“We were not able to retrieve one complete body because all the victims’ bodies turned into pieces. The number of martyrs is shocking,” he added.

Another man, Taha Majad, asked: “Why would a shelter school like this be bombed by F-16 jets? We are humans, aren’t we?”

Many schools have been turned into shelters for the 1.9 million Palestinians who have fled their homes since the war in Gaza started a year ago.

Despite that, the UN says more than 200 schools have been hit, with at least 50 being completely destroyed.

Rufaida school is located inside the Israeli-designated al-Mawasi “humanitarian area”, where the Israeli military has told Palestinians to flee despite it being overcrowded and lacking basic services.

They include all of the estimated 400,000 people currently living in the north of Gaza, where Israeli forces are continuing a ground offensive on Jabalia and its urban refugee camp.

Reuters news agency cited Palestinian health officials as saying that at least 130 people had been killed since Sunday, when the Israeli military announced it was launching an operation in response to intelligence that Hamas fighters were regrouping there.

The Israeli military said on Wednesday morning its forces had killed “more than 50 terrorist operatives” and located large quantities of weapons in the Jabalia area over the previous 24 hours.

Israel launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to the group’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

More than 42,060 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s health ministry.

US President Joe Biden and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have held a much-anticipated 30-minute phone call – believed to be their first contact since August – which included discussions on Israel’s intended retaliation to Iran’s missile strike last week.

The White House described the dialogue as “direct” and “productive”, and said Biden and Netanyahu had agreed to stay in “close contact” in coming days. Vice President Kamala Harris also joined the call.

Speaking shortly afterwards, Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said its attack against Iran would be “deadly, precise and above all surprising”.

Two forces are at work. One is Joe Biden’s reluctance to see the US dragged into a war with Iran that it believes would be unnecessary and dangerous.

The other is a strong sense among some in Israel that they have an opportunity to deal a body blow to Iran – their mortal enemy.

Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah has energised Israelis who were desperate to break out of the grinding war of attrition on their border with Lebanon.

Lebanon, for them, felt like success and progress, a stark contrast to the position in Gaza.

Despite Israel’s onslaught on Gaza that has killed at least 42,000 people, most of them civilians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not been able to deliver his two war aims – the destruction of Hamas and the recovery of the hostages.

Hamas is still fighting, and still holds around 100 hostages, many of whom might be dead.

The damage done to Israel’s enemies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, has produced in some Israelis an urgent conviction to go further and mount a direct assault on Iran.

For them, a devastating air attack on Iran is a seductive prospect.

Top of the target list for many Israelis are the heavily fortified sites, some driven deep into mountains where Iran houses nuclear facilities that Israel and others fear could be used to make a bomb.

President Biden has made clear the US opposes the idea.

The US believes Iran is not about to make a nuclear weapon. An attack could push them to construct one.

One of the most prominent voices in Israel pressing Netanyahu to ignore US wishes is former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett who says Israel must not hesitate to act against what he calls the Iranian octopus.

He told me that it was “the 11th hour”.

Like the opposition politician and former general Benny Gantz, Bennett believes Iran is weaker than it has been for decades because of the damage done to Hezbollah and Hamas.

“Essentially Iran was defending itself with two arms, Hezbollah and Hamas. They were sort of its insurance policy against a strike,” Bennett says.

“But now both of those arms are pretty much neutralised.”

Bennett sees the moment as a once in a generation opportunity to do real damage to Iran’s Islamic Regime.

He adds: “Here’s the thing. The strategy with Iran – ultimately it’s not going to happen tomorrow.

“We need to accelerate the demise of this regime. This is a regime that will fall.

“If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, the likelihood that they’ll use it in order to save the regime is high. And that means that they’re going to turn the whole Middle East into a nuclear nightmare.”

• Middle East conflict: How will it end?

Bennett recalled two Israeli attacks on nuclear facilities he believes made the Middle East much safer – in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.

“People don’t like it,” Bennett says. “But we saved the world from [Bashar al-] Assad with nuclear weapons.

“We have the thankless job of taking out the nuclear facilities of the worst regimes in the world. Everyone likes to criticise us, but we’re doing that job.

“And if they get that bomb, it’s everyone’s problem. It’s not our problem. I want to see how Londoners will feel when there’s an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear bomb. We cannot allow that to happen.”

Iran and Israel have been in direct conflict since April, after Israel assassinated leading Iranian generals with a big airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Syria.

Iran’s retaliation was a missile strike on Israel. The escalation has continued.

The latest came on Tuesday last week in response to Israel’s assault on Iran’s ally Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the assassination of its leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Iran unleashed a huge ballistic missile attack, and Israel’s prime minister vowed to hit back.

President Biden was reluctant to restrain Israel in Gaza. And has “urged” Israel to minimise harm to civilians in Lebanon. But he has been adamant that Israel must not answer the Iranians with a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The US believes Iran is not about to make a nuclear weapon.

President Biden has said Israel must defend itself – but not by attacking Iranian nuclear sites – or its oil industry.

The US fears getting dragged into a war it doesn’t want. And there are concerns that if Iran can ride out an attack it will go for broke to produce a nuclear warhead for its missiles.

The next phases in this spiralling war depend on the extent of Israel’s retaliation – which may come any day now.

When an Israeli air strike hit her employer’s house in southern Lebanon, Andaku (not her real name) found herself all alone, locked inside and terrified.

The 24-year-old Kenyan woman has been working in Lebanon as a domestic worker for the past eight months, but she says the last month has been the toughest as Israel’s military has intensified its bombardment of what it has said are Hezbollah targets across the country.

“There were a lot of bombings. It was too much. My employers locked me in the house and left to save their own lives,” she tells BBC News Arabic.

The sound of explosions has left Andaku traumatised. She has lost track of how many days she was left alone in the house before her employers returned.

“When they came back, they threw me out. They never paid me and I had nowhere to go,” she says, adding that she was lucky enough to have enough money to catch a bus to the capital, Beirut.

Andaku’s story is not the only one.

Last Friday, UN officials said most of Lebanon’s nearly 900 government-organised shelters were full following the escalation of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, and expressed concern for the tens of thousands of mostly female domestic workers in the country.

According to the International Organization for Migration, there are around 170,000 migrant workers in Lebanon. Many of them are women from Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Philippines.

“We are receiving increasing reports of migrant domestic workers being abandoned by their Lebanese employers, either left on the streets or in their homes as their employers flee,” Mathieu Luciano, the IOM’s head of office in Lebanon, told a press briefing in Geneva.

Many migrant domestic workers move to Lebanon to be able to provide financial support for their families back home.

The average monthly salary for African domestic workers is estimated to be around $250 (£191), whereas Asian housekeepers could earn up to $450.

Migrant domestic workers have to abide by the Kafala (sponsorship) system in Lebanon, which does not guarantee protected rights for migrant workers, and allows employers to confiscate their passports and withhold their wages. They find work through local agencies.

“The lack of legal protections within the Kafala system, combined with restricted movement, means many can become trapped in exploitative conditions. This has resulted in instances of abuse, isolation, and psychological trauma among migrant workers,” says IOM spokesman Joe Lowry.

“Furthermore, we are aware of cases of migrants being locked into houses of Lebanese citizens who are fleeing, to look after their properties,” he adds.

Mina (also not her real name) is from Uganda and has been a domestic worker in Lebanon for one year and four months.

She tells the BBC she was mistreated by the family she worked for and decided to escape and return to her agency.

Hoping she would receive help, Mina said she was shocked to learn that she had to work for another family on a two-year contract before she could return home.

“When I returned to the [agency], I told them I had worked enough to be able to pay for my ticket and return back home. They took my money and asked me to work in a house for two years to be able to travel home,” the 26-year-old says.

Having to live with the continuous sounds of explosions led to Mina’s mental health being affected. She was not able to do her assigned domestic tasks properly, so she asked her new employer to leave.

She had been working for a family in Baalbek, a city in the Bekaa Valley in north-eastern Lebanon.

“[The family] had beaten me, pushed me and thrown me out… There were so many bombs at that time. When I left, I had nowhere to go,” she says.

Another domestic worker from Kenya, Fanaka, 24, says her agency would send her to work in different homes every two months and that she suffered from continuous headaches.

“I have been trying to do my best at work, but nobody is born perfect,” she says.

The women say they faced many challenges while living on the streets, as many shelters refused to take them in, claiming they were reserved for displaced Lebanese and not foreigners.

All three managed to reach Caritas Lebanon, a non-governmental organisation that has been providing help and protection for migrant workers since 1994.

In audio recordings sent to the BBC, migrant workers from Sierra Leone said dozens of them remained stranded on the streets of Beirut and were in desperate need of food.

Others told local media that they were denied entry to government-organised shelters in schools because they were not Lebanese.

The BBC contacted local authorities, who denied any form of discrimination.

Sources from the ministry of education told the BBC: “No specific centres have been designated for foreign domestic workers, but at the same time, they have not been refused entry.”

It is understood that some workers are avoiding official shelters, fearing repercussions over their incomplete legal documentation.

Hessen Sayah Korban, head of the protection department at Caritas Lebanon, says her NGO is currently sheltering around 70 migrant domestic workers, who are mainly mothers with children.

She says more funding is needed to be able to provide shelter for up to 250 domestic workers who have either been abandoned by their employers or are homeless and had their official documents confiscated.

“We are trying to provide them with all the help needed; it can be legal, mental or physical.”

She adds that many domestic workers require help with their mental health because they have been traumatised.

Since the beginning of October, the IOM has received more than 700 new requests from people seeking help to return to their countries of origin.

Ms Korban says Caritas, along with other NGOs, is assisting the abandoned domestic workers wanting to leave by co-ordinating with the IOM, various embassies and consulates, and the Lebanese security services.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appealed directly to the people of Lebanon in a video published on Tuesday, telling them to turn against the Iran-backed Shia group Hezbollah or risk destruction on the scale of Gaza.

“Christians, Druze, Muslims Sunni and Shia, all of you are suffering because of Hezbollah’s futile war against Israel,” he said. “Stand up and take your country back.”

But in Shia, Sunni and Christian neighbourhoods of Beirut on Wednesday morning, Netanyahu’s appeal was falling largely – if not entirely – on deaf ears.

“Yes we heard the address but nobody here listens to Netanyahu,” said Yusuf Habbal, 31, as he cut pieces of the traditional Lebanese sweet Kunafah in his shop in Tariq El Jdideh, a Sunni area.

“Nobody told Netanyahu to occupy Palestine, nobody told him to occupy Lebanon. It is the Israelis who are driving this conflict.”

But Habbal and his fellow Sunnis “also do not accept what Hezbollah is doing”, he said.

“Before Netanyahu ever spoke about Hezbollah, we were against them. Beiruti people know that Hezbollah has their own agenda. And now they are driving us into a war we do not want.”

Hezbollah, which is a better-armed and more powerful force in Lebanon than the country’s own military, began firing rockets into northern Israel a year ago, in support for Hamas the day after the brutal 7 October attack.

The Hezbollah rockets signalled the beginning of a new phase of its clash with Israel. Last month, Israel escalated that simmering conflict when it expanded its bombing campaign of Lebanon, including in Beirut, before launching a ground invasion in the south of the country.

“They are striking very close to us now and it is terrifying,” said Mohammed Khair, 43, as he had his hair cut in a barber shop in Tariq El Jdideh.

“Nobody here wants this war, but nobody is going to be turned against Hezbollah by something Netanyahu said in a video,” he said.

Netanyahu was “always talking to the Palestinians, to the Lebanese,” said Tarraf Nasser, a 76-year-old retiree who was passing by the barber shop. “Nobody listens to Netanyahu,” he said. “He is not really talking to us.”

In Achrafieh, Beirut’s main Christian neighbourhood, there was a sense of futility at the Lebanese people’s ability to heed Netanyahu’s advice, even if they wanted to.

Antoine, a 75-year-old Catholic retiree, who asked to be identified only by his first name, was smoking a cigarette outside the neighbourhood’s Brewholic Café.

“Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister of Israel, not Lebanon. He should take care of his people, not ours,” Antoine said.

“At the same time, it is true that we have to do something to be free from the influence of Iran. But we don’t have weapons and we don’t have politicians who can be truly Lebanese. All our politicians are affiliated to other states or groups, mostly Iran.”

Nobody in Lebanon was going to have domestic conflict because Netanyahu instructed them to, Antoine said. “We will do that on our own.”

Across the road in her shoe shop, Maya Habib, 35, gave a tired shrug at the Israeli prime minister’s video appeal. “Everyone here knows that Israel lies,” she said. “But listen, maybe he has a point. He warned everyone – don’t attack us, don’t come close to us, and it won’t be your war. Now it is.”

Among the Christians of Achrafieh, “people are paying attention” to Netanyahu, Habib said. “But nobody can do anything anyway,” she said, shrugging again. “We don’t even have a president. Netanyahu is saying all the weapons should go to the Lebanese army, but how?”

Hezbollah can still rely on staunch support in the neighbourhoods where it is the dominant force in political and social life, and among the Shia communities of mixed areas. Several Shia residents of the Mar Elias neighbourhood said they stood completely behind the group.

“We are all Hezbollah here, whatever Hezbollah does we will support them,” said Fadi Ali Kiryani, a 52-year-old corner shop owner. Like other people in Mar Elias, Kiryani said he was not concerned by Netanyahu’s threat that Lebanon would suffer the same destruction and suffering as Gaza.

“Even if it becomes worse here than Gaza, we will still fly the flag,” he said.

