Amid acrid smoke and cries from residents, rescue workers were searching Friday morning for signs of anyone left trapped in the rubble from two Israeli air strikes that hit central Beirut overnight.

According to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, 22 people died and 117 were wounded, making these the deadliest strikes in central Beirut of the recent escalation.

At the site of the heaviest of the two, in the Shia neighbourhood of Basta, the head of the Civil Defence rescue team Youssef Al-Mallah told the BBC that five people were still unaccounted for.

The Civil Defence has appealed for family members of the missing to come forward with any information on their whereabouts, Al-Mallah said.

Unconfirmed reports Friday said that Wafiq Safa, the head of Hezbollah’s liaison and coordination unit, was the target of one of the strikes but managed to survive.

Israeli authorities have not commented. They issued no warnings ahead of the strikes, as they have in some instances.

Both the strikes on Beirut hit residential buildings in densely packed neighbourhoods. The missile that hit Basta fell close to the site of an earlier strike that killed nine people last week. It destroyed a four-storey building completely and severely damaged or destroyed at least three adjacent buildings.

The other strike, on the mostly Shia neighbourhood of Nweiri, hit the third floor of an eight-storey building, ejecting large pieces of rubble into the street and destroying cars and shopfronts below.

The timing of the strikes – at about 20:00 local time, 18:00 BST – meant that many residents of the neighbourhoods were at home or on the street in the vicinity.

Hassan Jaafar, a 22-year-old security guard, was at home with friends just 50m from the Basta strike. He told the BBC they heard a “roar that seemed to grow closer with every second”.

“The shockwave knocked us off our feet, sending us backwards as dust and debris filled the air,” he said. “For a moment, everything vanished in a cloud of ash.”

Jaafar said he and his friends were bruised and cut in the strike by flying debris and glass. “In that moment, it felt like the war had expanded into our lives,” he said.

On the massive pile of rubble left by the strike on Friday morning, distraught residents looked on at their destroyed apartments and pleaded with members of the Civil Defence team to help them retrieve surviving possessions.

One group of women was searching for a missing relative – a mother of young children who was last seen on a stretcher at the site. The Civil Defence team told the group they needed to check at every hospital in person.

“If she left here on a gurney she will be at a hospital somewhere,” a rescue worker said.

Ibtisam Mazloum, 42, was in her building nearby when the strike hit. “If they want to fight they should fight at the border,” she said, angily. “The civilians in Beirut are not part of this.”

At the site of the Nweiri strike, Musa Araf, who works for the Civil Defence, described being in his apartment on the sixth floor of the target building when the missile hit.

“I didn’t panic because of my job, I am used to it,” he said. “But my children were screaming and clinging on to me. One of my grandchildren was cut by flying glass.”

This is the third time Israel has launched air strikes on Beirut outside of the city’s southern suburb of Dahieh, where the Iran-backed armed group Hezbollah has a strong presence.

The previous strikes on central Beirut targeted members of Hezbollah and the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, according to the IDF. One hit a health clinic which the IDF described as Hezbollah-affiliated and killed nine people.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch called on Friday for an inquiry into Israeli attacks on UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon. Reports said that an observation post belonging to the United Nations peacekeeping mission (Unifil) had been fired at by Israeli forces.

The incident would mark the fourth time in recent days that Israeli troops have fired at Unifil bases. Yesterday, two Indonesian peacekeepers were injured after an Israeli tank fired at a watchtower at the force’s headquarters in Ras al-Naqoura.

Hezbollah said on Friday it had launched an attack on an Israeli military base in the northern city of Haifa using explosive-laden drones.

The Iran-backed group said the attack was a retaliation for Israeli strikes on Beirut.

Gunmen have killed at least 20 people at a coal mine in Balochistan province in southwestern Pakistan, according to local police.

The attackers stormed the workers’ accommodation at the Junaid Coal Company mines in the province’s Duki district in the early hours of Friday morning, rounded the men up and opened fire.

A hospital in Duki has received 20 bodies and is treating six injured people, reported Reuters.

The workers were attacked with heavy weapons, including rocket launchers and grenades, police said, while one survivor described seeing a drone overhead.

Subcontractor Hafeezullah told the BBC he spotted the drone and its red light as he and a number of others hid in the bathroom.

“When the attackers got closer they shouted ‘we told you to stop work here, why didn’t you?’,” he told the BBC. He said the attackers spoke in Pashto. “Then they opened fire.”

Hafeezullah estimates the attack, which he says started just after midnight, lasted for about an hour and a half, during which time machinery was set alight. He also heard loud explosions, which he thinks were grenades exploding.

Asim Shafi, police chief in Duki district, confirmed to news agency AFP both hand grenades and rocket launchers were used in the attack, which is believed to have been carried out by as many as 40 people who then disappeared “into the night”.

Police confirmed that four of the victims were Afghans, while the rest of the men were from Pashto-speaking areas of Balochistan.

Hafeezullah says he lost several friends in the attack.

“When I left, there were people lying on the ground,” he said.

No group has claimed responsibility for the killings so far. In the past, the separatist Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) has carried out several deadly attacks in the province.

Mine owner Khairullah Nasar told news agency Reuters they had been getting “threats from the militants for some time, but there was no information about the attack”.

Friday’s attack is the latest to be carried out in recent days, and comes just ahead of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a major security summit being hosted in the Pakistani capital Islamabad next week.

On Monday, a BLA militant killed two Chinese nationals and injured at least 10 people in a suicide attack near Karachi airport.

The group, which pushes for an independent Balochistan, also committed multiple attacks in August that killed more than 50 people. Pakistani authorities responded by killing 21 insurgents in the province.

The latest attack on the miners drew condemnation from Balochistan’s chief minister Sarfraz Bugti, who said the attackers had an agenda to destabilise Pakistan.

“The terrorists have once again targeted poor labourers… the killing of these innocent laborers will be avenged,” he said in a statement.

Balochistan is home to several separatist groups, who accuse the central government of exploiting the resource-rich province.

The militants often target security forces, as well as people who have come to work at the province’s many mining and infrastructure projects.

As well as enhancing security measures, Pakistani authorities will reportedly be curbing movements of Chinese citizens during the summit, due to the security risk from militant groups targeting them.

A day after the death of India’s most globally-recognised tycoon Ratan Tata, his half-brother Noel Tata has been named as the new chairperson of Tata Trusts, the group has announced.

Tata Trusts is the company’s philanthropic arm which holds a majority stake of 66% in Tata Sons – one of India’s largest business groups, with annual revenues in excess of $100bn (£76.5bn).

Noel Tata, 67, is the son of Naval Tata, who was also Ratan’s father, and Simone Tata.

He is on the boards of many Tata companies, including Tata Trusts, and will now step up to lead its charities.

He is the chairman of Tata International Limited, Voltas and Tata Investment Corporation and the vice-chairman at Tata Steel and Titan Company Limited.

He also heads Tata’s massive apparel retail company, Trent Limited, which has seen tremendous growth since he took its leadership in 2014.

The company operates hugely successful fashion and lifestyle retail formats such as Westside, Zudio and Utsa.

From 2010 to 2021, Noel Tata ran the group’s global trading and distribution firm – Tata International – whose revenue rose from $500m to over $3bn during this time.

On Friday, Tata Trusts in a release said it had unanimously elected Noel Tata as its chairman.

Noel Tata said he was “deeply honoured and humbled” by the opportunity and that he looked forward to carrying forward the legacy of his brother.

“On this solemn occasion, we rededicate ourselves to carrying on our developmental and philanthropic initiatives and continuing to play our part in nation building,” he said, according to the release.

Noel Tata’s three children are also trustees on the boards of some charities linked to the family.

His son Neville is head of Star Bazaar, the group’s chain of retail supermarkets. His daughter Leah Tata is in charge of the Gateway brand under its The Indian Hotels Company. His other daughter, Maya Tata, works at Tata Digital.

Ratan Tata was unmarried, had no children and had not publicly named a successor and his death had sparked widespread interest in who would take over the Tata Trusts as his successor.

In 2012, he stepped down as the chairman of Tata Sons, handing over the reins to Cyrus Mistry. In 2016, Mistry was unexpectedly removed and Tata returned as interim chairman for a couple of years. In 2017, N Chandrasekaran was named chairman, a post he still holds.

Ratan Tata then became chairman emeritus of the group, a title he held until his death. He also remained chairman of the philanthropic arm until the end.

It was the call the family of a young British climber who went missing on Everest 100 years ago had given up hope of ever getting.

Last month, a team of climbers filming a National Geographic documentary stumbled on a preserved boot, revealed by melting ice on a glacier.

This boot was believed to belong to Andrew Comyn “Sandy” Irvine, who disappeared while attempting to climb Everest in June 1924 with his partner George Mallory.

What’s more, it could potentially help solve one of mountaineering’s biggest mysteries: whether or not the pair succeeded in becoming the first people to summit Everest, 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top.

