Cimarron Thomas was 12 years old in 2018 when she used her father’s handgun to kill herself.

From West Virginia, USA, she played the violin, she loved elephants and chatting with her friends on Snapchat, and she was looking forward to her 13th birthday.

But she was being sexually abused and blackmailed online by a student from Northern Ireland, described as the UK’s most prolific catfisher.

Alexander McCartney, 26, from outside Newry, County Armagh, has been given a life sentence with a minimum of 20 years in jail for the manslaughter of Cimarron and the extreme sexual exploitation of other young girls.

In a tragic turn of events, Cimarron’s father, Ben, a US army veteran, took his own life 18 months later. He did not know about his daughter’s abuse or why she took her own life.

Cimarron’s grandparents, Peggy and Dale Thomas, detailed their pain in a victim impact statement read out in court.

“Our lives will never be the same again,” they said.

“We didn’t get to see her graduate, walk down the aisle, or have children.

“We have been robbed, and our lives have been changed forever.”

Cimarron Thomas lived with her mum, dad, and siblings.

They were an ordinary American family, but in 2018, a predator was about to bring destruction to their lives.

Using a fake persona, McCartney contacted her online, complimented her on her appearance, and began grooming her before she sent him an intimate photo.

The court heard that during the first abusive interaction, he kept her online for an hour and 45 minutes, demanding sexual and degrading images.

He told her if she didn’t send him more photos, he’d publish the ones he already had on the internet.

Cimarron went back to school and did not tell anyone about the abuse.

McCartney continued to pursue Cimarron and contacted her four days later using another fake account, saying: “I want to play one more time.”

Despite pleading for McCartney to stop and being visibly upset, he told her to “dry your eyes” and involve her younger sister, aged nine, in a sex act.

Cimarron refused and said she would rather kill herself.

McCartney then put up a countdown clock, telling her “goodbye and good luck”.

Three minutes later, Cimarron was found by her nine-year-old sister, who entered the room after she thought she heard a balloon pop.

She had shot herself in the head with the family’s legally-held firearm.

Cimarron was taken to hospital where she was pronounced dead.

Police have released the 911 call of the family calling for help.

On that fateful day in May 2018, Cimarron’s nine-year-old sister found her lying on the floor of her parents’ bedroom with a gun by her side.

Her family had no idea why she had taken her life and were unaware of the ordeal she had been subjected to.

Her mother, Stephanie, told investigators that she might have been unsure of her sexuality. Eighteen months later, Cimarron’s father then took his own life.

However, years later, the truth behind what had happened to Cimarron emerged.

Cimarron’s grandparents, Peggy and Dale, have taken part in an upcoming BBC documentary about McCartney, where they remember their granddaughter but speak about their suffering.

They hope that raising awareness of what they went through will prevent other families from suffering the same ordeal.

McCartney first appeared in court in Northern Ireland in late July 2019.

Police believe he targeted as many as 3,500 children on 64 devices between 2013 and 2019.

The court heard the harm McCartney caused was “unquantifiable”, and he “degraded and humiliated” victims for his own sexual gratification.

Many of his child victims have never been identified, but all their lives have been changed forever.

Then in April 2021, just before McCartney was to be arraigned on some of the charges relating to the case, investigators discovered what had happened to Cimarron.

In what is understood to be a legal first, he was charged with the manslaughter of Cimarron, which he pleaded guilty to.

McCartney eventually admitted about 185 charges involving about 70 child victims – aged between 10 and 16.

The Public Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland brought these forward as sample charges in order to produce an indictment the court could manage.

The court heard of the impact McCartney’s abuse had on his young victims; some said they have suffered flashbacks, shame, alopecia, and trust issues.

Other girls now felt paralysed when touched in any way by any man, that their childhoods had been stolen, and some had suicidal thoughts.

The litany of McCartney’s crimes spanned continents.

BBC News NI has spoken to a man from New Zealand, we’ve called him Stephen (not his real name), about the abuse suffered by his two girls after McCartney struck up a friendship with his eldest daughter, then 12, on Snapchat.

The girl, we’ve called her Rebecca (not her real name), believed that she was talking to another girl.

That Rebecca believed to be a friendship grew over a few months. Then McCartney asked Rebecca for a nude photograph, which she sent.

“He then used that to manipulate and blackmail her into sending more photos, which ended up including our youngest daughter as well as part of the blackmail,” Stephen said.

“And then, in time, through her contact list on Snapchat, he added Rebecca’s cousin as well, who was older at the time, and he then tried to threaten her with getting more photos.

“Thankfully, she was mature enough and smart enough to reach out to my wife, and then we went straight to the police from there.”

He said as soon as the first photo was sent, McCartney had power, adding that Rebecca was “playing by his rules”.

“He preyed on her innocence,” he added.

The father explained that his youngest daughter, who is two years younger, did not know what was happening.

“She just thought it was two sisters playing dress up and taking silly pictures, so she’s actually completely oblivious to it to this day.”

Stephen said McCartney’s offending has had a “profound impact” on his eldest daughter.

At the beginning of the year, she moved away for university but moved home after six weeks.

“I believe she missed out on opportunities because of trust issues. It’s something she’s going to deal with forever,” he said.

“We know she’s on this medication all the time, and the dark places that I’m sure her mind goes when she’s alone.”

Stephen said he and his wife have been devastated by what happened to their children, but there was a silver lining in that they were able to play a “small part in bringing him [McCartney] to justice and preventing further victims”.

The three part series, Teen Predator/ Online Killer, which looks at this case in greater detail will be available on BBC iPlayer, BBC One NI and BBC Three in the coming weeks.

Archaeologists have found the remains of two medieval cities in the grassy mountains of eastern Uzbekistan, a discovery that could shift our understanding of the fabled Silk Road.

Known for the exchange of goods and ideas between the East and West, the trade routes were long believed to have linked lowland cities.

But using remote sensing technology, archeologists have now found at least two highland cities that sat along a key crossroad of the trade routes.

One of the cities – Tugunbulak, a metropolis spanning at least 120 hectares – sat more than 2,000m (6,600 ft) above sea level, an altitude thought to be inhospitable even today.