“My house in Dahieh has already been destroyed. I would rather my house was gone than the shoe on the foot of one Hezbollah fighter was damaged.”

Sitting behind the desk of her 40-year-old towel and bedlinens shop, 75-year-old Fany Sharara said that Hezbollah was the only force defending the people of Lebanon.

“Nothing Netanyahu could say could change my mind,” she said. “He is a criminal, an assassin, he cannot leave one child alive.”

Israel had “all of Europe and all of America” on its side, Sharara added. “We are with Hezbollah because they are the only ones defending us. Not the Lebanese government.”

A few doors down, and a few years younger, 24-year-old jewellery shop owner Ali Shoura was simply weary of everyone involved, he said. “Nobody really cares – the politicians, the people in power, the Lebanese government, Iran, Israel, America, Hezbollah too.”

He shook his head. “It’s all just theatre,” he said. “And we are all the victims.”

A year ago, after the October 7 attacks and the start of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, Joe Biden became the first US president to visit Israel at a time of war. I watched him fix his gaze at the TV cameras after meeting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the war cabinet in Tel Aviv, and tell the country: “You are not alone”. But he also urged its leadership not to repeat the mistakes an “enraged” America made after 9/11.

In September this year at the United Nations in New York, President Biden led a global roll call of leaders urging restraint between Israel and Hezbollah. Netanyahu gave his response. The long arm of Israel, he said, could reach anywhere in the region.

Ninety minutes later, Israeli pilots fired American-supplied “bunker buster” bombs at buildings in southern Beirut. The strike killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. It marked one of the most significant turning points in the year since Hamas unleashed its attack on Israel on 7 October.

Biden’s diplomacy was being buried in the ruins of an Israeli airstrike using American-supplied bombs.

I’ve spent the best part of a year watching US diplomacy close up, travelling in the press pool with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on trips back to the Middle East, where I worked for seven years up until last December.

• Follow live updates on this story
• Analysis: What will it take to end the conflict?
• BBC Verify examines footage revealing scale of damage in Lebanon
• Gaza then and now – a visual guide to how life has changed in 12 months
• Watch: How do young Palestinians and Israelis see their future?

The single greatest goal for diplomacy as stated by the Biden administration has been to get a ceasefire for hostage release deal in Gaza. The stakes could barely be higher. A year on from Hamas smashing its way through the militarised perimeter fence into southern Israel where they killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped 250, scores of hostages – including seven US citizens – remain in captivity, with a significant number believed to be dead. In Gaza, Israel’s massive retaliatory offensive has killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians, according to figures from the Hamas-run health ministry, while the territory has been reduced to a moonscape of destruction, displacement and hunger.

Thousands more Palestinians are missing. The UN says record numbers of aid workers have been killed in Israeli strikes, while humanitarian groups have repeatedly accused Israel of blocking shipments – something its government has consistently denied. Meanwhile, the war has spread to the occupied West Bank and to Lebanon. Iran last week fired 180 missiles at Israel in retaliation for the killing of Nasrallah, leader of the Iran-backed Hezbollah group. The conflict threatens to deepen and envelop the region.

Covering the US State Department, I have watched the Biden administration attempt to simultaneously support and restrain Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. But its goal of defusing the conflict and brokering a ceasefire has eluded the administration at every turn.

Biden officials claim US pressure changed the “shape of their military operations“, a likely reference to a belief within the administration that Israel’s invasion of Rafah in Gaza’s south was more limited than it otherwise would have been, even with much of the city now lying in ruins.

Before the Rafah invasion, Biden suspended a single consignment of 2,000lb and 500lb bombs as he tried to dissuade the Israelis from an all-out assault. But the president immediately faced a backlash from Republicans in Washington and from Netanyahu himself who appeared to compare it to an “arms embargo”. Biden has since partially lifted the suspension and never repeated it.

The State Department asserts that its pressure did get more aid flowing, despite the UN reporting famine-like conditions in Gaza earlier this year. “It’s through the intervention and the involvement and the hard work of the United States that we’ve been able to get humanitarian assistance into those in Gaza, which is not to say that this is… mission accomplished. It is very much not. It is an ongoing process,” says department spokesman Matthew Miller.

In the region, much of Biden’s work has been undertaken by his chief diplomat, Antony Blinken. He has made ten trips to the Middle East since October in breakneck rounds of diplomacy, the visible side of an effort alongside the secretive work of the CIA at trying to close a Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.

But I have watched multiple attempts to close the deal being spiked. On Blinken’s ninth visit, in August, as we flew in a C-17 US military transporter on a trip across the region, the Americans became increasingly exasperated. A visit that started with optimism that a deal could be within reach, ended with us arriving in Doha where Blinken was told that the Emir of Qatar – whose delegation is critical in communicating with Hamas – was ill and couldn’t see him.

A snub? We never knew for sure (officials say they later spoke by phone), but the trip felt like it was falling apart after Netanyahu claimed he had “convinced” Blinken of the need to keep Israeli troops along Gaza’s border with Egypt as part of the agreement. This was a deal breaker for Hamas and the Egyptians. A US official accused Netanyahu of effectively trying to sabotage the agreement. Blinken flew out of Doha without having got any further than the airport. The deal was going nowhere. We were going back to Washington.

On his tenth trip to the region last month, Blinken did not visit Israel.

For critics, including some former officials, the US call for an end to the war while supplying Israel with at least $3.8bn (£2.9bn) of arms per year, plus granting supplemental requests since 7 October, has amounted either to a failure to apply leverage or an outright contradiction. They argue the current expansion of the war in fact marks a demonstration, rather than a failure, of US diplomatic policy.

“To say [the administration] conducted diplomacy is true in the most superficial sense in that they conducted a lot of meetings. But they never made any reasonable effort to change behaviour of one of the main actors – Israel,” says former intelligence officer Harrison J. Mann, a career US Army Major who worked in the Middle East and Africa section of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time of the October 7th attacks. Mr Mann resigned earlier this year in protest at US support for Israel’s assault in Gaza and the number of civilians being killed using American weapons.

Allies of Biden flat-out reject the criticism. They point, for example, to the fact that diplomacy with Egypt and Qatar mediating with Hamas resulted in last November’s truce which saw more than 100 hostages released in Gaza in exchange for around 300 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. US officials also say the administration dissuaded the Israeli leadership from invading Lebanon much earlier in the Gaza conflict, despite cross border rocket fire between Hezbollah and Israel.

Senator Chris Coons, a Biden loyalist who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and who travelled to Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia late last year, says it’s critical to weigh Biden’s diplomacy against the context of the last year.

“I think there’s responsibility on both sides for a refusal to close the distance, but we cannot ignore or forget that Hamas launched these attacks,” he says.

“He has been successful in preventing an escalation – despite repeated and aggressive provocation by the Houthis, by Hezbollah, by the Shia militias in Iraq – and has brought in a number of our regional partners,” he says.

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert says Biden’s diplomacy has amounted to an unprecedented level of support, pointing to the huge US military deployment, including aircraft carrier strike groups and a nuclear power submarine, he ordered in the wake of October 7.

But he believes Biden has been unable to overcome the resistance of Netanyahu.

“Every time he came close to it, Netanyahu somehow found a reason not to comply, so the main reason for the failure of this diplomacy was the consistent opposition of Netanyahu,” says Olmert.

Olmert says a stumbling block for a ceasefire deal has been Netanyahu’s reliance on the “messianic” ultranationalists in his cabinet who prop up his government. They are agitating for an even stronger military response in Gaza and Lebanon. Two far-right ministers this summer threatened to withdraw support for Netanyahu’s government if he signed a ceasefire deal.

“Ending the war as part of an agreement for the release of hostages means a major threat to Netanyahu and he’s not prepared to accept it, so he’s violating it, he’s screwing it all the time,” he says.

The Israeli prime minister has repeatedly rejected claims he blocked the deal, insisting he was in favour of the American-backed plans and sought only “clarifications”, while Hamas continually changed its demands.

But whatever the shuttle diplomacy, much has turned on the relationship between the US president and Netanyahu. The men have known each other for decades, the dynamics have been often bitter, dysfunctional even, but Biden’s positions predate even his relationship with the Israeli prime minister.

Passionately pro-Israel, he often speaks of visiting the country as a young Senator in the early 1970s. Supporters and critics alike point to Biden’s unerring support for the Jewish state – some citing it as a liability, others as an asset.

Ultimately, for President Biden’s critics, his biggest failure to use leverage over Israel has been over the scale of bloodshed in Gaza. In the final year of his only term, thousands of protesters, many of them Democrats, have taken to American streets and university campuses denouncing his policies, holding “Genocide Joe” banners.

Biden’s mindset, which underpins the administration’s position, was shaped at a time when the nascent Israeli state was seen as being in immediate existential peril, says Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York.

“American diplomacy has basically been, ‘whatever Israel’s war demands and requires we will give them to fight it’,” says Prof Khalidi.

“That means, given that this [Israeli] government wants an apparently unending war, because they’ve set war aims that are unattainable – [including] destroying Hamas – the United States is a cart attached to an Israeli horse,” he says.

He argues Biden’s approach to the current conflict was shaped by an outdated conception of the balance of state forces in the region and neglects the experience of stateless Palestinians.

“I think that Biden is stuck in a much longer-term time warp. He just cannot see things such as… 57 years of occupation, the slaughter in Gaza, except through an Israeli lens,” he says.

Today, says Prof Khalidi, a generation of young Americans has witnessed scenes from Gaza on social media and many have a radically different outlook. “They know what the people putting stuff on Instagram and TikTok in Gaza have shown them,” he says.

Kamala Harris, 59, Biden’s successor as Democratic candidate in next month’s presidential election against Donald Trump, 78, doesn’t come with the same generational baggage.

However, neither Harris nor Trump has set out any specific plans beyond what is already in process for how they would reach a deal. The election may yet prove the next turning point in this sharply escalating crisis, but quite how is not yet apparent.

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

On 9 August, the Indian city of Kolkata was shaken when a trainee doctor was found raped and murdered at one of its oldest hospitals. Though an arrest was swiftly made, accusations of a cover-up and evidence-tampering quickly surfaced, fuelling public outrage. Since then, daily protests, human chains and candlelight vigils have filled Kolkata’s streets. Now, the city’s largest festival unfolds amid some of the city’s most fervent protests in years.

Kolkata is celebrating its biggest annual festival – Durga Puja, when the ten-armed Goddess Durga is said to visit her earthly home, her entire family in tow.

At Durga Puja pandals – or temporary temples – the goddess stands in the middle astride a lion, flanked by her children – elephant-headed Ganesha, warrior god Kartikeya on his peacock, the goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswati – while the defeated buffalo demon lies at her feet, symbolising the triumph of good over evil.

These days, it’s not just the gods that draw the crowds. The pandals have become quite elaborate. Some recreate landmarks like Dubai’s Burj Khalifa or the mangrove forests of Sundarbans. Others are installations with social messaging – conserve water, pray for world peace, save handicrafts.

That led to Durga Puja being billed as one of the biggest street art festivals in the world. Arts organisation Mass Art has been putting together previews of selected Pujas, especially so that foreign guests can get a sense, says its secretary, Dhrubajyoti Bose Suvo, of how a “city transforms into a public gallery”.

But this year, the largest street art event of the city has come face to face with the biggest street protests Kolkata has seen in years. Some of the idols are different, and even the artwork on the walls reflects anguish and protest with figures of women and animals rendered in stark red, black and white.

The protests broke out after the 31-year-old doctor was found brutally killed at RG Kar Medical College on the night of 9 August. After a gruelling 36-hour shift, she had fallen asleep in a seminar room due to the lack of a designated rest area. Her half-naked body, bearing severe injuries, was discovered the next morning on the podium.

“Of course there is an effect [of the incident] on us,” says visual artist Sanatan Dinda. “I do not paint inside an ivory tower. I speak of the society around me in my work.”

Upset over the incident, Dinda resigned from a government-run arts organisation. He says, “Now I am on the streets with everyone else. Now I have no fear.”

In September, Dinda and the clay artists who built the Durga images in the historic artisan neighbourhood of Kumartuli led a protest march demanding justice for the woman they called “our Durga”.

Dinda says he has made “improvisations” to the Durga images he was working on this year.

At one in Bagha Jatin in south Kolkata, his mother Goddess looks more fierce than maternal. The lion she normally rides is springing out of her chest. Each of her ten arms holds a spear to slay evil. The artwork on the walls reflects anguish and protest with figures of naked women and animals rendered in stark red, black and white.

Art as protest is not new.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s , commemorating the 1983 police killing of a man allegedly writing graffiti in the New York subway, found renewed relevance during the Black Lives Matter movement. Public artists like Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, Diego Rivera, and Banksy – whose stencils span walls from Kyiv to the West Bank – have long used art to deliver political messages.

Durga Puja art is public art, but it’s also central to a religious festival that fuels the state’s economy. A British Council report valued Durga Puja’s 2019 economic impact at over $4.5bn, nearly 3% of West Bengal state’s GDP.

With so much at stake, neighbourhood clubs organising pujas have to tread warily. They cannot alienate thousands of ordinary citizens looking for a good time, not a sermon. They get financial grants from the government that’s facing the protests. They have to work with the police on permits and traffic control.

A few have opted to forego taking money from the government.

One puja in Kankurgachi, in the northeastern side of the city, chose Lajja (Shame) as its theme after the protests erupted. Its Durga is covering her eyes, her lion keeping vigil over the body of a woman wrapped in a white sheet. The organiser is openly affiliated with the state’s opposition party.