Well-known adventurer Jimmy Chin, who led the team for National Geographic, hailed the discovery of the boot – with a foot inside it – as a “monumental and emotional moment”.

But for Irvine’s great-niece Julie Summers it was simply “extraordinary”.

“I just froze…. We had all given up any hope any trace of him would be found,” she told the BBC.

A number of people have searched for Irvine’s body over the years, partly because the 22-year-old is said to have been carrying a camera with an undeveloped film inside, potentially with a photograph of the pair at the summit.

Could the discovery of the boot be the first step to finding his body – and the camera?

The family have now given a DNA sample to help confirm the foot is indeed Irvine – but the filmmaking team is fairly confident it belongs to the mountaineer, due to the sock found inside the boot being embroidered with the words “A.C. Irvine”.

“I mean, dude… there’s a label on it,” Chin, who is known for making Oscar-winning climbing documentary Free Solo alongside his wife, was quoted as saying in a National Geographic report.

The team made the discovery as they descended the Central Rongbuk Glacier by the north face of Everest in September.

Along the way, they found an oxygen bottle marked with the date 1933. An Everest expedition that year had found an item belonging to Irvine.

Energised by this possible sign that Irvine’s body could be nearby, the team searched the glacier for several days, before one of them saw the boot emerging from melting ice.

It was a fortuitous find – they estimated the ice had only melted a week before their discovery.

The foot has since been removed from the mountain because of concerns that ravens were disturbing it, according to reports, and passed to the Chinese mountaineering authorities who govern the north face of Everest.

For Irvine’s descendants, the discovery has been emotional – especially in this, the centenary year of his disappearance.

Summers had grown up hearing stories of her grandmother’s adventurous, Oxford-educated younger brother, who they knew as “Uncle Sandy”.

“My grandmother had a photo of him by her bed until the day she died,” she recalled. “She said he was a better man than anyone would ever be.”

Birkenhead-born Irvine was just 22 when he disappeared, the youngest member of an expedition that has intrigued the mountaineering world for a century.

He and Mallory were last seen alive on 8 June 1924 as they set off for the peak.

Mallory’s body would not be found until 1999 by an American climber. In recent decades, the search for the climbers’ remains has been mired in controversy amid suspicions that the bodies were moved.

Summers has always dismissed those stories and suspicions, revealing her feeling of “relief” following the Chin’s call that “he was still there on the mountain”.

But what if it could now be proved that Irvine and Mallory reached the summit, becoming the first to do so – an idea which, Summers acknowledged, would “turn mountaineering history onto its head”?

“It would be nice – we would all feel very proud,” she said. “But the family has always maintained the mystery, and the story of how far they got and how brave they were, was really what it was about.”

And anyway, she said, “the only way we will ever know is if we find a picture in the camera he was believed to be carrying”.

The search, she suspects, will now continue for that camera. “I think it will be irresistible,” she said.

Whether it will be found remains to be seen.

Chin, meanwhile, is hoping that the boot’s discovery – “a monumental and emotional moment for us and our entire team on the ground” – will “finally bring peace of mind to his relatives and the climbing world at large”.

For Summers, it is a chance to remind the world about a young man “who took life and lived it”, embracing every opportunity – and above all, was “having fun”.

But perhaps surprisingly, she and her cousins are grateful the older generation were not here for this discovery.

“For them, Everest is his grave,” she explained.

Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors, has won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.

Known as hibakusha, the survivors of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been recognised by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

Nobel Committee Chair Joergen Watne Frydnes said the group had “contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear taboo”.

Mr Frydnes warned the “nuclear taboo” was now “under pressure” – and praised the group’s use of witness testimony to ensure nuclear weapons must never be used again.

Founded in 1956, the organisation sends survivors around the world to share their testimonies of the “atrocious damage” and suffering caused by the use of nuclear weapons, according to its website.

Their work began almost a decade after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On 6 August 1945, a US bomber dropped the uranium bomb above the city of Hiroshima, killing around 140,000 people.

Three days later a second nuclear weapon was dropped on Nagasaki. Japan’s surrender, announced by Emperor Hirohito shortly afterwards, ended World War Two.

Speaking to reporters in Japan, a tearful Toshiyuki Mimaki, the co-head of the group, said: “Never did I dream this could happen,” the AFP news agency quotes him as saying.

Mr Mimaki criticised the idea that nuclear weapons bring peace. “It has been said that because of nuclear weapons, the world maintains peace. But nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists,” Mr Mimaki said, according to reports by AFP.

In a BBC interview last year, he said despite only being three years old at the time the nuclear bomb hit Hiroshima – he could still remember dazed and burnt survivors fleeing past his home.

The prize – which consist of a diploma, a gold medal and a sum of $1m (£765,800) – will be presented at a ceremonies in Oslo in December, marking the anniversary of the death of the scientist and prize creator Alfred Nobel.

The group has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize “many times” in the past, including in 2005 when it received a special mention by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, its website says.

The decision to recognise Nihon Hidankyo means the Nobel committee has steered away from more controversial nominees for the peace prize.

There had been widespread speculation the United Nations agency supporting Palestinians – UNRWA – was being considered for the prize.

Although the organisation is the main provider of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza, nine of its members were fired for alleged involvement in the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year.

More than 12,000 people had signed a petition urging the committee not to award UNRWA the prize.

There were equal concerns about the nomination of the International Court of Justice.

The UN’s main judicial organ is currently considering allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and has already issued a statement urging the Israeli authorities to refrain from genocidal acts.

But while giving the prize to Nihon Hidankyo may be a non-controversial choice, it could also focus global attention on the threat of nuclear conflict which overshadows the fighting in both Ukraine and the Middle East.

Throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its leaders have repeatedly hinted that they may be ready to use tactical nuclear weapons if western allies increase their support for Ukraine in a way Russia considers unacceptable.

These threats have succeeded in restraining western support for fear of escalation.

In the Middle East, the subtext for much of Israel’s strategy is the fear that Iran is seeking nuclear capability, something Tehran denies.

The Nobel committee’s decision may renew a debate about the use of nuclear weapons at a time when some countries look enviously at their deterring power.

This year’s peace prize had 286 nominations, a number comprising 197 individuals and 89 organisations.

Nominations can be made by people in positions of significant authority, including members of national assemblies, governments and international courts of law.

Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi won the prize in 2023, when she was honoured for her work fighting the oppression of women in Iran.

Ms Mohammadi is currently being held in Evin prison in Tehran, having already spent 12 years in jail serving multiple sentences related to her activism.

The head of Ukraine’s Odesa region has said its three ports are “not possible” to protect fully because they span such a large area and Russia has intensified its missile attacks.

He was speaking to the BBC after a 16-year-old girl, two women and a man were killed in a Russian strike on a two-floor building to the north-west of Odesa city.

It was the fourth such attack on the Black Sea coastal region in five days, and regional head Oleh Kiper said “probably a ballistic missile was targeting an infrastructure facility, but it hit nearby instead – into this place.”

Russia has not commented on its wave of missile strikes. A further nine people were killed in an attack on a cargo ship early on Thursday.

There have been ballistic missile strikes on Odesa’s ports before. But never so many, in quick succession.

Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said Russia had carried out 60 such attacks in just three months, damaging or destroying almost 300 port facilities. He said 79 people had been killed or wounded and 22 civilian vessels hit.

Oleh Kiper told the BBC that Odesa’s current air defences were unable to cover all three ports in Odesa region as they spanned over about 80km (50 miles): “So the main focus is on the city of Odesa, where over a million people live. The rest of the ports and towns remain in a difficult situation.”

Other Ukrainian ports – in the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Mykolayiv regions – are no longer operating, making the facilities in Odesa more important than ever to Ukrainian exports.

He suggested Russia was attacking civilian vessels now to harm Ukraine’s economy and to scare the world with what it could do.

“They hit [the ships in Odesa] so that the insurance companies and the ship owners refuse to enter our ports, into the combat zone, Kiper said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general has said criminal proceedings have begun into the death in Russian detention of a prominent Ukrainian journalist who chronicled life under occupation in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Viktoriia Roshchyna had been briefly detained in the occupied eastern city of Berdyansk in 2022 but she disappeared in the occupied east in August 2023 and it was not until a few months ago that Russian authorities confirmed she was being held.

Ukrainian intelligence officials said she was supposed to have been included in a prisoner exchange and Russian reports said she died on 19 September while being moved to a detention centre in Moscow.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Roshchyna’s death had come as a heavy blow. “For all of us in Ukraine, the issue of captured and deported people remains incredibly painful. These are adults and children, many civilians who are now held in prisons and camps in Russia,” he wrote on X.

Zelensky met Pope Francis at the Vatican on Friday before heading to Berlin for talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

He is promoting a “victory plan” to end the war and told a briefing in Berlin he would like to see the war end “no later than next year, 2025,” adding that it was very important that aid to Kyiv did not decrease in the coming year.

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni had earlier promised Zelensky that support for Kyiv would last “for as long as needed”.