“The history of Central Asia is now changing with this finding,” said archaeologist Farhod Maksudov, who was part of the research team.

The team believes Tugunbulak and the smaller city, Tashbulak, were bustling settlements between the 8th and 11th centuries, during the Middle Ages, when the area was controlled by a powerful Turkic dynasty.

Only 3% of the world’s population live above this altitude today. Lhasa in Tibet and Cusco in Peru are among the rare examples.

The discovery led by Mr Maksudov, director of Uzbekistan’s National Center of Archaeology and Michael Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St Louis, was made possible with drones and a remote-sensing tool known as lidar, which uses reflected light to create three-dimensional mappings of the environment.

Their research was published in the scientific journal Nature this week, and experts who are not involved in it have hailed its significance in shedding light on the lifestyles of nomadic communities.

The team first discovered Tashbulak, the smaller city, in 2011 while trekking in the mountains. They found burial sites, thousands of pottery shards and other signs that the territory was populated.

Historical records allude to cities in the region, he said, but the team did not expect to find a 12-hectare medieval city some 2,200m above sea level.

“We were kind of blown away,” Mr Frachetti told the BBC.

Even trekking up there was rough, he added, as they encountered strong winds, storms and logistical challenges.

Four years later, a local forestry administrator tipped off the team to study another site close to Tashbulak.

“The official said, ‘I think I have some of those kinds of ceramics in my backyard.’

“So we went to his house… And discovered his house was built on a medieval citadel. He was like living on a huge city,” Mr Frachetti said.

The most challenging part in these discoveries was in convincing the academic community that these cities existed.

“We would say to people that we found this amazing site, and we would get scepticism, that maybe it’s not so big, or it’s just a mound, or a castle… That was the big challenge, how to document this city scientifically to actually illustrate what it was,” Mr Frachetti said.

In 2022, the team returned with a drone equipped with a lidar sensor, which helped peel back the surfaces to unveil walls, guard towers, intricate architectural features and other fortifications in Tugunbulak.

The researchers suggest that communities may have chosen to settle in Tugunbulak and Tashbulak to tap strong winds to fuel fires needed to smelt iron ores – which the region was rich in. Preliminary excavations have also uncovered production kilns.

“Whoever had iron in their hands in medieval time was very powerful,” Mr Maksudov said.

But this could also have led to the communities’ downfall, he said. This area used to be covered by a thick juniper forest, but these could have been cut to facilitate iron production. “The area became environmentally very unstable because of the flash floods, because of the avalanches,” he said.

Typically, scholars have expected to find evidence of settlements lower down in the valley, “so these finds are remarkable”, said Peter Frankopan, a global history professor at Oxford University.

“What an amazing treasure trove… that shows the deep interconnections criss-crossing Asia, as well as the links between exploitation of natural resources more than a millennium ago,” he said.

High-altitude urban sites are “extraordinarily rare” in the archaeological record because communities face unique challenges in settling there, said Zachary Silvia, an archaeologist at Brown University.

The team’s work provides an “immense contribution to the study of medieval urbanism in Central Asia”, he wrote in a commentary on Nature.

Grammy Award-winning US rapper Lil Durk has been arrested on a charge of murder-for-hire, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Police records seen by US media show the star, real name Durk Devontay Banks, was arrested in Broward County, Florida, on Thursday night and is being held without bail.

The arrest comes a day after five people with ties to Banks’ hip-hop group, Only The Family (OTF), were reported to have been charged in Chicago in connection with a 2022 shooting that killed the cousin of rival rapper Quando Rondo.

Lil Durk has had six albums in the US Billboard chart’s top five since 2019, and has also collaborated with top stars like Drake and J Cole on hit singles.

The 33-year-old, from Chicago, has received four Grammy Award nominations, winning the prize for best melodic rap performance in February for All My Life, featuring J Cole.

Lil Durk founded OTF in 2010 and the group are at the centre of the city’s drill rap scene.

Officials allege the five men charged on Wednesday organised the 2022 shooting in Los Angeles as direct retaliation for the 2020 death of emerging rapper King Von, who was signed to OTF, US media report.

A friend of Quando Rondo was charged with King Von’s murder but the charges were later dropped. Quando Rondo was not arrested or charged.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the new indictment against the five men alleges that an unnamed co-conspirator offered “money and lucrative music opportunities with OTF” to anyone who took part in killing Quando Rondo.

In 2022, some of the accused men allegedly shot at a car travelling with Quando Rondo, his sister and his cousin Saviay’a Robinson.

Quando Rondo and his sister were unharmed but Robinson died.

Earlier this month, the mother of another Chicago rapper, FBG Duck, reportedly filed a lawsuit accusing Lil Durk, OTF and King Von of being involved in shooting him dead in 2020.

Meanwhile, two years ago, Lil Durk had charges including attempted murder dropped following a non-fatal shooting in Atlanta in 2019.

The BBC has contacted Lil Durk’s representatives for comment.

Three Lebanese journalists have been killed in an Israeli air strike on a building known to be housing reporters in south-eastern Lebanon, witnesses have told the BBC.

The attack was carried out on a guesthouse in a compound in Hasbaya being used by more than a dozen journalists from at least seven media organisations – with a courtyard containing cars clearly marked with “press”.

The three men worked for broadcasters Al-Manar TV and Al Mayadeen TV, which issued statements paying tribute to their killed employees.

Lebanon’s information minister said the attack was deliberate and described it as a “war crime”.

The Israeli military has not yet commented, but has previously denied targeting journalists.

Those killed were camera operator Ghassan Najjar and engineer Mohamed Reda from pro-Iranian news channel Al Mayadeen, as well as camera operator Wissam Qassem from the Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Manar.

The Lebanese ministry of health said three others were injured in the blast.

Five reporters had been killed in prior Israeli strikes in Lebanon, including Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah.

Footage broadcast by Al-Jadeed TV – whose journalists were also sharing the house – showed a bombed-out building with a collapsed roof and floors covered in rubble.