Close by, another puja creates a tableau of the bereaved family, the mother sitting on the bed, the father at a sewing machine, their daughter’s picture in doctor’s scrubs on the wall. Other organisers are more circumspect, not wanting to wade into political waters.

“But we still want to make a point, especially as a women-led women-run club,” says Mousumi Dutta, president of the Arjunpur Amra Sabai Club.

Their theme this year is Discrimination. The artist uses the Constitution of India and its articles promising equality as the backdrop to the goddess while local actors enact the gap between the promise of the Constitution and reality through street theatre.

The theme had been decided earlier but the tragedy gave it a different urgency. “We have decided to not call this year’s Durga Puja a festival,” says Dutta. “We are calling it a pledge instead. A pledge to create a world where we won’t have to keep coming out on to the streets to demand justice.”

The demand for justice for a woman resonates with Durga Puja anyway, a festival built around a goddess vanquishing evil. One puja had already chosen women power as its theme which now matches the zeitgeist.

Durga puja theme designers say they were already neck-deep in work when the protests erupted.

“Perhaps if it had happened earlier it would have been different. By August I was committed to the organisers and to some 450 people working with me,” says Susanta Shibani Pal. But he says the issue “subconsciously” crept into the art.

His installation Biheen (The Void) for the Tala Prattoy puja, covers 35,000 sq ft, immersing the viewer into what he calls a “black hole”.

His Durga has no body, her life force represented by a flickering candle, much like the candles that are part of the protests. “A viewer might read this as my protest. I might call it coincidence. I started this work before RG Kar happened,” he said.

While some are bringing the mood of protest into their Durga Puja art, others are bringing protest art to their Durga Puja. Chandreyee Chatterjee’s family has been celebrating Durga Puja at their home in Kolkata for 16 years. Chatterjee also participated in many of the street protests.

She admits she was in no mood to celebrate this year. They will still have a Durga Puja but with a difference. “We will do what the rituals require, nothing more. Anything that comes under the heading of celebration, like dancing, is being done away with this year.”

She and her friends have also had an artistic little badge made. It shows a hand grasping a flaming torch. Underneath in Bengali are the words “We want justice.”

“I will be giving it to friends and family who come to our Puja,” says Chatterjee. “We want to remind people we have a long long way to go.”

What if someone told you mermaids were real?

Forget the fish tails, we mean women capable of holding their breath for minutes on end as they dive under the sea several hundred times a day.

These are the haenyeo divers of South Korea, a community of women from Jeju Island who have been free-diving (without oxygen) to harvest seafood for centuries.

Now, with most of them in their 60s, 70s and 80s, their traditions and way of life are in danger as fewer younger women take up the profession, and with the ocean potentially changing beyond recognition.

It’s these facts that prompted US-Korean film-maker Sue Kim to team up with female education advocate and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafazai to share their story with the world.

The daughter of Korean immigrants, US-born Kim first came across the haenyeo when she was a child, holidaying in South Korea.

“I was so struck by them for the same reasons that you see in the film – they were so incredibly bold and vibrant and confident. They were also so loud… fighting and laughing, and they just gave off this very big energy and occupied their space so unapologetically,” says Lee.

“I just fell in love with that entire vibe and big energy when I was a little girl. And so I grew up staying fascinated with them. They were a version of Korean womanhood that I was inspired by and wanted to emulate,” she adds.

“I was so shocked that I did not know about the haenyeo, like so many people did not know, I said yes straight away,” explains Malala, who was a producer on the film.

“The story really took on an urgency about 10 years ago when I found out that this was probably the last generation of the haenyeo,” explains Lee. “It became more of an urgent mandate to make sure someone documented… while we still had them and while they could still tell us their own story in their own words.”

The film follows the women going about their gruelling work during the harvest season and examines the challenges they face both in and out of the water.

They head out to dive at 6am daily. They hold their breath for a couple of minutes, come back up to the surface and go back down again – between 100 and 300 times a session.

Just imagine the fitness levels. They harvest for four hours and then spend another three or four shelling and preparing their catch.

There are various theories as to why women began to take over this traditionally male job so many years ago. The Visit Jeju website states that the number of men was low overall in the population due to a high portion of them dying on the rough seas while boat fishing.

As a result, there weren’t many men to harvest the ocean, so women gradually took over the job.

This is the first major documentary about the haenyeo and Kim says it was hard to gain access.

“The haenyeo communities, they’re very insular,” she explains.

“They’re rural communities that live in fishing villages. They don’t interact with the cities of Jeju much.”

Kim found a researcher who had a history with NGOs and had contacts in the community.

“So this woman… introduced us, then I went down and I basically spent two weeks with… the Haenyeo communities and really gaining their trust. And I did that by mostly listening.

“They actually wanted to talk about all the things that were happening to them.

“They wanted to talk about the fact that they felt that they were on the verge of extinction. They wanted to talk about what was happening to the ocean that no-one seemed to know about or care about.”

Kim says she had to reassure the women that she wouldn’t stereotype them or pity them for working into old age.

“They love working! They think they’re so strong and empowered by doing so.”

Kim told them she would show them in their “true power.”

“‘I promise I will not take on this sad grandma trope because that’s not how I see you, I see you as heroes’,” she explained to the group.

“After that, we became a family.”

The risks are big. There is no insurance available for the job, as it’s too dangerous. And now the ocean – and the women’s livelihood – is under threat.

Global warming is resulting in less sea life, particularly in shallow water; diving deeper is more difficult without oxygen.

Much of the film focuses on the women’s protests against the radioactive water from Japan’s Fukishima plant being discharged into the ocean (Jeju borders Japan), which takes one of the haeneyeos, Soon Deok Jang, directly to the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The message from experts is, overwhelmingly, that the release is safe and it got the green light from the International Atomic Energy Agency – but not all scientists agree on the impact it will have.

While the haenyeo do harvest marine life, there are regulations in place about when they’re allowed to harvest certain seafood, which helps to protect the ecosystem.

Another reason they don’t use oxygen tanks is because “they believe that by holding their breath, that will allow them the natural amount of marine life that they should harvest”, Kim explains, which helps avoid overfishing.

Perhaps the bigger threat though, is from within, with fewer younger women choosing to pursue this difficult profession.

A training school was set up in the early 2000s to try to stem the dwindling numbers but only 5% of those attending go on to become haenyeos.

All is not lost though. The film introduces us to two young women from another island who have found a following on social media and point out the flexible hours the job can offer around family life. One of them had to learn to swim at the age of 30 to do the job.

The older women meet with them for festivals and protests – they call them “their babies” while they are named “aunties” in return.

Yousafzai is inspired: “When I look at the haenyeo and how they work together, it just reminds me of the collective work that women are doing everywhere else, including the advocacy that Afghan woman are doing to raise awareness of the systematic oppression they are facing.”

“When a girl is watching this documentary, I want her to believe in herself and realise that she can do anything. She can stay under the water for two to three minutes without oxygen,” she says. “And of course I still have to take some swimming classes to learn how to swim! I’m at point zero, but it has inspired me to consider swimming.”

Kylie Minogue loves a puzzle.

Waiting for a concert to begin, she’ll chip away at crosswords, sudoku grids and the New York Times’ Spelling Bee to keep her nerves at bay.

Her friend, author Kathy Lette, once claimed the pop star is a fiend at Scrabble, saying: “She knows how to score big and doesn’t mess around.” (Coincidentally, Kylie’s name is a valid Scrabble word, scoring a respectable 12 points.)

But when she plays Wordle, the daily word-guessing game, she has an unusual strategy: Deliberately getting it wrong.

“It’s annoying if you get it in two lines,” she says. “I want it to be more of a challenge.

“I like to get down to the pointy end, where everything’s at stake.”

You could call it a metaphor for her career. Kylie thrives on challenges, and she’s faced more than a few over the last 37 years – from spiteful critics and creative mis-fires to a life-changing encounter with breast cancer.

Right now, she’s on a high, thanks to her global hit Padam Padam.

Released just in time for Pride month in 2023, the slinky, sinuous club anthem became an unexpected viral smash. Its onomatopoeic title, meant to represent a heartbeat, was quickly adopted as gay slang for anything and everything.

In the UK, Padam Padam gave Kylie her first top 10 hit in more than a decade. In February, she Padam-ed her first Grammy Award in 20 years. In March, she was Padam-ed a “global icon” at the Brit Awards.

In the fluctuating market of pop stardom, Kylie’s stock has never been higher.

“It’s so weird, because I never stop working,” she says, “but then there’s these peaks.

“I look at it like surfing – not that I’m surfer, but I have caught a wave once in my life, so I understand the principle.

“We’re paddling, paddling, paddling, and sometimes you catch a wave. So I really want to ride this one and enjoy the view – because I know how exhausting it is to paddle and miss the wave.”

That’ll be why Padam Padam’s parent album, Tension, is getting a sequel – an ex, if you please. Thirteen new tracks that dive deeper into the slick electro aesthetics of the original.

“I guess I’m really stretching it out!” Kylie laughs.

In the era of Eras, it’s unusual for a pop star to repeat themselves but, in this case, success bred success. After Tension topped the charts, writers from all over the world started pitching their best new material to team Kylie.

“I couldn’t say no,” she says. “The list kept getting longer and I said, ‘Maybe this is a shaping up to be… well, not the next album, because the next album will be a different thing, but a whole lot more than a little bit more’.”

The album features collaborations with Sia, The Blessed Madonna, Tove Lo, Diplo and Orville Peck. But the lead single, Lights, Camera, Action, reunites Kylie with Padam Padam’s co-writer Ina Wroldsen.

Packed with pulsing beats, it’s all about serving the fiercest of fierce looks. Karl Lagerfeld and John Paul Gaultier are namechecked in the lyrics. In the video, Kylie rocks a dress made from crime scene tape.

Does she still get a thrill from pulling the perfect outfit together?

“Um, the thought of fittings makes me go like this,” she says, rolling her eyes in mock exasperation.

“But when you find the outfit that works, there’s a real high. Then the next high is getting it all off – face, hair, outfit, shoes, all of it, and getting comfy again.

“I call it the debunk,” she says. “I’ll slip into a very worn pair of track pants and that one T-shirt that’s in favour for six months.

“Fifty shades of comfortable – that’s my buzz.”

When on tour, she’s required to change her outfit mid-show seven or eight times a night, navigating her way into corsets and sequins and feathered headdresses as a clock ticks down to the next song.

“It’s frantic, it’s really stressful,” she admits. “I might swear a lot.

“It just takes one thing to go wrong, and you’re all freaking out.”

She adds: “I did pass by the wardrobe [department] on a gig I did recently, and I said, ‘I’m a despicable human being. I’m so sorry.’

“They were like, ‘No, what happens in quick change stays in quick change’.”

The thought of the singer losing her temper is intriguing.

Of course she flips out sometimes – we all do – but “angry Kylie” is so antithetical to her public persona that it’s hard to imagine.

She’s one of pop’s most poised stars, choosing her words carefully and brushing away personal questions with a practised affability. In conversation, she offers glimpses of intimacy and vulnerability, but typically closes them off with a positive affirmation, neatly steering the discussion back towards her career.

The only people who know her true feelings are her family.

“When it’s not going well, that’s who I turn to – mum, dad, my brother and my sister,” she says.

Her younger brother Brendan, a camera operator, has even taught her a technique for shaking off stress, which she calls “the foofer valve”.

“When the emotion has got to come out, or you’ve got to have a big cry or a moan, you let out a noise, , like a kettle letting off steam, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I feel so much better’.”

The foofer valve was crucial at the start of Kylie’s pop career.

Early reviews called her music “hackneyed”, “lightweight” and “emotionless”. After watching her first Australian tour in 1990, the Sydney Morning Herald declared: “It is amazing how successful mediocrity can become.”

“It wasn’t cool that people were as nasty as they were,” she says now, “and it wasn’t some invisible person behind a keyboard.

“These were grown adults who should have known better.”

How did she cope?

“To be honest, I don’t know what made me keep going,” she replies. “But one of the blessings is that I had a job and I had to show up to work.

“There were definitely times when I would have liked to hide in a cave, so it’s good if you have that responsibility [of acting]. You have to show up, and then you’re distracted by other things.”

Critics might not have warmed to her, but the public were always on Kylie’s side.

Even during her ill-fated “indie years”, fans snapped up experimental and wayward songs like Confide In Me and the Nick Cave duet Where The Wild Roses Grow.

“I’m very proud of the times I swam against the current when it felt like things were going against me,” she says. “It’s a rewarding feeling.”

The new millennium brought a major reset.

Spinning Around, released in 2000, was a textbook comeback single, and she followed it up with the hypnotically cool Can’t Get You Out Of My Head – still the biggest-selling single of her career.

Then, in 2005, on the UK leg of her greatest hits tour, Kylie started experiencing blurred vision on stage.

Putting it down to exhaustion, she soldiered on, especially after a health check gave her the all-clear.

“When they say, ‘You don’t need to worry’, that’s what you want to hear, so you believe it,” she recalls.

But a second test revealed that Kylie had early-stage breast cancer. Her career was put on hold as she had chemotherapy and a lumpectomy.

The public responded with an outpouring of love that she describes as “really moving”.

To this day, she’s kept all the letters, drawings and cards that fans sent her.

“There were envelopes that just said, ‘Kylie Minogue, Australia’, and the post department bothered to [deliver] them,” she says.