Zelensky denied he had been discussing terms for a ceasefire. “The key is to strengthen Ukraine’s positions and relations with our closest partners,” he stressed.

Russian forces continue to make gains in eastern Ukraine, and on Friday authorities in the strategically important hilltop city of Toretsk said only 40-50% of it remained under Ukrainian control.

Ukrainian troops are outgunned and outnumbered and are also under pressure in the Pokrovsk. The two cities are seen as vital for maintaining the army’s supply lines.

Earlier this week Ukraine’s military targeted a big oil terminal on the east coast of Russian-occupied Crimea.

Satellite images show the offshore facility at Feodosia is still burning five days after the attack. Russian-installed official Igor Tkachenko said that even though the fire was not out, it was fully under control.

The Ukrainian military said the terminal was the biggest in Crimea and helped supply Russia’s occupying forces.

More than 1,000 residents have had to leave their homes because of the strike, which Kyiv says is in retaliation for Russian attacks that have destroyed much of its power infrastructure.

Forty new allegations from 40 different people that include sexual assault and rape against former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed have been made to the Metropolitan Police.

The new allegations cover a period between 1979 and 2013.

It comes after a BBC documentary and podcast heard testimony from former Harrods employees who said the billionaire sexually assaulted or raped them.

The force had urged anyone who had not previously come forward with allegations to do so and said it would review historical complaints.

Since the documentary first aired, a further 65 women have contacted the BBC saying they were abused by Mohamed Al Fayed, with allegations stretching beyond Harrods and as far back as 1977.

Al Fayed, who died aged 94 in 2023, took over the luxury department store in 1985 and sold it in 2010.

The Metropolitan Police said the 40 new allegations are in addition to the 21 allegations they were aware of prior to the broadcast of the BBC documentary.

Whilst there is no prospect of conviction against Al Fayed, the Metropolitan Police said it continues to explore whether any other individuals could be pursued for any criminal offences.

Cdr Stephen Clayman said: “Since the broadcast of the documentary and our recent appeal, detectives have received numerous pieces of information, predominantly relating to the activities of Mohamed Al Fayed but some relating to the actions of others.”

The force is continuing to appeal to anyone who has been a victim of Al Fayed or has information relating to those who facilitated his offending.

It added a full review of previous allegations continues and it has identified 21 separate allegations reported to the force about Al Fayed prior to the BBC broadcast.

The review will ensure there are no new lines of enquiry based on information that has emerged and will liaise with the Directorate of Professional Standards if needed.

Last month the BBC heard testimony from more than 20 female ex-Harrods employees who accuse the billionaire of sexual assault and rape.

The documentary and podcast – Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods – gathered evidence that, during Al Fayed’s ownership, Harrods not only failed to intervene, but helped cover up abuse allegations.

Harrods’ current owners said they were “utterly appalled” by the allegations and that his victims had been failed – for which the store sincerely apologised.

The department store is also carrying out an independent review which began in 2023.

Since the broadcast, dozens of women have contacted the BBC to say they were abused by Al Fayed.

On Thursday, the BBC reported 65 women contacted the broadcaster to say there were abused by Al Fayed, with allegations stretching beyond Harrods and as far back as 1977.

It suggests he used a broader range of abuse tactics and also targeted women employed outside his businesses.

Several of the new 65 women interviewed allege they were recruited by Al Fayed under false pretences into roles on the billionaire’s domestic staff and were then sexually exploited by him – including at his mansion in Oxted.

The police watchdog, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), has told the BBC it has asked the Metropolitan Police whether anything needs to be referred to it for investigation and internal force review is ongoing.

An IOPC spokesperson said: “Following the TV documentary on Mohamed Al-Fayed, we contacted the Metropolitan Police Service to see whether it had received any related complaints or identified any conduct issues which would require a referral to the IOPC.”

The Met Police is conducting a review, the spokesperson added, and the watchdog has not yet had any referrals about the force’s handling of the allegations.

Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods

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

Watch Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods on BBC iPlayer now.

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

One person has died and 23 others have been rescued after a lift malfunctioned at a disused Colorado gold mine.

Two groups of 12 people were touring Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine in Cripple Creek, a privately owned tourist attraction, when the failure occurred on Thursday, leaving one group stuck below ground for six hours.

In the first group, one person died while the remaining 11 tourists, including two children, were rescued from the mine, four of them with minor injuries.

The second group of 12 were stranded in a tunnel at the bottom of the mine but all were returned to safety later in the day.

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.

Breakdancers have been urged to avoid headspinning after a dancer who developed a cone-shaped lump on his head due to “years of extensive headspinning practice” had to have it surgically removed.

The benign tumour, dubbed a “breakdance bulge”, was more than an inch thick, according to a report published by the British Medical Journal.

The condition is thought to be caused by repeated friction between the scalp and the floor, combined with pressure from the dancer’s body.

The unnamed dancer from Denmark trained five times a week – including up to seven minutes of headspinning – and had been wearing a hat to hide the bulge.

He had continued spinning on his head despite developing the “protuberance” over 19 years of breakdancing.

Over the last five years, it had grown bigger and more painful.

When he sought help in his thirties, medics at Copenhagen University Hospital had to rule out diseases including cancer before diagnosing a “headspin hole”.

The condition typically begins with hair loss but can develop into a significant lump on the head.

One of the authors of the paper, published in the journal BMJ Case Reports on Thursday, told the PA news agency: “This report does not advocate against headspinning entirely.”

“However, breakdancers who notice the early development of a breakdance bulge should consider reducing or avoiding headspins, as continuing may lead to further enlargement of the bulge”, said Dr Christian Baastrup Sondergaard.

He added: “Although this is a rare condition unique to breakdancers, the successful surgical treatment in this case demonstrates that it is a viable option for symptom relief.”

He added that only one prior case had been reported and encouraged further study of breakdancing injuries.

The dancer said: “It is now possible for me to go out in public without a cap… which is, of course, a very nice feeling.”

He added that he had received “a lot of positive feedback”, including that his head “looks completely normal”.

The report notes that breakdancing involves “a range of complex and physically demanding techniques” that render dancers “particularly prone to injuries”.

A student got more than she bargained for when she opened a clothing parcel from fast-fashion firm Shein to discover a live scorpion.

“I thought it was a toy – and then it moved,” Sofia Alonso-Mossinger said, adding it had been “pretty scary”.

With the help of her flatmates at the University of Bristol, the venomous invader was moved into a tub before being collected by an expert.

China-based Shein said it had conducted an internal investigation and had confirmed that “all standard operating processes have been adhered to”.

The electrical and electronic engineering student said: “I unzipped the outer packaging and saw something move and was like, what’s this?”

After realising it was a scorpion, Ms Alonso-Mossinger, 18, rezipped the bag containing a pair of boots, got it out of her room and called her flatmates.

“I thought I was dreaming,” she said. “I feel like I am all right with spiders and things but it was scary being in my room with a random scorpion.”

Phoebe Hunt, 18, said she heard screaming and rushed out to find her flatmate with “a live scorpion in a bag on her boots”.

She said they were “not exactly buzzing to have a scorpion in the flat”.

“At first, I’ll be honest, I said we should kill it and then everyone pointed out that wasn’t the most humane thing so we scooped it up and put it in a Tupperware.”

Oliver James, another flatmate who is studying zoology, transferred the scorpion into a plastic container with kitchen tongs.

“It was a bit nerve-wracking,” he said, as no one knew how venomous it was.

The flatmates then gave the scorpion water on kitchen towel, which it drank immediately, and some card to hide under before contacting animal groups.

Phoebe said they had tried the RSPCA but realised it was more set up to collect cats and dogs, before getting in touch with the National Centre for Reptile Welfare (NCRW).

The charity was able to send someone over within a couple of hours.

NCRW’s Chris Newman said reports of such stowaways were surprisingly frequent.

“The scorpion is , it doesn’t really have a common name other than Chinese scorpion,” he said.

He said its sting would be “medically significant… potentially life threatening but an average adult would just have a really bad day”.

“It is quite worrying this is the second one we have had in under a month that has come in this way.”

Fortunately there was no sting in the tail of this tale, and Ms Alonso-Mossinger said it now felt “like it is a funny story… but it was pretty scary at the time”.

Shein said it was in touch with her to resolve the issue.

In a statement it said: “After receiving the feedback, we immediately conducted an internal investigation.

“Our teams on the ground have checked the shipment packing process and carried out an inspection of the goods in our warehouse and have confirmed that all standard operating processes have been adhered to.”

Hurricanes Helene and Milton – which have devastated parts of the south-east United States – have bookended an exceptionally busy period of tropical storms.

In less than two weeks, five hurricanes formed, which is not far off what the Atlantic would typically get in an entire year.

The storms were powerful, gaining strength with rapid speed.

Yet in early September, when hurricane activity is normally at its peak, there were peculiarly few storms.

So, how unusual has this hurricane season been – and what is behind it?