A vehicle used for TV broadcasts was overturned on its side, its satellite dish mangled with cabling nearby.

“All official parties were told that this house was being used as a stay-house for journalists. We coordinated with them all,” an Al-Jadeed journalist, caked in concrete dust, said in a live broadcast while panting and coughing.

Lebanese journalists covering the conflict in the south of the country had to relocate from nearby Marj’youn to Hasbaya, as the former became too dangerous.

Youmna Fawwaz, a reporter for broadcaster MTV Lebanon, told the BBC that journalists in the compound were awoken at around 03:00 local time (01:00 BST) by the strike.

She said ceilings had fallen in on them, and they were surrounded by rubble and dust, with the sound of fighter jets overhead.

Each news organisation had their own building in the compound, she said, and the building housing the Al Mayadeen reporters was “obliterated” while Al-Manar employees were inside.

Ms Fawwaz said it was a media compound known as such to both Israel and Hezbollah.

“The airstrike was carried out on purpose. Everyone knew we were there. All the cars were labelled as press and TV. There wasn’t even a warning given to us.”

She added: “They are trying to terrorise us just like they do in Gaza. Israelis are trying to prevent us from covering the story.”

Lebanon’s information minister accused Israel of intentionally targeting journalists, in contravention of international law.

“The Israeli enemy waited for the journalists’ nighttime break to betray them in their sleep,” Ziad Makary wrote in a post on X.

“This is an assassination, after monitoring and tracking, with prior planning and design, as there were 18 journalists there representing seven media institutions.”

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Hasbaya, about five miles (eight kilometres) from the Israeli border, is inhabited by Muslims, Christians, as well as people from the Druze ethnic and religious minority.

It has seen attacks on its peripheries in recent weeks, but this was the first strike on the settlement itself.

The attack comes as part of an expanding conflict in Lebanon, where Israel has been intensifying air strikes for weeks – as well as launching a ground invasion on border towns and villages in the south.

On Friday UN peacekeepers said they were forced to withdraw from an observation post in Zahajra, in the south-west, after it was fired on by Israeli forces earlier this week.

Unifil has accused Israel of targeting its bases several times in recent weeks, causing injuries to peacekeepers. Israel denies this and has blamed previous incidents on clashes with nearby Hezbollah fighters.

In the northern Bekaa area, the Israeli military has confirmed it attacked the Jousieh border crossing between Syria and Lebanon overnight – which it said was being used by Hezbollah and Syrian security forces to smuggle weapons.

Lebanese authorities have recorded over 1,700 air strikes across the country in the past three weeks.

Hostilities broke out between Israel and Hezbollah on 8 October last year, the day after Hamas’s attack on Israel that killed around 1,200 people. The Iran-backed armed group has since been firing rockets and drones into Israel in what it described as “solidarity” with Palestinians in Gaza.

Nearly 2,600 people in Lebanon have been killed in the current conflict, according to the country’s health ministry – many of the deaths occurring since Israel began escalating its attacks on 23 September.

Around 60,000 people in northern Israel have been displaced by Hezbollah rocket fire, and the Israeli government has declared returning them to their homes to be a key objective.

In southern Lebanon, satellite imagery examined by the BBC shows Israel’s intensified bombing campaign has caused more damage to buildings in two weeks than occurred during a year of cross-border fighting.

Data shows that more than 3,600 buildings in Lebanon appear to have been damaged or destroyed between 2 and 14 October – about 54% of the total damage.

The attack on journalists in Lebanon comes days after the Israeli military accused six Al Jazeera journalists working in northern Gaza of being affiliated with Hamas or other armed Palestinian groups.

The Qatari broadcaster said it denies and “vehemently condemns” the allegations.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 123 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched a war in the territory last year.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health authority has reported more than 42,000 people killed since.

Two Israeli journalists have also been killed in the conflict.

Two months ago, Kamala Harris was crowned as the Democratic presidential nominee at a jubilant national convention in Chicago.

For thousands of party faithful, she was the electoral saviour, replacing an 81-year-old incumbent who seemed incapable of defeating Donald Trump and winning another term.

But even then, senior party strategists told me they worried Democrats were overconfident about her path to victory. Now, as election day looms and anxieties grow, it seems their concerns were well-founded.

There is no doubt that Harris enjoyed a surge of momentum, and an instant and significant boost in the polls compared to President Joe Biden, who was lagging far behind Trump. Yet it appears she was winning back those who normally vote Democratic anyway, but who had worried about Biden and his age.

For victory, Harris needs to attract voters from beyond the Democrats’ base, while holding together the fragile coalition that helped Biden win in 2020.

The latest polls show a race that has tightened in recent weeks and is now essentially a tie.

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Worrying for Democrats is that Trump has gained ground in the crucial “blue wall” states that offer Harris her clearest path to victory – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – as well as among black and Latino voters.

Although the race is neck-and-neck in the key swing states, poll numbers are within the margin of error. In other words, they could be wrong.

But Harris’s criticism of Trump, her Republican opponent, has become much darker in the last few days. At the convention, she laughed at Trump, dismissing him as an “unserious man” and “weird”. Now she is calling him a “fascist” and “increasingly unhinged and unstable”.

Her original message of wanting to bring “joy” has turned to one of fear – warning of what she says are the dangerous consequences of a second Trump term.

Polling suggests Harris is likely to win the popular vote. But that won’t be enough. She has to win key battleground states to win in the electoral college.

But in recent weeks as I’ve travelled through most of those states, the reservations many voters still have about Harris – a woman they feel they still don’t know enough about – have been clear.

Harris has a very particular problem in Michigan, which has the highest concentration of Arab-American voters in the US.

Biden won the state in 2020 by just over 150,000 votes, but his administration’s inability to rein in Israel’s attacks in Gaza and Lebanon has deeply hurt the party’s standing among the 300,000 Arab-Americans living here.

Harris, Biden’s vice-president, is being held equally responsible.

In the Haraz coffee shop in Dearborn, a Middle Eastern-style café serving Turkish coffee and pomegranate juice, I met a group of lifelong Democrats who normally would be out campaigning.