“I just felt there was a trail of love and support. It really made such a difference to me.”

Kylie got the all-clear in 2006, and she hit the road again almost immediately.

Determination and persistence have been the keys to her longevity, and today it’s the search for the next Padam Padam that keeps her motivated.

It all links back to her love of word games. “Music’s a bit of a puzzle, too, trying to figure it all out.”

But where Brainteasers are bound by logic, pop music is more like gambling. Luck and timing are just as important as creative choices. And the public is petulant, demanding more of the same, but losing interest if you don’t evolve.

Kylie has successfully walked that tightrope for five decades, something that fellow pop icon Madonna acknowledged when she asked her to duet on stage in Los Angeles this March.

“It was kind of mind-blowing,” Kylie recalls. “I spoke to her manager and he said, ‘M would really like to sing I Will Survive with you’.

“The reasoning for that is she lost her mother to breast cancer, and she knows some of my story. But even more relevant, for her and I, was that we’re women who’ve survived this industry.

“It’s never easy,” she adds. “I don’t think anyone it to be easy, because where’s the challenge? But we’re still here, doing what we love.”

Pausing to reflect, the singer is momentarily overawed.

“There’s so much that’s happened that eight-year-old me, or even 20-year-old me, wouldn’t have been able to compute,” she says.

“You’re going to meet Prince one day. He’s going to write a song for you. You’re going to sing on stage with Madonna.

“I mean, I’m amazed. I’m like, ‘Is this even my life?'”

That’s one puzzle where the answer is self-evident.

“Now I think about it, I definitely chose the wrong industry.”

Xiao Chen*, who works in a private equity firm in China’s financial hub, Shanghai, says he is having a rough year.

For his first year in the job, he says he was paid almost 750,000 yuan ($106,200; £81,200). He was sure he would soon hit the million-yuan mark.

Three years on, he is earning half of what he made back then. His pay was frozen last year, and an annual bonus, which had been a big part of his income, vanished.

The “glow” of the industry has worn off, he says. It had once made him “feel fancy”. Now, he is just a “finance rat”, as he and his peers are mockingly called online.

China’s once-thriving economy, which encouraged aspiration, is now sluggish. The country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has become wary of personal wealth and the challenges of widening inequality.

Crackdowns on billionaires and businesses, from real estate to technology to finance, have been accompanied by socialist-style messaging on enduring hardship and striving for China’s prosperity. Even celebrities have been told to show off less online.

Loyalty to the Communist Party and country, people are told, now trumps the personal ambition that had transformed Chinese society in the last few decades.

Mr Chen’s swanky lifestyle has certainly felt the pinch from this U-turn. He traded a holiday in Europe for a cheaper option: South East Asia. And he says he “wouldn’t even think about” buying again from luxury brands like “Burberry or Louis Vuitton”.

But at least ordinary workers like him are less likely to find themselves in trouble with the law. Dozens of finance officials and banking bosses have been detained, including the former chairman of the Bank of China.

On Thursday, the former vice-governor of the People’s Bank of China, Fan Yifei, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, according to state media.

Fan was found guilty of accepting bribes worth more than 386 million yuan ($54.6m; £41.8m).

The industry is under pressure. While few companies have publicly admitted it, pay cuts in banking and investment firms are a hot topic on Chinese social media.

Posts about falling salaries have generated millions of views in recent months. And hashtags like “changing career from finance” and “quitting finance” have gained more than two million views on the popular social media platform Xiaohongshu.

Some finance workers have been seeing their income shrink since the start of the pandemic but many see one viral social media post as a turning point.

In July 2022, a Xiaohongshu user sparked outrage after boasting about her 29-year-old husband’s 82,500-yuan monthly pay at top financial services company, China International Capital Corporation.

People were stunned by the huge gap between what a finance worker was getting paid and their own wages. The average monthly salary in the country’s richest city, Shanghai, was just over 12,000 yuan.

It reignited a debate about incomes in the industry that had been started by another salary-flaunting online user earlier that year.

Those posts came just months after Xi called for “common prosperity” – a policy to narrow the growing wealth gap.

In August 2022, China’s finance ministry published new rules requiring firms to “optimise the internal income distribution and scientifically design the salary system”.

The following year, the country’s top corruption watchdog criticised the ideas of “finance elites” and the “only money matters” approach, making finance a clearer target for the country’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign.

The changes came in a sweeping but discreet way, according to Alex*, a manager at a state-controlled bank in China’s capital, Beijing.

“You would not see the order put into written words – even if there is [an official] document it’s certainly not for people on our level to see. But everyone knows there is a cap on it [salaries] now. We just don’t know how much the cap is.”

Alex says employers are also struggling to deal with the pace of the crackdown: “In many banks, the orders could change unexpectedly fast.”

“They would issue the annual guidance in February, and by June or July, they would realise that the payment of salaries has exceeded the requirement. They then would come up with ways to set up performance goals to deduct people’s pay.”

Mr Chen says his workload has shrunk significantly as the number of companies launching shares on the stock market has fallen. Foreign investment has decreased in China, and domestic businesses have also turned cautious – because of the crackdowns and weak consumption.

In the past his work often involved new projects that would bring money into his firm. Now his days are mostly filled with chores like organising the data from his previous projects.

“The morale of the team has been very low, the discussion behind the bosses backs are mostly negative. People are talking what to do in three to five years.”

It’s hard to estimate if people are leaving the industry in large numbers, although there have been some layoffs. Jobs are also scarce in China now, so even a lower-paying finance job is still worth keeping.

But the frustration is evident. A user on Xiaohongshu compared switching jobs to changing seats – except, he wrote, “if you stand up you might find your seat is gone.”

Mr Chen says that it’s not just the authorities that have fallen out of love with finance workers, it’s Chinese society in general.

“We are no longer wanted even for a blind date. You would be told not to go once they hear you work in finance.”

A crack team assembles and breaks into a top secret military base or corporate headquarters – you’ve probably seen it in a film or on TV a dozen times.

But such teams exist in the real world and can be hired to test the tightest security.

Plenty of firms offer to test computer systems by attempting to remotely hack into them. That’s called White Hat Hacking.

But the skills involved in breaching physical security, known as Red Teaming, are rare.

Companies that offer the Red Team service have to assemble staff with very particular skills.

Often using former military and intelligence personnel, Red Teams are asked one question.

“How can you break into this top-secret project?”

Leonardo, the giant defence company, offers such a service.

It says hostile states seeking disruption and chaos are a real threat and sells its Red Team capability to government, critical infrastructure, and defence sector clients.

Its Red Team agreed to speak to the BBC under pseudonyms.

Greg, the team leader, served in the engineering and intelligence arms of the British Army, studying the digital capabilities of potential enemies.

“I spent a decade learning how to exploit enemy communications,” he says of his background.

Now he co-ordinates the five-strong team.

The attack is about gaining access. The objective might be to stop a process from working, such as the core of a nuclear power plant.

The first step for Greg and his team is called passive reconnaissance.

Using an anonymous device, perhaps a smartphone only identifiable by its sim card, the team build a picture of the target.

“We must avoid raising suspicions, so the target doesn’t know we’re looking at them,” Greg says.

Any technology they employ is not linked to a business by its internet address and is bought with cash.

Charlie spent 12 years in military intelligence, his techniques include studying commercial satellite imagery of a site, and scanning job ads to work out what type of people work there.

“We start from the edges of the target, staying away. Then we start to move into the target area, even looking at how people who work there dress.”

This is known as hostile reconnaissance. They are getting close to the site, but keeping their exposure low, wearing different clothes every time they show up, and swapping out team members, so security people don’t spot the same person walking past the gates.

Technology is devised by people and the human factor is the weakest point in any security set-up. This is where Emma, who served in the RAF, comes in.

With a background in psychology Emma happily calls herself “a bit of a nosy people watcher”.

“People take shortcuts past security protocols. So, we look for disgruntled people at the site.”

She listens in to conversations at adjacent cafes and pubs to hear where dissatisfaction with an employer surfaces.

“Every organisation has its quirks. We see what the likelihood of people falling for a suspicious email due to workload and fatigue is.”

An unhappy security guard may get lazy at work. “We’re looking at access, slipping in with a delivery for instance.”

A high turnover rate evidenced by frequently advertised vacancies also flags up dissatisfaction and a lack of engagement with security responsibilities. Tailgating, spotting people who are likely to hold an access door open for a follower, is another technique.

Using that intelligence, plus a little subterfuge, security passes can be copied, and the Red Team can enter the premises posing as an employee.

Once inside the site Dan knows how to open doors, filing cabinets and desk drawers. He’s armed with lock pick keys known as jigglers, with multiple contours that can spring a lock open.

He’s searching for passwords written down, or will use a plug-in smart USB adaptor to simulate a computer keyboard, breaking into a network.

The final step in the so-called kill chain, is in the hands of Stanley.

A cyber security expert, Stanley knows how to penetrate the most secure computer systems, working on the reconnaissance report from his colleagues.

“In the movies it takes a hacker seconds to break into a system, but the reality is different.”

He prefers his own “escalatory approach”, working through a system via an administrator’s access and searching for a “confluence”, a collection of information shared in one place, such as a workplace intranet.

He can roam through files and data using the administrator’s access. One way a kill chain concludes is when Stanley sends an email impersonating the chief executive of the business via the internal, hence trusted, network.

Even though they operate with the approval of the target customer they are breaking into a site as complete strangers. How does this feel?

“If you’ve gained access to a server room that is quite nerve-wracking,” says Dan, “but it gets easier the more times you do it.”

There is someone at the target site who knows what’s going on. “We stay in touch with them, so they can issue an instruction ‘don’t shoot these people,’” Charlie adds.

Eight-year-old Grace Welch has been waiting since 2019 for her older sister to occupy the bed next to hers.

Her parents had told her that, Penelope, a 10-year-old born in China, would be joining the family, who live in Kentucky in the US.

Grace, also adopted from China, was born without her left forearm. Her mother, Aimee Welch, said Penelope too has a “serious but manageable” special need, although she did not wish to disclose it.

The Welch family, who have four biological sons, sought to adopt children with disabilities after the birth of a nephew without arms.

“He taught us all what a person with limb differences can achieve with the right love and support. His birth started us on the path towards adopting Grace,” Ms Welch said. “We believe in the dignity and worth of each person, just as they are, in all their diversity.”

But the pandemic delayed their plans.

Then in September, China announced that it was putting a stop to international adoptions, including cases where families were already matched with adoptee children.

The painful wait will particularly determine the fates of China’s most vulnerable children – those with special needs.

Up-to-date statistics are not readily available, but Beijing’s civil affairs ministry said that 95% of international adoptions between 2014 and 2018 involved children with disabilities.

These children “will have no future” without international adoption as they are unlikely to be adopted domestically, says Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow at the US-based Council on Foreign Relations.

Ms Welch said Grace was especially saddened by the news that Penelope may never come home: “She told me, ‘We were meant to be a family of eight so that everyone could have a buddy.’”

Ms Welch called on China to “keep the promises made to the children already matched with adoptive parents”.

Beijing has not commented since the September announcement, when it thanked families for their “love in adopting children from China”. It said the ban was in line with international agreements and showed China’s “overall development and progress”.

China began allowing international adoptions in 1992 as the country was opening up, and they peaked in the mid 2000s. More than 160,000 children have been adopted by families across the world in the last three decades.

A contentious one-child policy had forced families to give up children, especially girls and kids with special needs. Social stigma around disability had also led to more children with special needs ending up in orphanages.

Dani Nelson, who was adopted to the US in 2017, said she was given basic care at an orphanage in the southwestern city of Guiyang, but it was “not enough for me to live a normal life”.

The 21-year-old was born with spina bifida – a spinal defect – and hydrocephalus, which is a neurological disorder that causes water to gather around her brain.

In her first three years in the US, she had seven surgeries which she said helped her “lead a normal life”.

“I joined a swim team. I got a job… Adoption saved my life,” said Ms Nelson, who now works as a cashier at a coffee shop.

Like in many Asian societies, disabled people in China face discrimination and are sometimes even seen as a source of “bad luck”.

China has made some strides in improving accessibility to the disabled, but public infrastructure, especially in rural areas, are still weaker than countries in the West. It has only recently started developing education institutions and curricula for students with special needs.

Only the most seriously disabled receive financial support from the government.

The BBC had previously interviewed Chinese adults with special needs whose parents have had to stop working to care for them.

Aware of these challenges, waiting families are concerned about what will happen to the children they were meant to adopt, some of whom need urgent medical treatment.

Meghan and David Briggs were matched with a boy in Zhengzhou, Henan, in 2020. The 10-year-old has a “moderate special need that requires medical intervention”, Mrs Briggs said.

The couple live with their biological son, also 10, in Pennsylvania. Mr Briggs said the family made a “wilful choice” to adopt a child who is more vulnerable and less likely to get the specialised care and therapy in an institution in China than with a family in the US.

“Such care is a financial and emotional responsibility. We were prepared to offer this care because we view this child as our family,” said Mr Briggs, who himself was adopted from South Korea.

“He was promised a family by his own government,” Ms Briggs said. “The children are the ones who will suffer with this decision,” she said.

Not everyone agrees.

Some, including adult adoptees, are relieved about that Beijing has ended foreign adoption.

“My experience as a transracial adoptee being raised in a predominantly white, Christian city is that you often get looked down upon. I was constantly reminded that I don’t belong,” said Lucy Sheen, who was adopted by a white family in the UK.