The season started ominously. On 2 July, Hurricane Beryl became the earliest category five hurricane to form in the Atlantic on records going back to 1920.

Just a few weeks earlier in May, US scientists had warned the 2024 season from June to November could be “extraordinary”.

It was thought that exceptionally warm Atlantic temperatures – combined with a shift in regional weather patterns – would make conditions ripe for hurricane formation.

So far, with seven weeks of the official season still to go, there have been nine hurricanes – two more than the Atlantic would typically get.

However, the total number of tropical storms – which includes hurricanes but also weaker storms – has been around average, and less than was expected at the start of the year.

After Beryl weakened, there were only four named storms, and no major hurricanes, until Helene became a tropical storm on 24 September.

That is despite warm waters in the tropical Atlantic, which should favour the growth of these storms.

Across the Main Development Region for hurricanes – an area stretching from the west coast of Africa to the Caribbean – sea surface temperatures have been around 1C above the 1991-2020 average, according to BBC analysis of data from the European climate service.

Atlantic temperatures have been higher over the last decade, mainly because of climate change and a natural weather pattern known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

The recipe for hurricane formation involves a complex mix of ingredients beyond sea temperatures, and these other conditions were not right.

“The challenge [for forecasting] is that other factors can change quickly, on the timescale of days to weeks, and can work with or against the influence of sea surface temperatures,” explains Christina Patricola, associate professor at Iowa State University.

Researchers are still working to understand why this was the case, but likely reasons include a shift to the West African monsoon and an abundance of Saharan dust.

These both hampered storm development by creating unfavourable conditions in the atmosphere.

But even during this period, scientists were warning that the oceans remained exceptionally warm and that intense hurricanes were still possible through the rest of the season.

And in late September, they came.

Starting with Helene, six tropical Atlantic storms were born in quick succession.

Fuelled by very warm waters – and now more favourable atmospheric conditions – these storms strengthened, with five becoming hurricanes.

Four of these five underwent what is known as “rapid intensification”, where maximum sustained wind speeds increase by at least 30 knots (35mph; 56km/h) in 24 hours.

Historical data suggests that only around one in four hurricanes rapidly intensify on average.

Rapid intensification can be particularly dangerous, because these quickly increasing wind speeds can give communities less time to prepare for a stronger storm.

Hurricane Milton strengthened by more than 90mph in 24 hours – one of the fastest such cases of intensification ever recorded, according to BBC analysis of data from the National Hurricane Center.

Scientists at the World Weather Attribution group have found that the winds and rain from both Helene and Milton were worsened by climate change.

“One thing this hurricane season is illustrating clearly is that the impacts of climate change are here now,” explains Andra Garner from Rowan University in the US.

“Storms like Beryl, Helene, and Milton all strengthened from fairly weak hurricanes into major hurricanes within 12 hours or less, as they travelled over unnaturally warm ocean waters.”

Milton also took an unusual, although not unprecedented, storm path, tracking eastward through the Gulf of Mexico, where waters have been exceptionally warm.

“It is very rare to see a [category] five hurricane appearing in Gulf of Mexico,” says Xiangbo Feng, research scientist in tropical cyclones at the University of Reading.

Warmer oceans make stronger hurricanes – and rapid intensification – more likely, because it means storms can pick up more energy, potentially leading to higher wind speeds.

US forecasters are currently watching an area of thunderstorms located over the Cabo Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa.

This could develop into another tropical storm over the next couple of days, but that remains uncertain.

As for the rest of the season, high sea surface temperatures remain conducive for further storms.

There is also the likely development of the natural La Niña weather phenomenon in the Pacific, which often favours Atlantic hurricane formation as it affects wind patterns.

But further activity will rely on other atmospheric conditions remaining favourable, which are not easy to predict.

Either way, this season has already highlighted how warm seas fuelled by climate change are already increasing the chances of the strongest hurricanes – something that is expected to continue as the world warms further.

“Hurricanes occur naturally, and in some parts of the world they are regarded as part of life,” explains Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

“But human-caused climate change is supercharging them and exacerbating the risk of major damage.”

Hurricane Milton tore through Florida this week. Tornadoes, floods and storm surges have left a trail of destruction and displaced millions of people – at least 16 people have died.

Anne and Sam Frost are Brits who moved to Tampa in 2023. They have a five-month-old baby called Georgia.

On Monday, after learning that their town was in the route of the hurricane, they evacuated home and travelled to Jacksonville.

“I’ve never felt anything like this, to know by week’s end your whole world could be different, not in a good way and not by choice. It’s like grief without the death,” Anne told the BBC.

While stuck in traffic with others fleeing, struggling to find gas and caring for their child they have been waiting and watching anxiously to see if they would lose their home.

Anne shared her diary from the week with us below.

Sam was fifth in the queue for sand bags at 06:00 (11:00 BST). When it finally opened at 07:45 (12:45 BST) the queue was in the hundreds.

He also got plywood for the windows – our local hardware store had a collection point.

We have done all we can to protect our home and our belongings and now we protect ourselves and our daughter by leaving.

We left at around 20:00 (01:00 BST). We passed several dry gas stations and one with a queue formed of more than 40 cars.

As we drove we passed blue “evacuation route” signs. We joined The I-75 which had heavy traffic, like daytime rush hour.

We came off at Withlacoochee and there was another 30-car queue for gas. We were going to stop for food but the Wendy’s drive-thru had about 30 cars queued up.

Waze, a navigation app, kept us off the I-75, travelling through little towns on the 301.

We travelled down winding roads reminiscent of the UK before stopping for food at a McDonald’s struggling to keep up with the unusually high number of customers.

We stopped at the 7-11 for gas but even here, in what feels like the middle of nowhere with no evacuation order in place (yet), it’s all out.

We finally found a gas station with some pumps available and were able to get another half a tank, but as we drove on we passed more which were completely out.

We have arrived in Wildwood and the hotel has a sign on the door – no vacancies at all. We are very lucky to have booked in advance. Tomorrow we will head to Jacksonville.

We set off from Wildwood at 11:00 (16:00 BST). We were warned to stay off the I-75 by the hotel staff.

Waze added 30 minutes to our journey several times. We mainly stayed on the 301 but came off it to avoid standstill traffic at Lawtey.

We passed houses that would have no chance of surviving if it were to hit this far north.

It all took its toll: our fussy baby, the constant nursery rhymes, and getting lost as Waze tried to help us avoid traffic.

It’s been amazing as a Brit to see the scale of the logistical efforts that go into preparing for hurricanes.

From the enormous dump trucks full of sand to the tankers of fuel being brought in; shelters set up in schools and free Uber rides – it’s a remarkable effort.

Teco (the energy supplier) has mobilised 4,500 linesmen to be ready to restore power.

We’re in Jacksonville now and we just have to wait and watch the spaghetti models (a forecasting tool to give an idea of where a storm could make an impact).

As someone commented online, “we don’t pray it hits somewhere else, we pray it gets weaker.”

• 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
• Are you in Florida? Please share your experiences

Wednesday is spent waiting for updates and watching the radars. The skies are grey and it’s raining in Jacksonville.

Hope fades instantly as I hear the reporters say how catastrophic this hurricane will be when it hits.

Our house is predicted to get the north side of the eye of the storm – all the wind and rain, so flooding is a risk from overly-saturated ground. And then we see that the storm is predicted to hit north of Sarasota, basically in the bay itself.

Any further, tiny jump means we will get surge water from the bay as well. I have to stop watching. It is an anxious wait.

At around 21:00 (02:00 BST) the storm carries east when the predicted path was north, which means when it hits it will be south of the bay.

For us, it means the bay drains and we will avoid surge water, but for those south it means they’re getting that water, wind and rain.

Then come the reports of people who remained in their homes calling for emergency services to get them out, but once hurricane force winds hit the emergency services will not be sent out.

I watch the cameras on our house and can see the bushes and trees moving. But as the storm moves through we still have a house intact. It feels incredible, how unlikely it was that we’d have anything left and how close to it we came.

I woke up at 04:00 (09:00 BST) and checked the home cameras – they were still on! And we had no flooding! We’ve lost two fences but it’s a small price to pay.

We live near a school so they buried the power cables in the area a few years ago and you realise what a difference that makes, but many are not so lucky as 74% of our county are out of power.

There’s flooding as far away from the coast as Plant City and Lakeland so I don’t know how we avoided it.

Authorities have closed access to Pinellas County entirely while they assess damage. Our county has boil-water and conserve water notices.

Tampa has an area-by-area re-entry plan and again I’m in awe at the logistical efforts and planning. The pictures of damage so close to us and in familiar places are devastating and we are feeling so very fortunate and grateful.

Our plans have changed as we can get home earlier now if we want to. So instead of staying another night in Jacksonville we will set off for Tampa via Orlando.

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.

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 gave a video address Tuesday, which he said was directed at the people of Lebanon, 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 warning was falling largely – if not entirely – being ignored.

“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.

“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.”

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.”