I expected to hear some of them say they couldn’t vote for Harris, and would be sitting out the vote. But Samraa Luqman, who describes herself as further left than most Democrats, said she is not only voting Trump but is actively encouraging others to do so.

“I believe there has to be accountability for all the lives lost,” she told me. “I do not forgive the Democrats for it, and I will not be scared into voting for them.”

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Chadi Abdulrazek said he could never have imagined voting for Trump a year ago, but now Samraa may persuade him.

“If I do want to punish the Democrats, specifically this administration, then I might have to consider that,” he said. ”Every time I say that, I feel like I have to go and throw up. But also I think about my family, my people, in Palestine and in Lebanon”

Harris has spoken about her anger over the suffering in Gaza and Lebanon, but these voters want her to say she will refuse to supply weapons to Israel if they are used in strikes that kill civilians.

In Michigan, the working-class and union vote could prove pivotal, too. Jean Ducheman, a United Auto Workers union official in the city of Lansing, Michigan, is more optimistic about Harris.

When I spoke to him in July, he wanted Biden to step aside because of his age. But he also had deep reservations about Harris. Now he says he is convinced she is the best choice and that she is winning over some of his undecided colleagues.

Mr Ducheman believes that campaigning extensively in Michigan has made a real difference.

“She came and spoke to us and that’s really appreciated,” he said, despite the fact that some unions have chosen not to endorse Harris.

The most important swing state is Pennsylvania because it has the largest number of votes in the all-important electoral college. With polls deadlocked, both sides have poured hundreds of millions into advertising here to reach undecided voters.

On every visit, I’ve found voters care the most about the economy. And it’s an area where Trump seems to enjoy a significant advantage: No matter how much Democrats point to rosy job numbers or economic growth, people simply felt better off four years ago before record-high inflation cut into monthly budgets.

At a national hunting and fishing event in Bald Eagle National Park, I met Gene Wool, one of those hard-to-find undecideds.

He said he was reluctant to vote for Trump because of what he described as the “scandals surrounding him”.

But Mr Wool is sure that when Trump was in office, food and petrol prices were lower.

“Most of my friends are probably going to vote for Trump,” he says, adding that he thinks Pennsylvania will swing that way, too.

Harris is focusing on women in the Pennsylvania suburbs – especially those who may usually vote Republican but are turned off byTrump’s rhetoric and behaviour.

Recent Harris events where she has appeared with moderate Republicans like former congresswoman Liz Cheney are aimed at persuading this group that it’s preferable to vote Democratic even if you don’t agree with Harris’s policies – just to keep Trump out of the White House.

Harris holds a very strong lead among female voters across the nation in an election with the country’s biggest ever gender divide.

She has not campaigned on the historic nature of her candidacy, almost never mentioning that if elected she would be the first female president. But she does stress her support for women’s reproductive rights.

Trump boasts of appointing the Supreme Court justices who ended the nation’s right to an abortion, in place for over 50 years. But he knows that the very strict abortion bans some states introduced afterwards are deeply unpopular with a lot of voters, forcing him to walk a careful line.

Early one evening in Phoenix, Arizona, recently, I joined some volunteers in a trendy downtown bar having a “postcard party”. They were writing personal messages about why they believe in abortion rights to be sent to Arizona voters. Many are not usually politically active.

In Arizona, one of the two battleground states in America’s west, there is a proposition on the ballot to decide whether to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution – effectively overturning the current law that forbids terminating a pregnancy after 15 weeks.

The hope for Democrats is that women in the ten states with such abortion ballot measures are driven to the polls by that issue, and while there, cast a presidential vote for Harris.

Nicole Nye told me it was the first time she had become involved in a political campaign, and she has already recruited a voter – her 62-year-old mother who had never voted before.

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“I said to her [that] I’m very concerned about my rights. She was fortunate enough to grow up in a time when those rights had been secured for her …It’s concerning that that’s up in the air for me.”

Arizona polls suggest voters are likely to support the proposition by a wide margin, but that may not translate into votes for Harris. As many as one in five people say they plan to vote to guarantee abortion rights in Arizona, but at the same time cast a ballot for Trump.

Neither Harris nor Trump know who will be the next president of the United States. Nor do any of the pollsters or political pundits.

But it appears Harris has not been able to sustain the excitement and optimism she generated when she first became a presidential candidate. She now has to slog it out, fighting for every vote, to stand a chance of breaking what the last woman to run for US president, Hillary Clinton, called “the highest, hardest glass ceiling”.

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.

It costs €15,000 (£12,500) for the whole “package”, we are told. For that we would be given an inflatable dinghy, with an outboard motor and 60 life jackets, to get across the English Channel.

This is the “good price” offered by two small-boat smugglers to an undercover BBC journalist in Essen – a western German city where many migrants live or pass through.

A five-month-long BBC investigation has exposed the significant German connection to the lethal human smuggling trade across the English Channel.

As the new UK government promises to “smash the gangs”, Germany has become a central location for the storage of boats and engines eventually used in Channel crossings – confirmed to the BBC by Britain’s National Crime Agency.

During covert filming, smugglers revealed to us that they store boats in multiple secret warehouses – as they play cat-and-mouse games with German police.

This year is already the deadliest for migrant Channel crossings, UN figures show, while more than 28,000 people have so far made the journey in small, dangerously packed boats.

__

Our undercover reporter is waiting outside the central station in the city of Essen.

He is wearing a secret camera and posing as a Middle Eastern migrant, eager to cross the Channel to the UK with his family and friends.

He must remain anonymous, for his safety, but we will refer to him as Hamza.

He approaches a man. It is someone Hamza has been in touch with for months, via WhatsApp calls, after getting his number through a contact within the migrant community – but this is the first time they have met.

This man’s name – or at least the name he has given us – is Abu Sahar.

Since Hamza contacted him, they have discussed how Sahar can help provide a dinghy to get to the south coast of England.

Hamza has told him that bad experiences with the smuggling gangs in the Calais region have driven him, his family and friends to try to manage their crossing alone – an unusual step.