Ms Sheen, now in her 60s, added that her adoptive family had little knowledge of her Chinese culture and heritage. She was once told off for asking to learn Mandarin.

“Some adopters have a ‘white-saviour’ mentality or have the ideology that they are bringing us where they come from because ‘West is best’, I think that needs to change,” she added.

Nanchang Project, a non-profit group that helps connect adoptees to their roots in China, said it felt “a sense of relief that no more children will be separated from their birthplace, culture, and identity”.

“We hope this moment can shift focus toward the need for post-adoptive services to support Chinese adoptees and their families for the rest of their lives,” the group said in a statement last month.

Under the new policy, China will only send children overseas for adoption if the adoptive parents are blood relatives. The BBC understands that US authorities are in talks with Beijing on whether a further exception can be made for waiting families.

John and Anne Contant who were matched with five-year-old Corrine in 2019, said they “honour China’s decision to change course on their adoption policy”.

“If there have been more families wanting to adopt domestically, that’s wonderful… Our ask is for these 300 children who have been matched [to families in the US] to be allowed to come home,” he said.

The couple live in Chicago with six children. Three of them were adopted from China and live with albinism, as does Corinne.

The Contants spoke to Corinne via WeChat when their plans to travel to China were shelved because of the pandemic.

“Corinne met our children, saw her home and the room that had been prepared for her, and experienced the excitement our children felt in preparation for her arrival,” Mr Contant said.

“In one of our conversations, she pointedly asked, ‘When are you coming to get me?’”

The Northern Lights have splashed vivid colour across UK night skies once again, with stunning images captured from Scotland to as far south as Kent and East Anglia.

The Met Office had earlier said the lights, also known as aurora borealis, might be seen only as far south as the Midlands.

People are advised to use a long exposure camera to capture the auroras, as the phenomenon is not always visible with the naked eye.

BBC Weather Watchers, readers and viewers have been sending in their photos of the display – here are some of the best along with some agency pictures.

The UK has seen more of the Northern Lights in 2024 than in many recent years.

Aurora displays occur when charged particles collide with gases in the Earth’s atmosphere around the magnetic poles.

As they collide, light is emitted at various wavelengths, creating colourful displays in the sky.

The auroras are most commonly seen over high polar latitudes, and are chiefly influenced by geomagnetic storms which originate from activity on the Sun.

Met Office spokesman Stephen Dixon said increased UK sightings were helped by the Sun being at the peak of an 11-year “solar cycle”.

He said it would still be possible to see the Northern Lights in the UK once the Sun passed the peak, but stargazers should expect a “gradual decline” in visibility.

The auroras have been particularly visible in 2024 due to the biggest geomagnetic storm since 2003, according to Sean Elvidge, a professor in space environment at the University of Birmingham.

Craig Snell, a weather forecaster at the Met Office, said a solar storm caused a powerful flare from the sun on Wednesday, which arrived in our atmosphere on Thursday evening.

He said the strength of the lights would ebb and flow throughout the evening, but the lights may be captured at different times throughout the night.

South Korean author Han Kang has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The 53-year-old fiction writer is a former winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her 2007 novel The Vegetarian.

At the ceremony she was praised “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.

The Nobel Prize committee has awarded the literary award since 1901 and this marks the 18th time a woman has won the prize.

She has won 11m krona (£810,000) which is the amount awarded to each Nobel Prize winner this year.

Han is the first South Korean winner of the prize, who was described by the Nobel Prize board as someone who has “devoted herself to music and art”.

The statement also added that her work crosses boundaries by exploring a broad span of genres – these include violence, grief and patriarchy.

A turning point for her career came in 2016, when she won the International Man Booker prize for The Vegetarian – a book which had been released nearly a decade before, but was first translated into English in 2015 by Deborah Smith.

It depicts the violent consequences for a woman who refuses to submit to the norms of food intake.

Han’s other works include The White Book, Human Acts and Greek Lessons.

Swedish Academy permanent secretary Mats Malm said at the ceremony that “she wasn’t really prepared” to win the prize.

Committee chair Anders Olsen also said she “confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life”.

He praised her “poetic and experimental style”, and called her “an innovator in contemporary prose”.

The chair added she has “unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead”.

Han is the first female recipient of the literature prize since 2022, when it was awarded to French writer Annie Ernaux.

She is also the first female Nobel laureate this year.

The prize is awarded for a body of work, rather than a single item – there is no shortlist and it is notoriously difficult to predict.

Han is the daughter of novelist Han Seung-won and was born in the South Korean city of Gwangju.

She moved to capital Seoul at a young age and studied Korean literature at a university in the city.

Her first published works were five poems in 1993, and she made her debut in fiction the following year with a short story.

Han, who has taught creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and is writing her sixth novel, has been published in more than 30 languages.

Last year’s prize was won by Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, and previous winners include Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Bob Dylan.

South Korean pop star Hanni has made a surprise announcement, saying she will testify to the country’s National Assembly in a hearing about bullying in the music industry.

The singer, who is part of the girl group NewJeans, said she had made the decision without telling her managers or her record label, Ador.

“I believe going forward is the right thing to do, no matter how much I think about it,” she wrote to fans on social media.

It comes after she and the other four members of her band raised concerns about their treatment by Ador during an impromptu YouTube livestream on 11 September.

The group were the eighth biggest-selling act in the world last year, scoring international hits with feathery, throwback songs like SuperShy and OMG.

However, their mentor and record label chief executive, Min Hee-Jin, was removed earlier this year over allegations that she had planned a hostile takeover that would make NewJeans and Ador independent of their parent label, Hybe. Min has denied the accusations against her.

In the band’s YouTube video, which has since been deleted, they demanded Min’s reinstatement; and made claims of workplace harassment.

Hanni said that when she greeted the members of another band at their record label offices, their manager had instructed them to “ignore her”.

The 20-year-old reported the incident to Ador’s new chief executive, Kim Joo-Young – but said her concerns had been brushed off.

“She told me it was too late and that I had no evidence. Seeing her ignoring the issue made me feel like there was no one to protect us,” Hanni alleged during the livestream.

The accusation sparked a war of words between fans of NewJeans and the girl group Illit – who were rumoured to be the antagonists.

As the row escalated, the agency managing Illit, Belift Lab, was forced to issue a denial.

“Illit’s managers never instructed anyone to ‘ignore’ NewJeans members, and the Illit members have always greeted NewJeans when passing by,” the agency said.

Belift said they had reviewed a video that showed Illit’s members bowing to Hanni on the day of the incident – but that footage of their subsequent interactions was not available.

The agency also denied claims from the parents of NewJeans members that this later footage had been deleted on purpose.

The row eventually caught the attention of South Korea’s Environment and Labour Committee, who have summoned both Hanni and Kim Joo-Young to testify to an audit on workplace harassment later this month.

In her statement, Hanni told fans: “I’ve made my decision. I’m going to go the National Assembly. A parliamentary inspection!

“I’m going alone. They still don’t know… neither my managers nor the company.”

The singer thanked fans for their support, and reassured them that they don’t “need to worry”.

“I’m doing this for myself and for the members [of NewJeans], and also for the Bunnies [fans],” she added.

“No, it’s not difficult. I want to do this.”

After more than 100 years hidden in the icy waters of Antarctica, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance has been revealed in extraordinary 3D detail.

For the first time we can see the vessel, which sank in 1915 and lies 3,000m down at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, as if the murky water has been drained away.

The digital scan, which is made from 25,000 high resolution images, was captured when the ship was found in 2022.

It’s been released as part of a new documentary called Endurance, which will be shown at cinemas.

The team has scoured the scan for tiny details, each of which tell a story linking the past to the present.

In the picture below you can see the plates that the crew used for daily meals, left scattered across the deck.

In the next picture there’s a single boot that might have belonged to Frank Wild, Shackleton’s second-in-command.

Perhaps most extraordinary of all is a flare gun that’s referenced in the journals the crew kept.

The flare gun was fired by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer, as the ship that had been the crew’s home was lost to the ice.

“Hurley gets this flare gun, and he fires the flare gun into the air with a massive detonator as a tribute to the ship,” explains Dr John Shears who led the expedition that found Endurance.

“And then in the diary, he talks about putting it down on the deck. And there we are. We come back over 100 years later, and there’s that flare gun, incredible.”

Sir Ernest Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish explorer who led the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which set out to make the first land crossing of Antarctica.

But the mission was doomed from the outset.

Endurance became stuck in pack ice within weeks of setting off from South Georgia.

The ship, with the crew on board, drifted for months before the order was eventually given to abandon ship. Endurance finally sank on 21 November 1915.

Shackleton and his men were forced to travel for hundreds of miles over ice, land and sea to reach safety – miraculously all 27 of the crew survived.

Their extraordinary story was recorded in their diaries, as well as in Frank Hurley’s photographs, which have had colour added for the Endurance documentary.

The ship itself remained lost until 2022.

Its discovery made headlines around the world – and the footage of Endurance revealed that it is beautifully preserved by the icy waters.

The new 3D scan was made using underwater robots that mapped the wreck from every angle, taking thousands of photographs. These were then “stitched” together to create a digital twin.

While footage filmed at this depth can only show parts of Endurance in the gloom, the scan shows the complete 44m long wooden wreck from bow to stern – even recording the grooves carved into the sediment as the ship skidded to a halt on the seafloor.

The model reveals how the ship was crushed by the ice – the masts toppled and parts of the deck in tatters – but the structure itself is largely intact.

Shackleton’s descendants say Endurance will never be raised – and its location in one of the most remote parts of the globe means visiting the wreck again would be extremely challenging.

But Nico Vincent from Deep Ocean Search, who developed the technology for the scans, along with Voyis Imaging and McGill University, said the digital replica offers a new way to study the ship.

“It’s absolutely fabulous. The wreck is almost intact like she sank yesterday,” said Mr Vincent, who was also a co-leader for the expedition.

He said the scan could be used by scientists to study the sea life that has colonised the wreck, to analyse the geology of the sea floor, and to discover new artefacts.

“So this is really a great opportunity that we can offer for the future.”

The scan belongs to the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust who also funded and organised the expedition to find Shackleton’s ship.

The Endurance documentary is premiering at the London Film Festival on 12 October and will be released in cinemas in the UK on 14 October.

A Spanish couple on their honeymoon in Singapore have been held in the country after protesting against the Singaporean owner of the football club they support.

Dani Cuesta posted photographs of himself outside the home of Peter Lim, the billionaire owner of Valencia CF, holding a banner criticising the business magnate.

Mr Cuesta and his partner Mireia Sáez were stopped while trying to leave Singapore airport on Friday and had their passports confiscated, Valencia Mayor María José Catalá told Spanish radio station Onda Cero.

The pair are assisting with ongoing investigations into the alleged offence of “taking part in a public assembly”, Singapore police told the BBC.

Singapore has some of the world’s strictest laws on public assembly, which includes assemblies even of one person.

The government says these laws are necessary to maintain order and safety.

In 2020, a Singaporean activist who had long campaigned for freedom of speech was arrested for posing with a placard of a smiley face.

Shortly after arriving in Singapore on Thursday, Mr Cuesta posted on X that he would “take some photos with my lovely flag”, which reads “Lim Go Home”.

Mr Lim is deeply unpopular with Valencia fans, who have seen their club’s fortunes decline significantly over the course of his ten year tenure.

Encouraged by users online, Mr Cuesta posted a series of photos of himself at various tourist spots in Singapore holding the yellow banner.

Another image shows him outside what is believed to be the luxury complex where Mr Lim lives in Singapore.

A video he posted shows Mr Cuesta placing a yellow sticker reading “Lim out” – a common sight in the city of Valencia – on the residence’s gate.

The images quickly went viral among Valencia fans and Mr Cuesta even gave a light-hearted interview to a Valencia football podcast on Thursday.

He explained that as soon as his wife suggested going to Singapore, he had a “lightbulb moment” and decided to bring a banner and some stickers, which he placed on lampposts around the city.

“I told her ‘this is something I have to do’… perhaps it will be for nothing but it sends the message that we don’t want these people in Valencia,” Mr Cuesta told Tribuna Deportiva.

“I’ve not been detained yet,” he joked. “My wife’s been reading up about the laws in Singapore – she’s looking forward to getting through immigration tomorrow.”

Earlier that day, Mr Cuesta had joked on X that he did not want to “end up in a Singapore prison as that’s not the way I see my honeymoon going”.

The following day, as they attempted to board a flight to Bali, Singapore authorities stopped Mr Cuesta and Ms Sáez, according to Valencia’s mayor.

“[The Spanish embassy in Singapore] confirmed that two people had their passports taken away, due to an ongoing police investigation,” Ms Catalá told Spanish radio station Onda Cero.

“They can leave their hotel but not the country,” she added.

Valencia CF, meanwhile, said it was aware of the situation of two of the club’s supporters in Singapore.

“Valencia CF and La Liga are in contact with the Spanish embassy in Singapore, who have assured us that both are being advised and assisted in everything necessary with the objective of this being resolved as quickly as possible,” the club said in a statement.

Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the BBC that its embassy in Singapore is “providing assistance to those affected and is in permanent contact with their families”.

One of Singapore’s richest men, Mr Lim purchased Valencia CF in 2014 and became the first foreign owner in the club’s history.

After an initial honeymoon period, he quickly became unpopular with fans as the team’s performances declined and the club ran up huge debts off the pitch.

Traditionally a team that would challenge for domestic and European titles, Valencia currently lie third-bottom in the league.