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

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

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

But Sir William Browder, a longstanding critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said it was an “embarrassment” that there had not been a single prosecution or fine for companies investigated for potentially breaching oil sanctions.

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

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.

Sir William, who heads the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, told the BBC the UK “was one of the most lax enforcers of these types of laws”.

He added: “The UK doesn’t do prosecutions well and I don’t know if that can be fixed overnight.

“There seems to be both a resource problem and a culture problem when it comes to prosecuting people for economic crimes or sanctions evasion here.”

Critics have claimed sanctions are ineffective after the latest figures showed the Russian economy was growing.

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.

Louis Wilson, the head of fossil fuel investigations at anti-corruption organisation Global Witness said it was “quite astonishing” that no fines have yet been handed out.

He described the oil cap as a “a sort of paper tiger” that is failing to crack down on rule breaking.

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

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”.

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”.

She said “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”.

It is important that when OFSI “find deliberate wrongdoing they are exacting financial penalties,” she added.

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 is 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.

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, in their film The Last of the Sea Women.

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 Kim.

“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 Kim. “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.”

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 on Florida’s east coast, 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.”

While Crystal’s neighbourhood was on Florida’s east coast, far from where Hurricane Milton first made landfall, tornadoes generated by the hurricane before its actual arrival caused devastation in this area.

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 are 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 destructive 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; and millions were left without power – but Florida Governor 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.

On Florida’s west coast, Maria Bowman, 60, hunkered down in her bright pink mobile home in North Fort Myers to ride 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 later diminished into a post-tropical cyclone, travelled onwards over 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 Sadova 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, and although Russian forces had launched a major offensive in 2023, they never fully managed to capture the city until the start of October 2024.

During the long battle, as the front line shifted, Fima had led a group of soldiers to the suburbs in late January 2023 and got caught in heavy fighting on Sadova 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.

During the battle for Vuhledar there was a point when the Russian soldiers retreated and 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 a 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 Sadova 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 Sadova Street during the battle for Vuhledar.

“Thank God Oleksii survived. But the fact that people died in my house, it shocked me,” Marina 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 Sadova 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 Sadova 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.

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.

The Northern Lights have splashed vivid colour across UK night skies once again, with stunning images captured all across the country.

The lights, also known as aurora borealis, were expected to be seen only as far south as the Midlands, but on Wednesday night, according to BBC Weather was the strongest and most widespread showing of the phenomenon in the UK since May.

As solar activity weakens, it might still be possible for those in some Northern areas to see the lights on Friday, but elsewhere, the chances are low.

BBC Weather Watchers‘ readers and viewers sent in almost 5000 photos of the lights – here are some of the best along with some agency pictures and snaps shared with the BBC on social media.

The Northern Lights have been visible right across the UK and into continental Europe after an extremely geomagnetic storm – G5 – which is the highest on the 1-5 scale.

Starting around 19:00 BST many people were able to view the aurora. It then weakened slightly for a time, before coming back even stronger around midnight and continued until dawn on Friday.

Meteorologists advise a long exposure camera is used to capture the auroras, as the phenomenon is not always visible with the naked eye.

However, many people reported they were able to see some of the colours with the naked eye further south.

What used to be a once-in-a-lifetime event for people to see it in the UK – or a bucket list trip to the Arctic circle – has become more common in the last couple of 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.

The UK has seen more of the Northern Lights in 2024 than in many recent years.

Increased UK sightings have been helped by the Sun reaching a “maximum” in it’s 11-year solar cycle.

During this maximum, the number of sunspots increases which leads to more Coronal Mass Ejections sending charged particles to Earth, creating the aurora.

With overall high activity on the Sun with lots of sunspots, there is a high chance we’ll get more of these Coronal Mass Ejections directed to Earth in the coming months.

However, experts say whilst it will still be possible to see the Northern Lights in the UK once the Sun passed its peak, 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.

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 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.

Tesla boss Elon Musk has unveiled the firm’s long-awaited robotaxi, the Cybercab, at the Warner Bros Studios in Burbank, California.

The futuristic-looking vehicle featuring two wing-like doors and no pedals or steering wheel deposited Mr Musk in front of an audience eager to hear details about a project he considers key to Tesla’s next chapter.

At the event, billed “We, Robot,” the multi-billionaire reiterated his view that fully self-driving vehicles will be safer than those operated by humans and could even earn owners money by being rented out for rides.

But Mr Musk’s prediction that production would begin some time “before 2027” raised questions about whether he will once again fail to meet his own deadlines.

“I tend to be optimistic with time frames,” he quipped during the event.

He said the Cybercab – which would compete with rivals including Alphabet-owned Waymo – would cost less than $30,000 (£23,000).

However analysts have cast doubt on how realistic that plan is.

“It will be extremely difficult for Tesla to offer a new vehicle at that price within that timescale,” said Paul Miller, from research Forrester.

“Without external subsidies, or Tesla making a loss on every vehicle, it doesn’t seem plausible to launch at anything close to that price this decade,” he added.

Mr Musk also said he expected to see “fully autonomous unsupervised” technology available in Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y in Texas and California next year “with permission where ever regulators approve it.”

But that approval is far from guaranteed.

“It is a big chunk of metal driving on roads at high speeds, so safety concerns are big,” said Samitha Samaranayake, an associate professor in engineering at Cornell University.

Tesla’s self-driving ambitions rely on cameras that are cheaper than radar and Lidar (light detection and ranging) sensors that are the technology backbone of many competitors’ vehicles.

By teaching its cars to drive, Tesla plans to use artificial intelligence (AI) trained by the raw data it collects from its millions of vehicles.

But the research community “is not sold on whether the Tesla style of doing things can give the safety guarantees that we would like,” Mr Samaranayake said.

The cybercab project has undergone delays, having originally been due for release in August.

This summer, in a post on X , formerly Twitter, Mr Musk said the wait was due to design changes he felt were important.

Meanwhile, competing robotaxis are already operating on some US roads.

• How robotaxis are dividing San Francisco
• Robotaxi tech improves but can they make money?

Tesla also seems poised to post its first ever decline in annual sales as competitors pile into the electric vehicle market, even as sales have softened.

Despite that dour backdrop, Tuesday’s event was heavy on spectacle – complete with Tesla’s humanoid robots dancing and serving drinks to attendees.

Mr Musk also unveiled another prototype for a “Robovan” which can ferry up to 20 passengers around at a time.

The sleek shuttle “could be a mode of transportation over the coming years that Tesla leverages,” said Wedbush Securities managing director Dan Ives who attended the event in person.

Another analyst said the event felt like a step back into memory lane while also signalling the path ahead.

“Musk did a fantastic job of painting an ideal future for transportation that promises to both free up our time and increase safety,” said Jessica Caldwell, head of insights at Edmunds.

But despite the showmanship, there are doubts about whether he can deliver the vision he sketched out.

“Many questions remain about how this will be achieved from a practical standpoint,” Caldwell added.

The deployment of robotaxis has encountered setbacks, with driverless cars operated by General Motors subsidiary Cruise being suspended in San Francisco after a pedestrian was knocked down.

But the sector continues to expand.

Waymo said in early October it would add the Hyundai Ioniq 5 to its robotaxi fleet after the vehicles undergo on-road testing with the company’s technology.

Ride-hailing giant Uber also wants to add more autonomous vehicles to its fleet to expand on its delivery and ridesharing options for customers.

It announced a multi-year alliance with driverless car developer Cruise in August.

Chinese tech company Baidu is also reportedly looking to expand its robotaxi division, Apollo Go, beyond China – where the vehicles are active in several cities.

The Princess of Wales has made an unexpected appearance alongside the Prince of Wales on a visit to Southport, where they held a private meeting with the bereaved families of three children killed in a knife attack in July.

This was Catherine’s first official public engagement since she finished her chemotherapy treatment.

Royal sources say she decided to join Prince William to show her “support, empathy and compassion to the local community”.

The couple spoke to emergency responders who helped at the scene of the devastating knife attack in the north-west seaside town.

Catherine gave a hug to some of the emergency workers, with fire chief Phil Garrigan saying “she could see the emotion in them”.

The royal visit to Southport had been planned as a low key event, to allow time to be spent in private with families of the three children who died and with the yoga teacher who was present during the attack.

But Catherine was a surprise addition as she made one of only a handful of public appearances this year, since revealing her cancer diagnosis.

Wearing a long brown, autumnal-looking coat, she arrived with her husband to meet the bereaved families and emergency workers described by Prince William as “heroes”.

With her chemotherapy having ended, Catherine has begun a gradual return to work, including meetings about her early years campaign last month.

However, this is the biggest moment so far in returning to royal duties.

Catherine has spoken of having “good days and bad days” and Kensington Palace has cautioned that her appearances might have to be flexible and be subject to last minute changes.

The visit to Southport was intended by Prince William and Catherine to show the community that it had “not been forgotten”.

The prince and princess heard about efforts to bring the community together after the knife attack – and the wave of riots that followed.