Sahar has already sent a video of an inflated dinghy which, he has suggested, is “new”, available and being kept in a warehouse in the Essen area.

He will go on to supply more footage including other, similar looking, boats as well as outboard engines being fired up.

Hamza has said he wants to check the quality of the items on offer himself and that is why he has insisted on an in-person meeting.

A BBC team is nearby, monitoring Hamza’s movements, in case anything goes wrong, or we need to extract him quickly.

As the two men walk through the centre of Essen, Sahar declares it is too “risky” to go to the warehouse to see the boat, even though he says it is less than 15 minutes’ drive away.

When Hamza asks about why the boats are kept in this part of Germany, Sahar talks about “safety” and “logistics”.

Essen is just a four- to five-hour drive from the Calais area – close enough to get boats there fast, but not too close to the more heavily monitored beaches of northern France.

While police raids do happen, including under European Arrest Warrants, the facilitation of people-smuggling is not technically illegal in Germany if it is to a third country outside the EU, which the UK now is after Brexit.

The interior ministry in Berlin argues that, because Germany and the UK aren’t geographical neighbours, “no direct smuggling” actually takes place – but a UK Home Office source told the BBC there is “frustration” about Germany’s legal framework.

Sahar takes Hamza to a cafe where they order coffees and light cigarettes, although they move tables because there are Arabic speakers next to them and Sahar doesn’t want to be overheard.

Just over 35 minutes later, Sahar gets up out of his chair and tells Hamza: “Lower your voice, he’s coming.”

A well-dressed man in a baseball cap approaches. He is referred to as “al-Khal”, which means “the Uncle” – a phrase in Arabic that implies someone who commands significant respect.

Khal is accompanied by another man who will remain largely silent, but appears to be his bodyguard.

There are some handshakes before Khal talks to the waitress in German and then switches back to Arabic, his native tongue.

Hamza is told to hand over his phone, which is placed on a separate table.

The bodyguard sits next to Hamza and will spend much of the next 22 minutes staring intently at him.

During the meeting, because of strict German law, the BBC can only record video, not the audio.

Our reporting of it is therefore partly based on the immediate recollection of our undercover journalist – an established method in German investigative reporting.

It is backed up by messages, call records and voice notes between Hamza and the smugglers.

“Don’t raise your voice,” says Khal as he instructs Hamza to explain who he is and what he wants.

Hamza repeats his cover story, apparently convincingly.

He also suggests the boat purchase they are now discussing may not, in fact, even be illegal because of grey areas in German law.

But Khal dismisses that suggestion.

“Who told you that?” he asks. “It’s not legal.”

Even if there are legal loopholes in Germany around boat-smuggling, it appears these men know they are involved in a wider criminal network.

During their coffee, Khal sometimes prods Hamza in the chest as the smugglers disclose they have about 10 warehouses in the Essen area.

That, it is implied, is a way of dividing up their goods in case of a police raid – which there was a “few days ago”.

Sometimes, it is suggested, they get word the police are coming and give them “bait” – meaning supplies are confiscated but seemingly not enough to seriously disrupt the operation.

The smugglers talk about their ability to get equipment to Calais within “three, four hours”, which indicates they feel bold enough to use motorways, rather than back roads.

Essen’s location means boats can be delivered within a morning or afternoon, should a good weather forecast prompt a surge in crossing attempts and therefore demand.

According to research by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, boats are typically transported by vans or cars from Germany, Belgium or the Netherlands to the French coast, with Germany a “particularly important transit point”.

Most of the vessels, they found, have been manufactured in China before being sent, by container, to Turkey and then moved into Europe.

One of the report’s authors, Tuesday Reitano, says Germany’s role as a hub has grown for various reasons including robust “anti-smuggling controls” in France, which have driven increasingly organised gangs to operate over longer distances.

She also believes the German authorities are less engaged with the issue of Channel crossings because, “It’s not a problem that’s on their border”.

Back at the cafe, Khal is apparently satisfied that Hamza is legitimate and starts talking money.

His preference is that Hamza takes the “package” deal which will cost €15,000 (£12,500).

That involves collecting the boat near Calais, along with an engine, fuel, pump and 60 lifejackets – more than Hamza has said he needs, but that is the blanket offer, and one that would more likely be made to a fellow smuggler directly organising the crossings in France.

Those smugglers’ profits are potentially “extraordinary” if you assume adults are being charged about €2,000 (£1,660) for a single trip with dozens of people on board – according to Global Initiative.

If a deal is agreed now, Khal claims he could get a boat to a location that is just 200m (655ft) from the French shoreline, by as soon as tomorrow.

Khal and Sahar also refer to a “new crossing point”, suggesting they have found a place less under the eye of the French authorities, though they don’t reveal its location.

There is a second, cheaper option, which Hamza has been pitching for all along.

For about €8,000 (£6,670) Hamza could pick up the boat himself, here at a warehouse in Essen, and drive it to northern France independently.

If you get caught, the smugglers tell him, we are not responsible.

Conversation turns to how Hamza would pay the gang, once he has decided what to do.

Khal wants the cash paid in Turkey, because “all the stuff” comes from there.

The money, he suggests, can be deposited through the Hawala system – a payment method that avoids formal banking and instead relies on a network of agents to deliver cash across borders.

Later, Hamza is sent an account name on WhatsApp.

Other messages and voice notes in Arabic, also sent after the cafe meeting, include Sahar describing brands of outboard motors. He “loves” Mercury ones, he says, although “if there is Yamaha, I prefer Yamaha”.

He talks about how they can “deliver and bury” the gear, implying it can be hidden underground near a crossing point, with Boulogne a better option because, “Calais, it’s hard”.

In what appears to be a sales pressure tactic, Hamza is also told the smugglers have “limited” stocks but plenty of buyers.

Khal is more careful in his communications, but in one voice note, forwarded by Sahar, he expresses unease after meeting Hamza, saying: “Your friend, he seems not OK.”

Nevertheless, he instructs Sahar to get a decision from Hamza about whether he wants to buy a boat or not: “Ask him in the next one or two hours.”

Eventually, Hamza tells them he can no longer go ahead with the deal.