Mr Lim has particularly been criticised for his friendship with Portuguese “super agent” Jorge Mendes and his alleged influence on the club’s recruitment of players and coaches.

Another associate of Mr Lim is former Manchester United defender Gary Neville, with whom he co-owned English lower-league club Salford City until earlier this year.

Despite having no managerial experience, Mr Neville was appointed Valencia’s head coach in 2015 but was sacked four months later after a disastrous spell in charge.

Libertad VCF, a Valencia fan group, said in a statement it had “total support and solidarity” with the recently married couple and called for them to be “freed immediately”.

“Their freedom of movement has been violated, simply for peacefully exercising their right to expression,” the statement added.

A fault with the BBC Weather website and app has led to incorrect forecasts of impossibly high wind speeds in the UK and across the globe.

Graphics warned of hurricanes and showed estimated wind speeds of 13,508mph in London and 5,293mph in Rome – far in excess of any genuine hurricane such as Milton, which struck Florida overnight.

Temperatures of 404C in Nottingham, 384C in New York and 378C in Sydney were among those being wrongly displayed.

BBC Weather said it was aware of a data issue with a third-party supplier and it was fixing the problem.

Weather presenters worked to reassure users who had spotted errors appearing on Thursday morning.

On social media, lead presenter Simon King said: “Oops, don’t be alarmed by some of our BBC Weather app data this morning.

“Be assured there won’t be 14408mph winds, hurricane force winds or overnight temperatures of 404C.”

Forecasters also acknowledged the issue on TV bulletins, which were not affected by the fault.

In a statement, BBC Weather said: “We have an issue with some of the weather data from our forecast provider which is generating incorrect numbers and text on our BBC Weather app and website.

“It’s mainly been impacting wind readings but some temperatures are also displaying wrongly.

“We recognise there is huge interest in weather today and this is incredibly frustrating.

“We are really, really sorry about this and working very hard to fix the problem.”

A BBC spokesperson also apologised and said it was working with its supplier to fix the issue as soon as possible.

Meteorological forecasting company DTN, which supplies BBC Weather with data, has apologised for what it called a “technical error”.

In a statement issued on Thursday evening, the US-based firm said the “root cause” of the error had been addressed, but it could take “several hours” for correct forecasts to reappear.

The glitch suggested winds speed would be 17,246mph in Edinburgh. In Belfast, it was suggested gusts would reach 14,398mph, and in Cardiff winds were said to be 12,585mph.

Meanwhile, Truro in Cornwall was displaying wind speeds of 16,309mph and they were said to be 15,227mph in Liverpool.

Forecasts also said Paris and Bangkok would experience wind gust of more than 13,000mph.

Accurate weather headlines for Thursday included colder air moving in, with rain and drizzle in the south of the UK and blustery showers near the east coast.

The Met Office said winds would reach a maximum of 33mph in Aberdeen.

Next week, Florida’s Hurricane Milton could bring uncertainty to UK weather if its remnants end up in the Atlantic, but the Met Office said it was “highly unlikely” to reach the UK.

Hurricanes are powerful storms which develop over tropical waters.

They involve sustained winds near the surface of at least 74mph. In a category 5 hurricane, the most severe on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, winds can reach over 157mph.

Hurricane Milton, which made landfall as a category 3, storm has battered Florida, bringing tornadoes, floods, and the risk of storm surges.

More than three million homes and businesses are without power, and at least six deaths have been reported in the state.

Crystal Coleman sits outside the remnants of her home in St Lucie County, Florida, and wonders where she and her daughter will spend the night.

One of at least a dozen tornadoes spawned by Hurricane Milton tore through this low-income community in south Florida, killing at least five residents. At least 16 people are known to have died across the US state.

Crystal is happy to be alive but at a loss over what to do next.

“All of a sudden the door to my attic flew off, all the objects in my house started flying around,” Ms Coleman told BBC News on Thursday.

“It was devastating, we were very scared. It felt like the tornado was inside of our house.”

Her neighbourhood is one of many across the state that were devastated by Milton as it barrelled across the state, leaving widespread damage and millions without power.

The tornadoes spawned as Milton approached the state Wednesday evening, an occurrence that forecasters say sometimes follows tropical weather.

Parts of Crystal’s roof were torn off, and the windows blown out. Further up the street on Thursday, workers at a non-profit organisation were handing out hundreds of hot meals. The power is out and there’s no running water. People are grateful for a hot meal, a smile, and a helping hand.

Devastation litters the main road. A tractor trailer on its side. The canopy ripped off a petrol station. Trees uprooted. Some residents say they’ve contacted the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) for help, but for now, they’re most worried about shelter and food for their families tonight.

Milton’s devastating path is still being assessed by workers across the state, who caution the death toll is likely to continue rising in the coming days.

The storm brought heavy rains of up to 18in (45cm) in some areas. Neighbourhoods and roads remain flooded, businesses, homes and stadiums were torn apart by the winds – but Florida Gov Ron DeSantis said the state did not experience “the worst-case scenario”.

Many evacuated, including some 80,000 people who stayed in shelters overnight, he said.

“My sense is that a lot of the people did leave who were in the evacuation zones,” DeSantis said.

Nevertheless, crews still deployed for hundreds of rescues across the state in large vehicles, boats and helicopters. That includes more than 400 people alone who were rescued from a severely flooded apartment complex in Pinellas County and a US Coast Guard rescue of a ship captain who ended up in the water clinging to a floating cooler 30 miles (48km) from shore.

Maria Bowman, 60, hunkered down in her bright pink mobile home in North Fort Myers, rode out Milton’s fierce winds.

Her home, 600m from the Caloosahatchee River and at risk of storm surge, was in Evacuation Zone A – the category for the most at-risk areas.

She felt her home rattle as Milton came ashore. Her power cut out around 22:00.

“It sounded like an explosion,” she told BBC News. “Boom. No electricity.”

Ms Bowman, who says she’s dealt with numerous hurricanes, says she’s ready to leave the state.

“It’s too many hurricanes,” she said. “One day you survive it, the next time no. Who knows.”

Gov DeSantis warned that flooding remained possible in the coming days. He noted the death toll could continue to rise as the impact of the storm becomes more clear.

• Where is Hurricane Milton heading?
• Why Hurricane Milton caused tornadoes
• ‘My anxiety’s through the roof,’ says woman who did not evacuate
• Evacuees: ‘Waiting out Milton was gamble we weren’t willing to make’
• BBC Verify: No, Hurricane Milton was not ‘engineered’

Tampa Mayor Jane Castor has voiced relief that her city has not seen the type of storm surge that was feared.

But the region saw destruction.

In nearby St Petersburg, the Major League Baseball stadium that is home to the Tampa Bay Rays was severely damaged. Wind tore apart the stadium’s dome, which shines bright orange when the team wins a home game.

A crane also broke apart and collapsed in the middle of downtown St Petersburg, crashing into high rises as the storm blew through.

Castor and other officials have spent days urging people in Milton’s path to flee their homes or risk death.

Milton made landfall as a category three hurricane on Wednesday evening local time, bringing 124mph (200km/h) winds. Earlier in its life, it was categorised more than once as a category five hurricane – which denotes the most powerful type of storm.

The arrival of Milton comes two weeks after the south-eastern US was pummelled by Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 200 people and left many more missing. Clean-up operations are ongoing.

Milton, which has diminished into a post-tropical cyclone, has passed through Florida and traveling through the Atlantic Ocean, north of the Bahamas.

• Does US lack relief money for Hurricane Milton?
• How Hurricane Milton compares to Hurricane Helene
• Is climate change making hurricanes and typhoons worse?
• Hurricanes: A look inside the deadly storms

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.

“Now I think about it, I definitely chose the wrong industry.”

Xiao Chen*, who works in a private equity firm in China’s financial hub, Shanghai, says he is having a rough year.

For his first year in the job, he says he was paid almost 750,000 yuan ($106,200; £81,200). He was sure he would soon hit the million-yuan mark.

Three years on, he is earning half of what he made back then. His pay was frozen last year, and an annual bonus, which had been a big part of his income, vanished.

The “glow” of the industry has worn off, he says. It had once made him “feel fancy”. Now, he is just a “finance rat”, as he and his peers are mockingly called online.

China’s once-thriving economy, which encouraged aspiration, is now sluggish. The country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has become wary of personal wealth and the challenges of widening inequality.

Crackdowns on billionaires and businesses, from real estate to technology to finance, have been accompanied by socialist-style messaging on enduring hardship and striving for China’s prosperity. Even celebrities have been told to show off less online.

Loyalty to the Communist Party and country, people are told, now trumps the personal ambition that had transformed Chinese society in the last few decades.

Mr Chen’s swanky lifestyle has certainly felt the pinch from this U-turn. He traded a holiday in Europe for a cheaper option: South East Asia. And he says he “wouldn’t even think about” buying again from luxury brands like “Burberry or Louis Vuitton”.

But at least ordinary workers like him are less likely to find themselves in trouble with the law. Dozens of finance officials and banking bosses have been detained, including the former chairman of the Bank of China.

On Thursday, the former vice-governor of the People’s Bank of China, Fan Yifei, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, according to state media.

Fan was found guilty of accepting bribes worth more than 386 million yuan ($54.6m; £41.8m).

The industry is under pressure. While few companies have publicly admitted it, pay cuts in banking and investment firms are a hot topic on Chinese social media.

Posts about falling salaries have generated millions of views in recent months. And hashtags like “changing career from finance” and “quitting finance” have gained more than two million views on the popular social media platform Xiaohongshu.

Some finance workers have been seeing their income shrink since the start of the pandemic but many see one viral social media post as a turning point.

In July 2022, a Xiaohongshu user sparked outrage after boasting about her 29-year-old husband’s 82,500-yuan monthly pay at top financial services company, China International Capital Corporation.

People were stunned by the huge gap between what a finance worker was getting paid and their own wages. The average monthly salary in the country’s richest city, Shanghai, was just over 12,000 yuan.

It reignited a debate about incomes in the industry that had been started by another salary-flaunting online user earlier that year.

Those posts came just months after Xi called for “common prosperity” – a policy to narrow the growing wealth gap.

In August 2022, China’s finance ministry published new rules requiring firms to “optimise the internal income distribution and scientifically design the salary system”.

The following year, the country’s top corruption watchdog criticised the ideas of “finance elites” and the “only money matters” approach, making finance a clearer target for the country’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign.

The changes came in a sweeping but discreet way, according to Alex*, a manager at a state-controlled bank in China’s capital, Beijing.

“You would not see the order put into written words – even if there is [an official] document it’s certainly not for people on our level to see. But everyone knows there is a cap on it [salaries] now. We just don’t know how much the cap is.”

Alex says employers are also struggling to deal with the pace of the crackdown: “In many banks, the orders could change unexpectedly fast.”

“They would issue the annual guidance in February, and by June or July, they would realise that the payment of salaries has exceeded the requirement. They then would come up with ways to set up performance goals to deduct people’s pay.”

Mr Chen says his workload has shrunk significantly as the number of companies launching shares on the stock market has fallen. Foreign investment has decreased in China, and domestic businesses have also turned cautious – because of the crackdowns and weak consumption.

In the past his work often involved new projects that would bring money into his firm. Now his days are mostly filled with chores like organising the data from his previous projects.

“The morale of the team has been very low, the discussion behind the bosses backs are mostly negative. People are talking what to do in three to five years.”

It’s hard to estimate if people are leaving the industry in large numbers, although there have been some layoffs. Jobs are also scarce in China now, so even a lower-paying finance job is still worth keeping.

But the frustration is evident. A user on Xiaohongshu compared switching jobs to changing seats – except, he wrote, “if you stand up you might find your seat is gone.”

Mr Chen says that it’s not just the authorities that have fallen out of love with finance workers, it’s Chinese society in general.

“We are no longer wanted even for a blind date. You would be told not to go once they hear you work in finance.”

Twelve tourists who were trapped in a disused Colorado gold mine for hours have been rescued, officials say.

The group were touring Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine in Cripple Creek, a privately owned tourist attraction, when a lift malfuncioned.

One person died and 11 people, including two children, were rescued earlier. Four had minor injuries.

The hour-long tour takes visitors 1,000ft (305m) down the shaft into the south-west side of Pikes Peak, according to the tour company’s website.

Officials say the lift descending into the gold mine had a mechanical issue around 500ft beneath the surface, creating a “severe danger for the participants”.

“We did have one fatality that occurred during this issue at 500ft,” Teller County Sheriff Jason Mikesell said earlier. He did not give details.

“There is an elevator issue to resolve before they could be brought up,” Sheriff Mikesell told reporters.

Rescue teams used radio to communicate with the 12 others who were stuck near the bottom of the mine.

“They have chairs, blankets, water and are at a safe temperature,” Sheriff Mikesell said. “This was due to an equipment malfunction. The mine did not collapse.”

Several agencies, including search and rescue teams, responded to the incident with heavy equipment.

Hours later, Governor Jared Polis said: “I am relieved that 12 of the people trapped in the Mollie Kathleen Mine have been safely rescued.”

According to the tour company’s website, entering the 1890s gold mine is comparable to riding in a lift, complete with the sounds of mining machinery.

Visitors to the Mollie Kathleen view several exposed gold veins in their natural state, the website says.

The website adds that revenue from the tours is used to “maintain the mine in safe operable mining condition”.

Officials say the last time an “incident” occurred there was in 1986, though they did not provide more detail.