Bebe King, 6, Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9, were killed on 29 July, 2024, in the attack on a children’s dance group.

The royal couple spent 90 minutes talking to the families of the three children – and later passed on the families’ thanks to emergency responders, in a meeting in Southport Community Centre.

Catherine told the emergency workers they had supported families through their “darkest times” – and she said: “On behalf of them, thank you.”

Ten other people – eight of whom were children – were injured in the stabbings.

Axel Rudakubana, 17, was arrested at the scene and has been charged with multiple counts of murder and attempted murder.

The royal couple told emergency workers from police and the health services about the importance of protecting their own well-being and mental health.

“The first thing we thought about was actually how on earth you guys are going to handle having seen what you’ve seen. So please take your time, don’t rush back to work, do whatever you need to,” said Prince William, who with Catherine has campaigned for people to be more open about mental health concerns.

The couple had made a donation to a fundraiser to provide physical and psychological help for police and ambulance staff who were caught up in the attack and the riots that followed.

In a message on social media, Prince William and Catherine said their Southport visit had been a “powerful reminder of the importance of supporting one another in the wake of unimaginable tragedy”.

Former chief constable Andy Rhodes described the visit as a “massive boost” for emergency workers.

“It was quite emotional. It is still raw for people,” he said.

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It was the call the family of a young British climber who went missing on Everest 100 years ago had given up hope of ever getting.

Last month, a team of climbers filming a National Geographic documentary stumbled on a preserved boot, revealed by melting ice on a glacier.

This boot was believed to belong to Andrew Comyn “Sandy” Irvine, who disappeared while attempting to climb Everest in June 1924 with his partner George Mallory.

What’s more, it could potentially help solve one of mountaineering’s biggest mysteries: whether or not the pair succeeded in becoming the first people to summit Everest, 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top.

Well-known adventurer Jimmy Chin, who led the team for National Geographic, hailed the discovery of the boot – with a foot inside it – as a “monumental and emotional moment”.

But for Irvine’s great-niece Julie Summers it was simply “extraordinary”.

“I just froze…. We had all given up any hope any trace of him would be found,” she told the BBC.

A number of people have searched for Irvine’s body over the years, partly because the 22-year-old is said to have been carrying a camera with an undeveloped film inside, potentially with a photograph of the pair at the summit.

Could the discovery of the boot be the first step to finding his body – and the camera?

The family have now given a DNA sample to help confirm the foot is indeed Irvine – but the filmmaking team is fairly confident it belongs to the mountaineer, due to the sock found inside the boot being embroidered with the words “A.C. Irvine”.

“I mean, dude… there’s a label on it,” Chin, who is known for making Oscar-winning climbing documentary Free Solo alongside his wife, was quoted as saying in a National Geographic report.

The team made the discovery as they descended the Central Rongbuk Glacier by the north face of Everest in September.

Along the way, they found an oxygen bottle marked with the date 1933. An Everest expedition that year had found an item belonging to Irvine.

Energised by this possible sign that Irvine’s body could be nearby, the team searched the glacier for several days, before one of them saw the boot emerging from melting ice.

It was a fortuitous find – they estimated the ice had only melted a week before their discovery.

The foot has since been removed from the mountain because of concerns that ravens were disturbing it, according to reports, and passed to the Chinese mountaineering authorities who govern the north face of Everest.

For Irvine’s descendants, the discovery has been emotional – especially in this, the centenary year of his disappearance.

Summers had grown up hearing stories of her grandmother’s adventurous, Oxford-educated younger brother, who they knew as “Uncle Sandy”.

“My grandmother had a photo of him by her bed until the day she died,” she recalled. “She said he was a better man than anyone would ever be.”

Birkenhead-born Irvine was just 22 when he disappeared, the youngest member of an expedition that has intrigued the mountaineering world for a century.

He and Mallory were last seen alive on 8 June 1924 as they set off for the peak.

Mallory’s body would not be found until 1999 by an American climber. In recent decades, the search for the climbers’ remains has been mired in controversy amid suspicions that the bodies were moved.

Summers has always dismissed those stories and suspicions, revealing her feeling of “relief” following the Chin’s call that “he was still there on the mountain”.

But what if it could now be proved that Irvine and Mallory reached the summit, becoming the first to do so – an idea which, Summers acknowledged, would “turn mountaineering history onto its head”?

“It would be nice – we would all feel very proud,” she said. “But the family has always maintained the mystery, and the story of how far they got and how brave they were, was really what it was about.”

And anyway, she said, “the only way we will ever know is if we find a picture in the camera he was believed to be carrying”.

The search, she suspects, will now continue for that camera. “I think it will be irresistible,” she said.

Whether it will be found remains to be seen.

Chin, meanwhile, is hoping that the boot’s discovery – “a monumental and emotional moment for us and our entire team on the ground” – will “finally bring peace of mind to his relatives and the climbing world at large”.

For Summers, it is a chance to remind the world about a young man “who took life and lived it”, embracing every opportunity – and above all, was “having fun”.

But perhaps surprisingly, she and her cousins are grateful the older generation were not here for this discovery.

“For them, Everest is his grave,” she explained.

Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors, has won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.

Known as hibakusha, the survivors of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been recognised by the Norwegian Nobel Committee for efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

Nobel Committee Chair Joergen Watne Frydnes said the group had “contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear taboo”.

Mr Frydnes warned the “nuclear taboo” was now “under pressure” – and praised the group’s use of witness testimony to ensure nuclear weapons must never be used again.

Founded in 1956, the organisation sends survivors around the world to share their testimonies of the “atrocious damage” and suffering caused by the use of nuclear weapons, according to its website.

Their work began almost a decade after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On 6 August 1945, a US bomber dropped the uranium bomb above the city of Hiroshima, killing around 140,000 people.

Three days later a second nuclear weapon was dropped on Nagasaki. Japan’s surrender, announced by Emperor Hirohito shortly afterwards, ended World War Two.

Speaking to reporters in Japan, a tearful Toshiyuki Mimaki, the co-head of the group, said: “Never did I dream this could happen,” the AFP news agency quotes him as saying.

Mr Mimaki criticised the idea that nuclear weapons bring peace. “It has been said that because of nuclear weapons, the world maintains peace. But nuclear weapons can be used by terrorists,” Mr Mimaki said, according to reports by AFP.

In a BBC interview last year, he said despite only being three years old at the time the nuclear bomb hit Hiroshima – he could still remember dazed and burnt survivors fleeing past his home.

The prize – which consist of a diploma, a gold medal and a sum of $1m (£765,800) – will be presented at a ceremonies in Oslo in December, marking the anniversary of the death of the scientist and prize creator Alfred Nobel.

The group has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize “many times” in the past, including in 2005 when it received a special mention by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, its website says.

The decision to recognise Nihon Hidankyo means the Nobel committee has steered away from more controversial nominees for the peace prize.

There had been widespread speculation the United Nations agency supporting Palestinians – UNRWA – was being considered for the prize.

Although the organisation is the main provider of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza, nine of its members were fired for alleged involvement in the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year.

More than 12,000 people had signed a petition urging the committee not to award UNRWA the prize.

There were equal concerns about the nomination of the International Court of Justice.

The UN’s main judicial organ is currently considering allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and has already issued a statement urging the Israeli authorities to refrain from genocidal acts.

But while giving the prize to Nihon Hidankyo may be a non-controversial choice, it could also focus global attention on the threat of nuclear conflict which overshadows the fighting in both Ukraine and the Middle East.

Throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its leaders have repeatedly hinted that they may be ready to use tactical nuclear weapons if western allies increase their support for Ukraine in a way Russia considers unacceptable.

These threats have succeeded in restraining western support for fear of escalation.

In the Middle East, the subtext for much of Israel’s strategy is the fear that Iran is seeking nuclear capability, something Tehran denies.

The Nobel committee’s decision may renew a debate about the use of nuclear weapons at a time when some countries look enviously at their deterring power.

This year’s peace prize had 286 nominations, a number comprising 197 individuals and 89 organisations.

Nominations can be made by people in positions of significant authority, including members of national assemblies, governments and international courts of law.

Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi won the prize in 2023, when she was honoured for her work fighting the oppression of women in Iran.

Ms Mohammadi is currently being held in Evin prison in Tehran, having already spent 12 years in jail serving multiple sentences related to her activism.

A day after the death of India’s most globally-recognised tycoon Ratan Tata, his half-brother Noel Tata has been named as the new chairperson of Tata Trusts, the group has announced.

Tata Trusts is the company’s philanthropic arm which holds a majority stake of 66% in Tata Sons – one of India’s largest business groups, with annual revenues in excess of $100bn (£76.5bn).

Noel Tata, 67, is the son of Naval Tata, who was also Ratan’s father, and Simone Tata.

He is on the boards of many Tata companies, including Tata Trusts, and will now step up to lead its charities.

He is the chairman of Tata International Limited, Voltas and Tata Investment Corporation and the vice-chairman at Tata Steel and Titan Company Limited.