The BBC paid no money to these men, whose real identities we have not been able to establish definitively.

We have shown footage we received of the boats to the Chair of the National Independent Lifeboat Association, Neil Dalton, who says he wouldn’t go in a “duck pond” in such vessels.

Comparing one to a “death trap”, he says it would be “appallingly dangerous” to pack dozens of people onto these boats for a Channel crossing, because of what appears to be a “tremendously flimsy” design.

Meanwhile, diplomats insist that co-operation between Germany and the UK, on tackling these gangs, has improved.

Arrests and warehouse raids have happened in Germany, in partnership with other countries – while so-called “collateral crime”, such as violence or money-laundering, can be prosecuted within Germany.

February saw a major raid where boats, engines, life vests and flotation devices for children were seized in Germany with 19 arrests – but these were made under Belgian and French judicial orders. A separate trial, following a similar operation in 2022, is being prosecuted in France.

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A UK Home Office spokesperson told the BBC the government is “rapidly accelerating” work with countries, including Germany, to “crack down on the criminal smuggling gangs”, but “there is always more to do together”.

That sentiment is echoed by the French authorities.

“It is important to demonstrate to the Germans that these boats are linked to offences on our coasts, which will allow them to intervene,” Pascal Marconville, a prosecutor in northern France, told the BBC earlier this month.

Berlin’s interior ministry told the BBC that bilateral cooperation was “very good” and that German authorities can take action at the request of the UK.

A spokesperson added that while it isn’t illegal to aid smuggling from Germany to the UK, it is punishable to aid smuggling to Belgium or France, where Channel crossings take place.

The BBC’s investigation highlights “exactly the sort of activity we want to be working to address”, Downing Street said.

Asked whether Germany should be doing more to stop inflatable dinghies being smuggled through the country, Keir Starmer’s official spokesperson said: “It is vital that we continue to step up our approach on enforcement, and that goes to other countries.

“We need to keep pace with the scale of their activity, and it’s something that we’ll be working very closely with the Germans and others on.”

Along the shores of north-eastern France, you can find the remnants of failed crossing attempts on boats that, according to the National Crime Agency, are becoming “ever more dangerous and unseaworthy”.

The deflated dinghies and abandoned life jackets on these beaches may look worthless, but someone will have paid huge sums for what they hoped was a route to a better life.

It is a trade in misery, desperation and, in the worst cases, death – but one that continues to evolve and thrive deep inside Europe.

Following publication, we asked al-Khal for a response but he did not reply.

At least 38 people have been killed in Israeli strikes in southern Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry says, as Israeli troops reportedly raided one of the last functioning hospitals in the north of the territory.

Rescue workers said nine children from one family were among those killed near the southern city of Khan Younis.

The ministry and medics also said Israeli troops had ordered patients and staff to leave Kamal Adwan hospital in the northern town of Beit Lahia, close to the besieged Jabalia area.

The Israeli military said it was checking the reports from Khan Younis and that forces were operating “in the area” of Kamal Adwan based on intelligence “regarding the presence of terrorists”.

Meanwhile, Jordan’s foreign minister warned that Israel was carrying out “ethnic cleansing” in northern Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians have reportedly been killed and tens of thousands displaced in recent weeks.

At least two residential buildings in the south-eastern al-Manara neighbourhood of Khan Younis were hit by Israeli air strikes around dawn on Friday, according to a spokesman for Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency.

Fourteen people, including nine children, were killed when the home of the al-Fara family was hit, while six other people were killed in a second strike on a nearby home, Mahmoud Bassal said.

“The rocket fell next to us, and we were buried under the rubble. My children and sister were killed,” Umm al-Ameer al-Fara who survived told AFP news agency.

Ihsan al-Fara said her five-year-old son Issa was killed and that there had only been women and children in the house.

The Civil Defence posted a video that it said showed its rescue workers recovering the bodies of the children from the al-Faras’ home. The same children were also later photographed in body bags at the nearby European Gaza hospital.

Reuters news agency also said the bodies of another three children were brought to Nasser hospital, in Khan Younis.

The Gaza health ministry said a total of 38 people were killed in what it condemned as “several massacres” by the Israeli military.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, but on Friday morning it put out a statement saying that it had “eliminated several terrorists from the air and the ground and dismantled numerous terrorist infrastructures” over the past day.

Meanwhile in northern Gaza, the health ministry said Israeli forces had “stormed” Kamal Adwan hospital and were detaining the hundreds of patients, medical staff and displaced people inside.

“At midnight, the occupation army tanks and bulldozers reached the hospital. The terrorising of civilians, the injured and children began as [the Israeli forces] started opening fire on the hospital,” Eid Sabbah, the director of nursing, said in a voice note to Reuters.

He said the Israeli forces retreated when a delegation from the World Health Organization (WHO) arrived with an ambulance and evacuated 40 patients. However, tanks later returned to the surrounding area and opened fire at the hospital, hitting its oxygen stores, before troops began a raid and ordered staff and patients to leave, he added.

A video posted on social media also showed the hospital’s director, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, speaking on the telephone while walking through a busy ward with what appeared to be two shattered windows and a damaged ceiling.

“Instead of receiving aid we receive tanks. Tanks that are shelling the building,” he says.

The WHO’s director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the agency had lost touch with personnel at Kamal Adwan hospital.

“This development is deeply disturbing given the number of patients being served and people sheltering there,” he added.

He confirmed that the a WHO team had reached the hospital late on Thursday night “amid hostilities in the vicinity”, and transferred 23 patients and 26 caregivers to al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. They also delivered units of blood, trauma and surgical supplies.

“Kamal Adwan Hospital has been overflowing with close to 200 patients – a constant stream of horrific trauma cases. It is also full of hundreds of people seeking shelter,” he added.

The Israeli military said in a statement that its forces were “operating in the area of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Jabalia, based on intelligence information regarding the presence of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure in the area”.

“In the weeks preceding the operation, the [forces] facilitated the evacuation of patients from the area while maintaining emergency services,” it added.

Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi urged US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to put pressure on Israel over the deteriorating humanitarian situation and the mass displacement of civilians in northern Gaza.

“We look at northern Gaza and we do see ethnic cleansing taking place, and that has got to stop,” he said at the start of a meeting in London.

Many Palestinians believe the Israeli military is implementing out the so-called “Generals’ Plan” in the north, which would see the forced displacement of all of the estimated 400,000 civilians there to the south followed by a siege of any remaining Hamas fighters.

The Israeli military has denied having such a plan and said its offensive in Jabalia is to rout a Hamas resurgence.

Safadi also warned that the Middle East stood on the “brink of regional war”, adding that every time he met Blinken the situation was getting worse, “not for lack of us trying but because we do have an Israeli government that is not listening to anybody, and that has got to stop”.

“The only path to save the region from that is for Israel to stop the aggressions on Gaza, on Lebanon, stop unilateral measures, illegal measures in the West Bank, that is also pushing the situation to the abyss,” he stated.

Blinken is meeting Arab leaders and foreign ministers in the UK following a diplomatic tour of the Middle East.

The US is believed to be working on a plan for post-conflict Gaza, trying to get buy-in from Arab countries even though progress on a ceasefire and hostage deal for Gaza has been stalled for weeks.

Blinken said he was having important conversations “on ending the war in Gaza and charting a path for what comes next”. He also said there was a “sense of real urgency in getting a diplomatic resolution” to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

On Thursday, Israel said it would send the head of its Mossad intelligence agency to Doha on Sunday to meet the CIA director and Qatar’s prime minister amid renewed efforts to restart the Gaza ceasefire and hostage release talks.

It came after a Hamas delegation met Egyptian security officials in Cairo. Hamas said there had been no change in its conditions for a deal, which include the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

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 42,840 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

The King has told Commonwealth leaders “none of us can change the past” at a summit in Samoa.

But leaders could commit to learning from history and “finding creative ways to right inequalities that endure,” he told the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

Diplomatic sources have told the BBC a number of the grouping’s leaders want to start a “meaningful conversation” about whether the UK should pay reparations for its role in the slave trade.

The King, who did not directly address slavery, was speaking at the opening of the biennial summit for the first time as the head of the 56-member group.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said leaders at the summit “must acknowledge our shared history – especially when it’s hard”.

He said he understood “the strength of feeling” around calls for the UK to pay compensation for its role in the transatlantic slave trade.

In his speech, King Charles said the “most painful aspects of our past continue to resonate”.

“The right ways, and the right language” should be used to address inequalities, he said, adding: “It is vital therefore that we understand our history to guide us to make the right choices in the future.”

“Let us choose within our Commonwealth family the language of community and respect, and reject the language of division.”

When the King makes a speech as monarch he has to stick to the advice of minsters on areas of politics or policy.

So for issues such as reparations or an apology for slavery he must uphold the government’s position.

From 1500, the British government and the monarchy were prominent participants in the centuries-long slave trade, alongside other European nations. Historians estimate British ships transported over three million enslaved Africans, mostly to colonies in the Caribbean and North America.

Britain also had a key role in ending the trade, through Parliament’s passage of a law to abolish slavery in 1833.

Some Commonwealth leaders have called for the UK to pay financial compensation, known as reparations, for its historic role in the slave trade.

A report published last year by the University of West Indies – backed by Patrick Robinson, a judge who sits on the International Court of Justice – concluded the UK owed more than £18tn ($23tn) in reparations for its role in slavery in 14 Caribbean countries.

But successive UK governments have resisted these calls. Ahead of the summit, Downing Street insisted the issue of reparations would not be on the agenda.

However, several Commonwealth leaders – particularly those from Caribbean countries – are expected to defy the UK and hold discussions on securing reparations from the UK.

The draft of the summit conclusion, seen by the BBC, says that the heads of government noted “calls for discussions” on reparations for transatlantic slave trade.

It says they “agreed that the time has come for a meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation towards forging a common future based on equity”.

British officials succeeded in blocking plans for an entirely separate declaration on reparations, but at the moment are having to accept that some text on the subject will appear in the final communiqué.

Starmer has told the BBC that slavery was “abhorrent” and that it is important to “talk about our history”.

But he added he wanted the summit to focus on “today’s challenges,” such as climate change and boosting trade within the Commonwealth.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves ruled out paying reparations, saying: “That’s not something that this government is doing.” The government has also ruled out non-financial reparations.

But the foreign minister of the Bahamas said he hoped the UK would change its stance, and urged the government to offer an apology.

“It’s a simple matter,” Frederick Mitchell said. “It can be done, one sentence, one line.”

Asked about apologising for slavery, Starmer said: “Of course, an apology has already been made in relation to the slave trade, and that’s not surprising, it’s what we would expect.”

The UK has never formally apologised for its role in the slave trade, though in 2007 then-Prime Minister Tony Blair said: “Well actually I have said it: We are sorry. And I say it again now.”

The BBC spoke to several locals in Samoa about the summit.

Pisa Pisa Imoamoa, a teacher, was excited to see her country hosting such a large summit, describing it as “an honour”.

“It’s good to see a lot of people from overseas, especially the King,” she said.

“I think it’s good for the economy. It helps a lot of people, especially our people, by people coming here.”

She added that the summit gave smaller countries the chance to have their say on climate change, an issue that will disproportionately affect the small island nations that make up much of the Commonwealth.

“It’s really exciting for a small country like us having this first commonwealth meeting,” says Lucy Upumoni, who owns a shop near the fish market on the waterfront in Apia.

“It’s really a great opportunity for us, to make friends with palagi guys [foreigners/non-Samoans] – it’s an honour for us.”

On reparations, Amanda Taavaomaalii, a teacher, said: “We have different opinions.

“It’s already in the past – nothing more to talk about.”

The King also used his speech to highlight climate change, saying: “We are well past believing it is a problem for the future.

“It is already undermining the development gains we have long fought for.”

Outrage has erupted on social media after Somalia’s Family Minister Gen Bashir Mohamed Jama shared photos on X of himself and another male delegate representing Somalia at a UN meeting about women’s issues.