On TripAdvisor, several people described the lift as a miners “cage”. The posts, which the BBC could not verify, said conditions could be tight and claustrophobic.

William Snare, a former hoist operator at the mine, told the Colorado Springs Gazette that the lift could carry between nine to 15 people. He said it took two minutes to descend, and four to five minutes to return to the surface.

The mine was named after Mollie Kathleen Gortner, the first woman in the Cripple Creek Gold Camp to strike gold in 1891.

The tours were set to close this Sunday for the season.

A deluge of misinformation online about back-to-back hurricanes in the US has been fuelled by a social media universe that rewards engagement over truth.

The scale and speed of false rumours about Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton has been unlike many of the frenzies I’ve investigated online before.

Viral posts have ranged from seemingly innocuous questions about the legitimacy of forecasts and rescue efforts, to false claims – repeated by Donald Trump – that hurricane relief funds are being spent on migrants who entered the US illegally.

Others spread false images of the wreckage – faked pictures of children fleeing devastation that were generated by artificial intelligence (AI), old clips showing different storms or computer-generated (CGI) videos. And then there were those who shared false and evidence-free conspiracy theories about the government manipulating – or “geo-engineering”- the weather.

“Yes they can control the weather,” wrote Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene last week on X.

• Fact-checking claims about hurricane response efforts
• No, Hurricane Milton was not ‘engineered’
• WATCH: Floridians assess hurricane damage

Most of the viral misinformation has come from social media profiles which have blue ticks and a track-record for sharing conspiracy theories. Several accounts which spread Hurricane Milton misinformation this week had previously shared posts suggesting real-life events were staged or rigged, from elections to political violence, the pandemic and wars.

I messaged dozens of accounts which shared false and misleading posts on X related to both hurricanes. Their accounts seemed to be able to go viral precisely because of changes made at X since Elon Musk became owner. While the blue-check used to be given out only to people who had been verified and vetted, users are now allowed to purchase these ticks. The algorithm, in turn, gives their posts greater prominence. They can also then profit from sharing posts, regardless of whether they are true or not.

X’s revenue sharing policy means that blue-tick users can earn a share of revenue from the ads in their replies. On 9 October, the site announced that “payouts are increasing”, and accounts would now be paid based on engagement from other users who pay to get Premium membership, not the adverts in their responses.

This has incentivised some users to share whatever it is that will go viral – however untrue. Several of those I messaged acknowledged to me that they benefitted from getting engagement from their posts and sharing content they know will get attention.

It’s true, most social media companies allow users to make money from views. But YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook have guidelines which allow them to de-monetise or suspend profiles that post content that spreads misinformation, and say they label posts when they are misleading. X does not have guidelines on misinformation in the same way.

While it has rules against faked AI content and “Community Notes” to add context to posts, it removed a previous feature which allowed users to report misleading information.

X did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Misleading posts which go viral on X can also travel over to the comment section of videos on other sites, too, showing how an idea shared on one site can spread through the social-media ecosystem.

“Wild Mother”, a social media influencer who regularly shares unproven theories across different sites, said that four years ago, her comments were filled with “people calling me names, denying it”.

“And now, I was surprised to see that nearly every comment is in agreement,” she said, referring to a recent post discussing conspiracy theories about geo-engineering and the recent hurricanes.

There is a real-world impact to this kind of disinformation, which can undermine trust in authorities – in this case – during a complex rescue and recovery operation following Hurricane Milton.

Although misinformation has always spread during natural disasters, there’s a crucial difference between now and previous storms. For one, the falsehoods being shared are spreading to more people – fewer than three dozen false or abusive posts were viewed 160 million times on X, according to the Institute of Strategic Dialogue think tank.

They have also taken on a sharper political edge because of the impending US presidential election.

Many of the most viral posts come from accounts which support Donald Trump, ISD found. And they are taking aim at foreign aid and migrants.

Several posts and videos have even targeted relief workers, who are accused of “treason” for taking part in untrue, outlandish plots.

The anger and distrust this can foster risks inhibiting efforts on the ground. Ahead of an election, it also risks undermining wider faith in how systems and government work, and of overshadowing any legitimate criticism of governments’ efforts.

While Wild Mother, and people like her, choose to view this as a sign that “more and more people are waking up to reality”, I see it as a sign that these conspiracy theories are gaining a wider audience.

She tells me how “a well informed collective is much harder to control”. In other words, the more people who believe these kinds of evidence-free conspiracy theories, the harder it is to combat them.

This ultimately comes down to the way the algorithms across social media sites favour engagement above all else. These conspiracy theories, false claims and hate can reach hundreds of thousands of people before anyone realises they’re are untrue – and those sharing them can be rewarded with views, likes, followers or money in return.

Twenty-two people have been killed and 117 injured in Israeli air strikes on central Beirut on Thursday evening, Lebanon’s health ministry said.

BBC reporters heard loud explosions echoing from the site of the strikes in Bachoura, a small Shia area in the capital. Rescuers were seen digging through rubble at the scene.

Ambulances rushed many injured to the American University hospital.

Unconfirmed media reports suggested the apparent target was Wafiq Safa, assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s brother-in-law and a high-ranking security official in the group. Hezbollah’s media office has not commented.

The Israeli strikes hit residential buildings in Bachoura’s two densely packed neighbourhoods, Nweiri and Basta.

They came after two relatively calm days in the Lebanese capital, which has felt unusual after intensive strikes in recent weeks.

There was no warning beforehand, and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has not commented.

This is the third time Israel has launched air strikes on the city outside of the southern suburb of Dahieh, where it has struck repeatedly, killing Hezbollah commanders and destroying munitions caches.

One woman outside the hospital, who did not want to be named, said she was in the building next-door to the blasts.

She said a building which was hit was entirely residential, and about four or five floors high. One of her relatives was being treated for head injuries.

The Beirut attack came hours after two Indonesian peacekeepers were injured in southern Lebanon when an Israeli tank fired at a watchtower, according to the UN.

An observation tower at a UN base in Naqoura was directly hit, causing the peacekeepers to fall, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) said in a statement.

Unifil is a peacekeeping mission created in 1978, monitoring hostilities and helping to ensure humanitarian access to civilians in southern Lebanon.

The UN said Israeli forces had “repeatedly hit” UN positions in the last 24 hours. Israeli soldiers are also accused of deliberately shooting at the cameras and lights at two other Unifil bases.

The IDF said its troops had fired from the area around the base after ordering members of the base to remain in “protected places”.

Both peacekeepers were not seriously injured but remain in hospital, the UN said, adding that deliberate attacks on its peacekeepers were a “grave violation of international law”.

In a separate incident, Israeli soldiers fired at a base in Naqoura, “hitting the entrance to the bunker where peacekeepers were sheltering, and damaging vehicles and a communications system,” the UN added.

An Israeli drone was also spotted flying above the bunker entrance.

Also in Naqoura, Hezbollah said it fired rockets at Israeli soldiers on the ground and used guided missiles to destroy a tank heading towards the area, leading to casualties.

There are now four divisions of Israeli soldiers fighting inside Lebanon as it continues its ground operations against Hezbollah, launched on 30 September.

A spokesperson for Unifil told the BBC on Thursday the force was “alarmed” and “deeply concerned” by the Israeli army’s activity in the area where peacekeeping troops are based.

Positions hit by Israeli forces are well known as UN sites, Andrea Tenenti said, adding it would be important to have a discussion with Israeli authorities “to understand what happened”.

Unifil has been operating in southern Lebanon, between the so-called “Blue Line” – the unofficial boundary separating Lebanon from Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights – and the Litani river, about 30km (20 miles) to the north.

Last week, Unifil refused to leave its positions near the Blue Line after being ordered to do so by the IDF.

There are about 10,000 Unifil military peacekeepers in Lebanon, from 50 contributing countries. There are also about 800 civilian staff.

Indonesia, where the injured peacekeepers are from, supplies more than 1,200 troops to Unifil, more than any other country.

The defence minister in Italy, which contributes more than 1,000 troops to Unifil, said the incidents were “intolerable” and must be “carefully and decisively avoided”.

Around 190 rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel by Hezbollah on Thursday, the IDF said.

Earlier on Thursday, the Lebanese ministry of public health said an Israeli air strike on the village of Karak in eastern Lebanon had killed four people, injuring 17.

Lebanon’s government says as many as 1.2 million people have fled their homes over the past year.

Hostilities in the region have escalated steadily since Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel on 8 October 2023, the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people. A further 251 were taken to the Gaza Strip as hostages.

Since 7 October, nearly 42,000 people have been killed during Israel’s offensive in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

The government is investigating 37 UK-linked businesses for potentially breaking Russian oil sanctions – but no fines have been handed out so far, the BBC can reveal.

Financial sanctions on Russia were introduced by the UK and other Western countries following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Conservative shadow foreign office minister Dame Harriett Baldwin said sanctions were designed to “shut down the sources of finance for Russia’s war machine” and “bring this illegal invasion to an end sooner”.

But critics have claimed they are ineffective after the latest figures showed the Russian economy was growing.

The Treasury said it would take action where appropriate, but pointed to the complexity of the cases as a reason they take considerable time.

The sanctions include a cap on the price of Russian oil, designed to ensure that oil can keep flowing without Russia making large profits.

The cap prohibits British businesses from facilitating the transportation of Russian oil sold above $60 a barrel.

Data obtained by the BBC using Freedom of Information laws shows the Treasury has opened investigations into 52 companies with a connection to the UK suspected of breaching the price cap since December 2022.

As of August, 37 of those investigations were live and 15 had concluded, but no fines had been handed out.

The identities of the businesses are unknown but it’s understood some are likely to be maritime insurance firms.

Dame Harriett told the BBC “there is probably more that could be done” by the government and the oil sector itself “because it does appear that UK importers are still bringing in oil that originated in Russia”.

The anti-corruption organisation Global Witness said it was “quite astonishing” that no fines have yet been handed out, and described the oil cap as “a sort of paper tiger” that is failing to crack down on rule breaking.

Louis Wilson, the head of fossil fuel investigations at Global Witness, called for “bold action” to be taken against companies breaching sanctions.

He said if the UK government “prevents British businesses from enabling Putin’s profiteering, then I think you’ll start to see others following that lead”.

Investigations into potential breaches of the oil cap and other financial sanctions are carried out by a Treasury unit called the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI).

OFSI received an extra £50m of funding in March to improve enforcement of the UK’s sanctions regime

But Mr Wilson said companies under investigation find it “pretty easy to come by” a document that gets them out of trouble.

He described the documents as “basically promises, voluntary bits of paper” and said they can be easily obtained even if the company was involved in transporting oil sold above the price cap.

“What’s likely is either these businesses will find the paperwork that they need to get through this process, or we’ll see the UK government drop these cases quietly,” he said.

He claimed the US were reluctant to make the Western sanctions regimes harder “because they’re scared that if they do enforce the rules it will stop the Russian oil trade and that will send oil prices higher”.

Dame Harriett said it was important that when OFSI “find deliberate wrongdoing they are exacting financial penalties”.

A spokesperson for the Treasury said it would take enforcement action “where appropriate” and it was “putting sanction breachers on notice”.

They added that the cap was reducing Russia’s tax revenues from oil, adding that data from the country’s own finance ministry showed a 30% drop last year compared to 2022.

The former chair of Parliament’s Treasury Select Committee launched an inquiry into the effectiveness of sanctions on Russia in February.

Dame Harriett said she “received evidence that the oil price cap is being evaded by refining Russian oil in refineries based in third countries and then the oil is being exported into the UK.”

Earlier this year the BBC reported on claims about how much oil this so-called “loophole” is allowing into the UK.

But parliamentary committees are disbanded once an election is called and the findings of the Treasury committee inquiry were never published.

It’s understood no decision has yet been made as to whether the new Treasury Select Committee will recommence the work.

OFSI issued its first Russia-related penalty last month, when it fined a concierge company £15,000 for having a sanctioned individual on its client list.

London-based firm Integral Concierge Services was found to have made or received 26 payments that involved a person whose assets have been frozen as part of the Russia sanctions.

Hurricane Milton left behind power outages, destruction and some fatalities after making landfall overnight Wednesday as a major category three hurricane.

The storm brought with it winds over 100mph and one-in-a-thousand-year rainfall. As much as 18 inches fell in some parts of Florida’s west coast, with heavy downpours across the state and in nearby Cuba.

As it travelled inland across the Florida peninsula, Milton maintained category one strength with sustained winds up to 90mph. It lost some power once over land after its energy was fueled by the warm Gulf of Mexico waters.

Storm surges and tornadoes led to extensive flooding, with more expected in the coming days. Several people have been killed, with tornadoes in Lucie County claiming four lives before Milton made landfall.

Officials across Florida ordered evacuations as the storm approached, and more than three million homes and businesses reportedly lost power overnight Wednesday.

As residents and responders continue rescue operations and surveying damage, we look at the impact of Hurricane Milton in pictures.

An abrupt silence swamped the courtroom in Avignon as three large television screens, positioned high on three walls, flickered back to life. One could sense people bracing themselves.

In a bleak trial about extraordinary allegations of drugs and rape, it was time to show more of Dominique Pelicot’s carefully curated home videos.

Those videos, filmed by Pelicot and kept on a hard drive that he labelled “abuse”, document assaults on his ex-wife, Gisèle, over the course of a decade.

Fifty men are accused of raping her after she was drugged and left unconscious in the couple’s bed by her husband.