He also heads Tata’s massive apparel retail company, Trent Limited, which has seen tremendous growth since he took its leadership in 2014.

The company operates hugely successful fashion and lifestyle retail formats such as Westside, Zudio and Utsa.

From 2010 to 2021, Noel Tata ran the group’s global trading and distribution firm – Tata International – whose revenue rose from $500m to over $3bn during this time.

On Friday, Tata Trusts in a release said it had unanimously elected Noel Tata as its chairman.

Noel Tata said he was “deeply honoured and humbled” by the opportunity and that he looked forward to carrying forward the legacy of his brother.

“On this solemn occasion, we rededicate ourselves to carrying on our developmental and philanthropic initiatives and continuing to play our part in nation building,” he said, according to the release.

Noel Tata’s three children are also trustees on the boards of some charities linked to the family.

His son Neville is head of Star Bazaar, the group’s chain of retail supermarkets. His daughter Leah Tata is in charge of the Gateway brand under its The Indian Hotels Company. His other daughter, Maya Tata, works at Tata Digital.

Ratan Tata was unmarried, had no children and had not publicly named a successor and his death had sparked widespread interest in who would take over the Tata Trusts as his successor.

In 2012, he stepped down as the chairman of Tata Sons, handing over the reins to Cyrus Mistry. In 2016, Mistry was unexpectedly removed and Tata returned as interim chairman for a couple of years. In 2017, N Chandrasekaran was named chairman, a post he still holds.

Ratan Tata then became chairman emeritus of the group, a title he held until his death. He also remained chairman of the philanthropic arm until the end.

The Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Simon Harris has described Israel’s attack on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon as a breach of international law.

Speaking to BBC News in Washington DC, Harris said it was an “extraordinarily concerning development”.

The IDF has acknowledged that its troops “opened fire in the area” of the base in Naqoura on Thursday after instructing UN troops to “remain in protected spaces”.

Ireland has 379 troops in Lebanon as part of the UNIFIL peacekeeping mission. None were hurt in Thursday’s attacks but two Indonesian soldiers were injured.

The taoiseach described attacks on three United Nations Interim Force positions in Lebanon (UNIFIL) as “really dangerous, despicable attacks on peacekeepers”.

He added that the IDF had positioned themselves at a UNIFIL outpost which was being manned by about 30 Irish peacekeepers, but had since moved following UN and US intervention.

The taoiseach said that he was protesting “at the highest levels” in relation to the attack, and said that the United Nations, and all of the countries making up the peacekeeping mission should “speak with one voice” about what he called Israel’s breach of international law.

However, he said he was concerned that “Israel doesn’t listen”.

He added that Israel had “a right to defend itself, a right to live in peace and security” and that no-one disputed that but that “international law has to be followed, and proportionality also has to be due”. He said neither of those tests were currently being met.

He said he had spoken to the US President Joe Biden twice in recent days, including at an hour-long meeting in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

He said he had also spoken to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres about the matter.

On Friday UNIFIL reported that two more peacekeeping troops had been hurt in two explosions near the Naqoura base.

The IDF said Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon had identified a threat and responded with fire.

The Israeli military said it had struck the UNIFIL post, which was about 50m away from the source of the threat. It said it had earlier told UNIFIL troops to stay in a protected space and added that it was continuing to examine the incident.

Israel has requested that the UNIFIL peacekeepers withdraw from Southern Lebanon, but the taoiseach rejected that.

He said: “We cannot have a situation where aggression can force a peacekeeping mission to leave.”

Harris said the IDF and Hezbollah needed to “respect the role of our peacekeepers” and what was needed was an “urgent de-escalation” and a ceasefire.

Israel alleges that that the UN has failed to enforce the 1701 resolution which called for a demilitarised zone and the disarmament of Hezbollah and this was partly to blame for the current conflict.

For its part, UNIFIL has said Israel’s ground invasion of southern Lebanon constitutes a violation of resolution 1701.

Harris said: “It’s very hard to take a lecture from Israel in terms of holding UN resolution right now, or indeed international law, when we’ve seen completely disproportionate war and the impact that that has had from the humanitarian crisis point of view of civilians, including children.”

The taoiseach said there were “significant lessons” that could be learned from the Northern Ireland peace process, and the first was to “never allow the world to believe that a terrorist organisation is the same as a country”.

Ireland is one of several European countries that has recognised the state of Palestine.

The taoiseach said it took that decision because “we know Palestine is not Hamas”.

He said: “Hamas is a despicable, disgusting terrorist organisation that should be condemned outright by all right thinking people, but we know what it’s like in Ireland to have efforts to hijack and sabotage your national identity and your flag by terrorists, and we can never stand for that.”

Forty new allegations from 40 different people that include sexual assault and rape against former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed have been made to the Metropolitan Police.

The new allegations cover a period between 1979 and 2013.

It comes after a BBC documentary and podcast heard testimony from former Harrods employees who said the billionaire sexually assaulted or raped them.

The force had urged anyone who had not previously come forward with allegations to do so and said it would review historical complaints.

Since the documentary first aired, a further 65 women have contacted the BBC saying they were abused by Mohamed Al Fayed, with allegations stretching beyond Harrods and as far back as 1977.

Al Fayed, who died aged 94 in 2023, took over the luxury department store in 1985 and sold it in 2010.

The Metropolitan Police said the 40 new allegations are in addition to the 21 allegations they were aware of prior to the broadcast of the BBC documentary.

Whilst there is no prospect of conviction against Al Fayed, the Metropolitan Police said it continues to explore whether any other individuals could be pursued for any criminal offences.

Cdr Stephen Clayman said: “Since the broadcast of the documentary and our recent appeal, detectives have received numerous pieces of information, predominantly relating to the activities of Mohamed Al Fayed but some relating to the actions of others.”

The force is continuing to appeal to anyone who has been a victim of Al Fayed or has information relating to those who facilitated his offending.

It added a full review of previous allegations continues and it has identified 21 separate allegations reported to the force about Al Fayed prior to the BBC broadcast.

The review will ensure there are no new lines of enquiry based on information that has emerged and will liaise with the Directorate of Professional Standards if needed.

Last month the BBC heard testimony from more than 20 female ex-Harrods employees who accuse the billionaire of sexual assault and rape.

The documentary and podcast – Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods – gathered evidence that, during Al Fayed’s ownership, Harrods not only failed to intervene, but helped cover up abuse allegations.

Harrods’ current owners said they were “utterly appalled” by the allegations and that his victims had been failed – for which the store sincerely apologised.

The department store is also carrying out an independent review which began in 2023.

Since the broadcast, dozens of women have contacted the BBC to say they were abused by Al Fayed.

On Thursday, the BBC reported 65 women contacted the broadcaster to say there were abused by Al Fayed, with allegations stretching beyond Harrods and as far back as 1977.

It suggests he used a broader range of abuse tactics and also targeted women employed outside his businesses.

Several of the new 65 women interviewed allege they were recruited by Al Fayed under false pretences into roles on the billionaire’s domestic staff and were then sexually exploited by him – including at his mansion in Oxted.

The police watchdog, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), has told the BBC it has asked the Metropolitan Police whether anything needs to be referred to it for investigation and internal force review is ongoing.

An IOPC spokesperson said: “Following the TV documentary on Mohamed Al-Fayed, we contacted the Metropolitan Police Service to see whether it had received any related complaints or identified any conduct issues which would require a referral to the IOPC.”

The Met Police is conducting a review, the spokesperson added, and the watchdog has not yet had any referrals about the force’s handling of the allegations.

Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods

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

Watch Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods on BBC iPlayer now.

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

The head of Ukraine’s Odesa region has said its three ports are “not possible” to protect fully because they span such a large area and Russia has intensified its missile attacks.

He was speaking to the BBC after a 16-year-old girl, two women and a man were killed in a Russian strike on a two-floor building to the north-west of Odesa city.

It was the fourth such attack on the Black Sea coastal region in five days, and regional head Oleh Kiper said “probably a ballistic missile was targeting an infrastructure facility, but it hit nearby instead – into this place.”

Russia has not commented on its wave of missile strikes. A further nine people were killed in an attack on a cargo ship early on Thursday.

There have been ballistic missile strikes on Odesa’s ports before. But never so many, in quick succession.

Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said Russia had carried out 60 such attacks in just three months, damaging or destroying almost 300 port facilities. He said 79 people had been killed or wounded and 22 civilian vessels hit.

Oleh Kiper told the BBC that Odesa’s current air defences were unable to cover all three ports in Odesa region as they spanned over about 80km (50 miles): “So the main focus is on the city of Odesa, where over a million people live. The rest of the ports and towns remain in a difficult situation.”

Other Ukrainian ports – in the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Mykolayiv regions – are no longer operating, making the facilities in Odesa more important than ever to Ukrainian exports.

He suggested Russia was attacking civilian vessels now to harm Ukraine’s economy and to scare the world with what it could do.