Now 72, Gisèle Pelicot has waived her anonymity so the full details of what she was subjected to can be revealed to the French public. Her lawyers fought to have videos of the crimes screened in court.

Although the judge had earlier said people “of a sensitive disposition” would be able to leave, one of Gisèle Pelicot’s legal team said many had decided to “look the rape straight in the eye”.

Many of the men recruited by her ex-husband on the internet insist they did not believe what they were doing was rape.

Dominique Pelicot sat behind a glass panel, slumped in his chair. His grey hair neatly cut, his left hand raised to block his view of the screen.

Gisèle Pelicot sat on the opposite side of the court, her head against the wall, her eyes occasionally closed. A blank, unreadable expression on her face.

On the screen, in near silence, a short, pale man wearing only blue underpants and black socks, could be seen approaching a bed.

The camera wobbled as it followed him. Behind the man, a woman lay on her left side, almost naked, on a crumpled white sheet. And then, without edits, without any blurring, the sex acts began.

At times, later in the video, you could clearly hear the woman snoring.

In court, Dominique Pelicot appeared to place both hands over his ears. For years he had laced his wife’s food and drink with an anti-anxiety drug, which made her unconscious and seriously affected her health.

This and other videos, shown in court and on Gisèle Pelicot’s insistence to the public watching from an overflow room near by, lie at the heart of the prosecution’s case.

Prosecutors argue that all 50 men who accepted online invitations from Pelicot to visit the family home in the village of Mazan, near Avignon, must have known his wife was unconscious.

Therefore, they must have realised that she was not a consenting partner in some kind of sex game in which she merely pretended to be asleep. Therefore, they must have intended to rape her.

But a string of defence lawyers and their clients have now sought to challenge that.

The man visible on screen in this particular video was a 43-year-old carpenter, named in court as Vincent C.

He stood now in front of the judges in a separate glass-walled area at the rear of the courtroom, with his head bowed down, looking away from the screen.

“Do you recognise the facts of aggravated rape that you are accused of?” asked lead judge Roger Arata – an affable figure with a large white moustache.

“No,” Vincent C replied.

His explanation, delivered haltingly, amounted to a hazy assumption that, since Dominique Pelicot had told him his wife was a consenting partner in a sex game, he had not given the matter any more thought.

At this point Gisèle Pelicot left the courtroom for a few minutes, saying “I can’t bear that man”.

Vincent C acknowledged the experience was “weird,” and unlike anything he had encountered with other couples. And yet, he went on, “I didn’t say to myself: this isn’t going well… I don’t think [about much else] in those moments.”

However, having spoken to his mother and to lawyers, and watching the trial unfold, Vincent C said he had come to understand more about French law, the meaning of rape and the gravity of his actions.

“Now that I am being told how the events unfolded, yes, the acts I committed would amount to rape.”

“Are you aware that Gisèle Pelicot was a victim of your acts?” asked the judge.

“Yes.”

Pelicot has himself admitted all the charges against him.

Outside the courtroom, a lawyer representing another of the accused men distinguished between Pelicot and the others.

“Today it’s clear that Dominique Pelicot’s position is to try to dilute his responsibility by dragging down 50 other men. [Gisèle] is the victim. The question is whether the others were complicit in it or were tricked into participating,” said Paul-Roger Gontard.

While some of the accused have admitted to rape, others have claimed to have spoken or interacted with Gisèle Pelicot in the bedroom.

“So, there are grey zones in this trial,” Mr Gontard continued, pointing to the fact that the videos themselves had already been edited by Pelicot himself, meaning that evidence potentially helpful for the defence could have been cut out.

“He selected what he wanted to keep. He selected the shots. But don’t let that fool you. Everyone says he’s very manipulative.

“Many [of the accused] thought it was a libertine project with the couple, only to discover it was actually a sinister and criminal scheme devised by the husband.

“The question today is when did they realise something was wrong? This realisation varies among [the accused]. The question often arises – why didn’t they leave? It’s not that simple to leave at that moment when faced with a clearly dominant personality in a situation where they are naked and recorded by a camera,” the lawyer added.

Ten minutes’ drive from the courthouse, in a small house in a suburb of Avignon, another of the accused, who has already testified in the trial, agreed to speak to the BBC on condition of anonymity. The man, a nurse by profession, portrayed himself as a victim of Dominique Pelicot.

“I was terrified… I was reduced to the state of an instrument. He was the one who told me: ‘do this.’ I said to myself, this man is not normal, he is a psychopath. It is an ambush, a trap. He is going to kill me in this house,” said the accused man.

He also claimed that Gisèle Pelicot had “reacted to simple caresses… she scratches herself with a co-ordinated movement”, which he said led him to believe that she was conscious and merely pretending to sleep.

When I challenged him, suggesting he was simply seeking to present himself as a victim to avoid culpability, he insisted that was not the case.

He lashed out, repeatedly, at the way the trial was being conducted, at alleged “pseudo-feminists”, and the “hysteria” the media had generated.

Speaking forcefully, but occasionally sobbing, he maintained he was not a rapist. However, he acknowledged that “I will never be considered innocent in this case. I will always carry my guilt with me. I know that.”

The trial in Avignon is set to continue for many more weeks, with a verdict due shortly before Christmas.

Only half of the accused have so far been called to testify, but already this case has revealed, in the grimiest detail, the horrors to which Gisèle Pelicot was subjected, and her extraordinary courage in declining her right to privacy.

The case has also highlighted longstanding debates about French laws and attitudes surrounding rape, and the extent to which a woman’s consent is, or should be considered, a factor in court.

Many of the men have admitted wrongdoing and, like Vincent C, even apologised to Gisèle Pelicot in the courtroom, but they have also insisted that since they didn’t intend to rape, they should not be found guilty of it.

South Korean pop star Hanni has made a surprise announcement, saying she will testify to the country’s National Assembly in a hearing about bullying in the music industry.

The singer, who is part of the girl group NewJeans, said she had made the decision without telling her managers or her record label, Ador.

“I believe going forward is the right thing to do, no matter how much I think about it,” she wrote to fans on social media.

It comes after she and the other four members of her band raised concerns about their treatment by Ador during an impromptu YouTube livestream on 11 September.

The group were the eighth biggest-selling act in the world last year, scoring international hits with feathery, throwback songs like SuperShy and OMG.

However, their mentor and record label chief executive, Min Hee-Jin, was removed earlier this year over allegations that she had planned a hostile takeover that would make NewJeans and Ador independent of their parent label, Hybe. Min has denied the accusations against her.

In the band’s YouTube video, which has since been deleted, they demanded Min’s reinstatement; and made claims of workplace harassment.

Hanni said that when she greeted the members of another band at their record label offices, their manager had instructed them to “ignore her”.

The 20-year-old reported the incident to Ador’s new chief executive, Kim Joo-Young – but said her concerns had been brushed off.

“She told me it was too late and that I had no evidence. Seeing her ignoring the issue made me feel like there was no one to protect us,” Hanni alleged during the livestream.

The accusation sparked a war of words between fans of NewJeans and the girl group Illit – who were rumoured to be the antagonists.

As the row escalated, the agency managing Illit, Belift Lab, was forced to issue a denial.

“Illit’s managers never instructed anyone to ‘ignore’ NewJeans members, and the Illit members have always greeted NewJeans when passing by,” the agency said.

Belift said they had reviewed a video that showed Illit’s members bowing to Hanni on the day of the incident – but that footage of their subsequent interactions was not available.

The agency also denied claims from the parents of NewJeans members that this later footage had been deleted on purpose.

The row eventually caught the attention of South Korea’s Environment and Labour Committee, who have summoned both Hanni and Kim Joo-Young to testify to an audit on workplace harassment later this month.

In her statement, Hanni told fans: “I’ve made my decision. I’m going to go the National Assembly. A parliamentary inspection!

“I’m going alone. They still don’t know… neither my managers nor the company.”

The singer thanked fans for their support, and reassured them that they don’t “need to worry”.

“I’m doing this for myself and for the members [of NewJeans], and also for the Bunnies [fans],” she added.

“No, it’s not difficult. I want to do this.”

Ratan Tata, the philanthropist and former chairman of Tata Group who has died aged 86, played an instrumental role in globalising and modernising one of India’s oldest business houses.

His ability to take bold, audacious business risks informed a high-profile acquisition strategy that kept the salt-to-steel conglomerate founded 155 years ago by his forefathers relevant after India liberalised its economy in the 1990s.

At the turn of the millennium, Tata executed the biggest cross-border acquisition in Indian corporate history – buying Tetley Tea, the world’s second largest producer of teabags. The iconic British brand was three times the size of the small Tata group company that had bought it.

In subsequent years, his ambitions grew only bigger, as his group swallowed up major British industrial giants like the steelmaker Corus and the luxury car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover.

While the acquisitions didn’t always pay off – Corus was bought at very expensive valuations just before the global financial crisis of 2007, and remained a drag on Tata Steel’s performance for years – they were big power moves.

They also had a great symbolic effect, says Mircea Raianu, historian and author of Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism. He adds that they “represented ‘the empire striking back’ as a business from a former colony took over the motherland’s prize assets, reversing the sneering attitude with which British industrialists looked upon the Tata Group a century earlier”.

The Tata Group’s outlook had been “outward-oriented” from the very beginning, according to Andrea Goldstein, an economist who published a study in 2008 on the internationalisation of Indian companies, with a particular focus on Tata.

As early as in the 1950s, Tata companies operated with foreign partners.

But Ratan Tata was keen to “internationalise in giant strides, not in token, incremental steps”, Ms Goldstein pointed out.

His unconventional education in architecture and a ring side view of his family group companies may have played a part in the way he thought about expansion, says Mr Raianu. But it was the “structural transformation of the group” he steered, that allowed him to execute his vision for a global footprint.

Tata had to fight an exceptional corporate battle at Bombay House, the group headquarters, when he took over as the chairman of Tata Sons in 1991 – an appointment that coincided with India’s decision to open up its economy.

He began centralising increasingly decentralised, domestic-focused operations by showing the door to a string of ‘satraps’ (a Persian term meaning an imperial governor) at Tata Steel, Tata Motors and the Taj Group of Hotels who ran operations with little corporate oversight from the holding company.

Doing this allowed him not only to surround himself with people who could help him execute his global vision, but also prevent the Tata Group – protected thus far from foreign competition – from fading into irrelevance as India opened up.

At both Tata Sons, the holding company, as well as individual groups within it, he appointed foreigners, non-resident Indians and executives with contacts and networks across the world in the management team.

He also set up the Group Corporate Centre (GCC) to provide strategic direction to group companies. It provided “M&A [mergers and acquisitions] advisory support, helped the group companies to mobilise capital and assessed whether the target company would fit into the Tata’s values”, researchers at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore wrote in a 2016 paper.

The GCC also helped Tata Motors raise money for high-profile buyouts like Jaguar Land Rover which dramatically changed the global perception of a company that was essentially a tractor manufacturer.

“The JLR takeover was widely seen as ‘revenge’ on Ford, which had derisively refused to acquire Tata Motors in the early 90s and then was beaten to the punch on the deal by Tata Motors. Taken together, these acquisitions suggested that Indian corporates had ‘arrived’ on the global stage just as growth rates were picking up and the liberalising reforms bearing fruit,” says Mr Raianu.

Today, the $128bn group operates across 100 countries with a substantial portion of its total revenues coming from outside India.

While the Tata Group made significant strides overseas in the early 2000s, domestically the failure of the Tata Nano – launched and marketed as the world’s cheapest car – was a setback for Tata.

This was his most ambitious project, but he had clearly misread India’s consumer market this time.

Brand experts say an aspirational India didn’t want to associate with the cheap car tag. And Tata himself eventually admitted that the “poor man’s car” tag was a “stigma” that needed to be undone.

He believed there could be a resurrection of his product, but the Tata Nano was eventually discontinued after sales plummeted year on year.

Succession at the Tata Group also became a thorny issue.

Mr Tata remained far too involved in running the conglomerate after his retirement in 2012, through the “backdoor” of the Tata Trust which owns two-thirds of the stock holding of Tata Sons, the holding company, say experts.

“Without assigning Ratan Tata blame for it, his involvement in the succession dispute with [Cyrus] Mistry undoubtedly tarnished the image of the group,” says Mr Rainu.

Mistry, who died in a car crash in 2022 was ousted as Tata chairman in 2016 following a boardroom coup that sparked a long-running legal battle which the Tatas eventually won.

In spite of the many wrong turns, Tata retired in 2012, leaving the vast empire he inherited in a much stronger position both domestically and globally.

Along with big-ticket acquisitions, his bid to modernise the group with a sharp focus on IT has served the group well over the years.

When many of his big bets went sour, one high-performing firm, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), along with JLR carried the “dead weight of other ailing companies”, Mr Raianu says.

TCS is today India’s largest IT services company and the cash cow of the Tata Group, contributing to three-quarters of its revenue.

In 2022, the Tata Group also brought back India’s flagship carrier Air India into its fold approximately 69 years after the government took control of the airline. This was a dream come true for Ratan Tata, a trained pilot himself, but also a bold bet given how capital intensive it is to run an airline.

But the Tatas seem to be in a stronger position than ever before to take big bold bets on everything from airlines to semiconductor manufacturing.

India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi appears to have clearly adopted an industrial policy of creating “national champions” whereby a few large conglomerates are built up and promoted in order to achieve rapid economic outcomes that extend across priority sectors.

Along with newer industrial groups like Adani, the decks are clearly stacked in favour of the Tata Group to benefit from this.