“They hit [the ships in Odesa] so that the insurance companies and the ship owners refuse to enter our ports, into the combat zone, Kiper said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general has said criminal proceedings have begun into the death in Russian detention of a prominent Ukrainian journalist who chronicled life under occupation in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Viktoriia Roshchyna had been briefly detained in the occupied eastern city of Berdyansk in 2022 but she disappeared in the occupied east in August 2023 and it was not until a few months ago that Russian authorities confirmed she was being held.

Ukrainian intelligence officials said she was supposed to have been included in a prisoner exchange and Russian reports said she died on 19 September while being moved to a detention centre in Moscow.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Roshchyna’s death had come as a heavy blow. “For all of us in Ukraine, the issue of captured and deported people remains incredibly painful. These are adults and children, many civilians who are now held in prisons and camps in Russia,” he wrote on X.

Zelensky met Pope Francis at the Vatican on Friday before heading to Berlin for talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

He is promoting a “victory plan” to end the war and told a briefing in Berlin he would like to see the war end “no later than next year, 2025,” adding that it was very important that aid to Kyiv did not decrease in the coming year.

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni had earlier promised Zelensky that support for Kyiv would last “for as long as needed”.

Zelensky denied he had been discussing terms for a ceasefire. “The key is to strengthen Ukraine’s positions and relations with our closest partners,” he stressed.

Russian forces continue to make gains in eastern Ukraine, and on Friday authorities in the strategically important hilltop city of Toretsk said only 40-50% of it remained under Ukrainian control.

Ukrainian troops are outgunned and outnumbered and are also under pressure in the Pokrovsk. The two cities are seen as vital for maintaining the army’s supply lines.

Earlier this week Ukraine’s military targeted a big oil terminal on the east coast of Russian-occupied Crimea.

Satellite images show the offshore facility at Feodosia is still burning five days after the attack. Russian-installed official Igor Tkachenko said that even though the fire was not out, it was fully under control.

The Ukrainian military said the terminal was the biggest in Crimea and helped supply Russia’s occupying forces.

More than 1,000 residents have had to leave their homes because of the strike, which Kyiv says is in retaliation for Russian attacks that have destroyed much of its power infrastructure.

Gunmen have killed at least 20 people at a coal mine in Balochistan province in southwestern Pakistan, according to local police.

The attackers stormed the workers’ accommodation at the Junaid Coal Company mines in the province’s Duki district in the early hours of Friday morning, rounded the men up and opened fire.

A hospital in Duki has received 20 bodies and is treating six injured people, reported Reuters.

The workers were attacked with heavy weapons, including rocket launchers and grenades, police said, while one survivor described seeing a drone overhead.

Subcontractor Hafeezullah told the BBC he spotted the drone and its red light as he and a number of others hid in the bathroom.

“When the attackers got closer they shouted ‘we told you to stop work here, why didn’t you?’,” he told the BBC. He said the attackers spoke in Pashto. “Then they opened fire.”

Hafeezullah estimates the attack, which he says started just after midnight, lasted for about an hour and a half, during which time machinery was set alight. He also heard loud explosions, which he thinks were grenades exploding.

Asim Shafi, police chief in Duki district, confirmed to news agency AFP both hand grenades and rocket launchers were used in the attack, which is believed to have been carried out by as many as 40 people who then disappeared “into the night”.

Police confirmed that four of the victims were Afghans, while the rest of the men were from Pashto-speaking areas of Balochistan.

Hafeezullah says he lost several friends in the attack.

“When I left, there were people lying on the ground,” he said.

No group has claimed responsibility for the killings so far. In the past, the separatist Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) has carried out several deadly attacks in the province.

Mine owner Khairullah Nasar told news agency Reuters they had been getting “threats from the militants for some time, but there was no information about the attack”.

Friday’s attack is the latest to be carried out in recent days, and comes just ahead of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a major security summit being hosted in the Pakistani capital Islamabad next week.

On Monday, a BLA militant killed two Chinese nationals and injured at least 10 people in a suicide attack near Karachi airport.

The group, which pushes for an independent Balochistan, also committed multiple attacks in August that killed more than 50 people. Pakistani authorities responded by killing 21 insurgents in the province.

The latest attack on the miners drew condemnation from Balochistan’s chief minister Sarfraz Bugti, who said the attackers had an agenda to destabilise Pakistan.

“The terrorists have once again targeted poor labourers… the killing of these innocent laborers will be avenged,” he said in a statement.

Balochistan is home to several separatist groups, who accuse the central government of exploiting the resource-rich province.

The militants often target security forces, as well as people who have come to work at the province’s many mining and infrastructure projects.

As well as enhancing security measures, Pakistani authorities will reportedly be curbing movements of Chinese citizens during the summit, due to the security risk from militant groups targeting them.

A student got more than she bargained for when she opened a clothing parcel from fast-fashion firm Shein to discover a live scorpion.

“I thought it was a toy – and then it moved,” Sofia Alonso-Mossinger said, adding it had been “pretty scary”.

With the help of her flatmates at the University of Bristol, the venomous invader was moved into a tub before being collected by an expert.

China-based Shein said it had conducted an internal investigation and had confirmed that “all standard operating processes have been adhered to”.

The electrical and electronic engineering student said: “I unzipped the outer packaging and saw something move and was like, what’s this?”

After realising it was a scorpion, Ms Alonso-Mossinger, 18, rezipped the bag containing a pair of boots, got it out of her room and called her flatmates.

“I thought I was dreaming,” she said. “I feel like I am all right with spiders and things but it was scary being in my room with a random scorpion.”

Phoebe Hunt, 18, said she heard screaming and rushed out to find her flatmate with “a live scorpion in a bag on her boots”.

She said they were “not exactly buzzing to have a scorpion in the flat”.

“At first, I’ll be honest, I said we should kill it and then everyone pointed out that wasn’t the most humane thing so we scooped it up and put it in a Tupperware.”

Oliver James, another flatmate who is studying zoology, transferred the scorpion into a plastic container with kitchen tongs.

“It was a bit nerve-wracking,” he said, as no one knew how venomous it was.

The flatmates then gave the scorpion water on kitchen towel, which it drank immediately, and some card to hide under before contacting animal groups.

Phoebe said they had tried the RSPCA but realised it was more set up to collect cats and dogs, before getting in touch with the National Centre for Reptile Welfare (NCRW).

The charity was able to send someone over within a couple of hours.

NCRW’s Chris Newman said reports of such stowaways were surprisingly frequent.

“The scorpion is , it doesn’t really have a common name other than Chinese scorpion,” he said.

He said its sting would be “medically significant… potentially life threatening but an average adult would just have a really bad day”.

“It is quite worrying this is the second one we have had in under a month that has come in this way.”

Fortunately there was no sting in the tail of this tale, and Ms Alonso-Mossinger said it now felt “like it is a funny story… but it was pretty scary at the time”.

Shein said it was in touch with her to resolve the issue.

In a statement it said: “After receiving the feedback, we immediately conducted an internal investigation.

“Our teams on the ground have checked the shipment packing process and carried out an inspection of the goods in our warehouse and have confirmed that all standard operating processes have been adhered to.”

Breakdancers have been urged to avoid headspinning after a dancer who developed a cone-shaped lump on his head due to “years of extensive headspinning practice” had to have it surgically removed.

The benign tumour, dubbed a “breakdance bulge”, was more than an inch thick, according to a report published by the British Medical Journal.

The condition is thought to be caused by repeated friction between the scalp and the floor, combined with pressure from the dancer’s body.

The unnamed dancer from Denmark trained five times a week – including up to seven minutes of headspinning – and had been wearing a hat to hide the bulge.

He had continued spinning on his head despite developing the “protuberance” over 19 years of breakdancing.

Over the last five years, it had grown bigger and more painful.

When he sought help in his thirties, medics at Copenhagen University Hospital had to rule out diseases including cancer before diagnosing a “headspin hole”.

The condition typically begins with hair loss but can develop into a significant lump on the head.

One of the authors of the paper, published in the journal BMJ Case Reports on Thursday, told the PA news agency: “This report does not advocate against headspinning entirely.”

“However, breakdancers who notice the early development of a breakdance bulge should consider reducing or avoiding headspins, as continuing may lead to further enlargement of the bulge”, said Dr Christian Baastrup Sondergaard.

He added: “Although this is a rare condition unique to breakdancers, the successful surgical treatment in this case demonstrates that it is a viable option for symptom relief.”

He added that only one prior case had been reported and encouraged further study of breakdancing injuries.

The dancer said: “It is now possible for me to go out in public without a cap… which is, of course, a very nice feeling.”

He added that he had received “a lot of positive feedback”, including that his head “looks completely normal”.

The report notes that breakdancing involves “a range of complex and physically demanding techniques” that render dancers “particularly prone to injuries”.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a video address Tuesday, which he said was directed at the people of Lebanon, 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 warning was falling largely – if not entirely – being ignored.

“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.”