“It is tone-deaf for the Somali government to have men on the frontline, representing women at the conference,” Fathiya Absie, a well-known Somali author and human rights activist, told the BBC.

A senior civil servant has told the BBC that two women also made up Somalia’s four-member delegation to the Women, Peace and Security Focal Points Network event in New York, but were not included in the photo.

Out of 197 delegates registered for the event from 57 countries, just 21 were men.

The group photo from the event – held earlier this week – has provoked further ridicule from Somalis online, with many saying the government does not take women’s issues seriously.

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Several photos were tweeted from the conference, one showing Gen Jama with his adviser, former MP Abdullahi Godah Barre; another showed them in the meeting room with another man, who the BBC was told was an aide.

“He was not the only male minister present – there were a lot of other male ministers, such as Japan and China,” Mohamed Bashir, a senior civil servant at Somalia’s Ministry of Family and Human Development, told the BBC.

The two female Somali delegates were Iman Elman, a prominent military officer, and Sadia Mohammed Nur, a civil servant from the ministry, he said.

The online backlash has reignited criticism of the government’s decision in July to rename what was the Ministry of Women and Human Rights Development to the Ministry of Family and Human Rights Development.

This is when Gen Jama, a senior military officer who has held posts including heading the spy agency and prisons service, was appointed to lead the ministry.

“Removing the word ‘women’ from the ministry’s title is an erasure of the struggles and specific needs of women. It generalises their issues under the broader term ‘family,'” Ms Absie said.

Women’s rights in Somalia have been under scrutiny for many years.

Women in Somalia – which has suffered a long civil war and a more recent Islamist insurgency – have long played a vital role in peacebuilding, often stepping into leadership roles and pushing for greater political participation.

Despite this, there are not many women in positions of political influence.

“Women were always the minority in leadership and now they have given the remaining ministries to men,” Ms Absie said.

Some did defend the government, saying they did not see anything wrong with having a man with experience fronting the family ministry.

But the voices of those calling for a stronger female presence are growing louder – and Mr Bashir said the ministry would be striving to give women a more significant role in future.

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Georgians know all about Russia’s wars. Several years before Russia invaded Ukraine, its army launched a five-day war in August 2008. The city of Gori was bombed and occupied, and a fierce battle further north in Shindisi left the station destroyed and the railway abandoned.

So when the country’s four opposition groups label Saturday’s pivotal election as a choice between Russia or Europe, their aim is to end 12 years of rule by the governing Georgian Dream party, who they accuse of drifting back into Russia’s orbit.

They want to revive Georgia’s stalled bid to join the European Union.

“In these streets we had Russians,” says Mindia Goderdzishvili, running the campaign in Gori for opposition group Coalition for Change. “People here have this in their memories and the government uses this in a bad way, playing on their emotions because they want to stay in power.”

Georgian Dream, known as GD, and its powerful billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili vehemently reject the opposition’s framing of the vote as a choice between Russia or Europe.

Theirs is the party of peace, they argue, while the opposition, backed by an unidentified “global war party” wants to drag Georgia into war.

A short distance from the bombed out station in Shindisi lie the graves of 17 Georgian soldiers who died defending the town. The separation line is not far north from here and beyond it is South Ossetia, one of two breakaway Georgian regions still under Russian military occupation.

“I don’t think anybody can guarantee Georgia’s security today,” says Maka Bochorishvili, the head of Georgia’s EU integration committee tells the BBC at Georgian Dream’s new headquarters in Tbilisi.

“We are not members of Nato, we don’t have that umbrella over our head. The last war of 2008 was not long ago.”

Her party still promises to take former Soviet republic Georgia into the European Union by 2030, but that commitment seems hollow when the EU has put the process on hold because of a law targeting “foreign influence” that threatens countless media and non-government groups.

Add to that a recent law targeting LGBT rights in Georgia and local reports of intimidation of voters, and it is no surprise that EU ambassador Pawel Herczynski feels that “instead of getting closer, Georgia is moving away from the European Union”.

On Thursday, financial police raided the homes of two Tbilisi-based women who are part of a research arm of the US-based Atlantic Council think tank. The prime minister suggested the searches “might uncover something interesting”.

Pro-Western president Salome Zourabichvili has openly called on Georgians to support opposition groups, who have backed her plan for a one-year technocratic government if they win.

Much of the spotlight in this election has focused on Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s richest man who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s and is considered the guiding force behind the ruling party.

Ivanishvili has gone into Saturday’s election promising to ban the biggest opposition party, the United National Movement, because of what it did before GD came to power.

UNM’s former leader, Mikheil Saakashvili is locked up in jail, but GD wants to go after other opposition figures too, so the ban could extend far beyond one party. For that to happen, they would need to win a big majority.

That seems unlikely, although Georgia’s opinion polls are unreliable and questions have been raised over the secrecy of the vote, despite a new electronic voting system.

Ivanishvili visited Gori during the election campaign and promised an apology to the people of South Ossetia for the 2008 war, which he blamed on Saakashvili’s government, rather than the Russians who bombed the city.

The billionaire doubled down on that at the party’s final campaign rally in the heart of Tbilisi on Wednesday. Speaking behind protective glass, he told supporters that the UNM had committed treason.

His rationale, presumably, is that by going after the biggest opposition party, voters will be dissuaded from backing any of the others.

For Aleksandre, a 30-year-old voter in Shindisi, the idea that Saakashvili started the war is “absurd”.

Most of the people of his age have left the town because of the lack of opportunities there.

He would rather the government focus on reviving the railway line and protect Georgians from creeping Russian encroachment on Georgian land.

The Kremlin has made no secret of its preference for Georgian Dream.

A few months ago Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service accused the US of preparing to stage a Ukraine-style revolution in the streets to stop GD from winning a fourth term in office. The SVR had no evidence for its allegation, and the US denied it.

Now Russia has latched on to an unfounded allegation made by Georgian Dream’s founder that a high-ranking foreign official asked Georgia’s former prime minister to join a war with Russia “for three or four days”.

“I don’t see any reason not to believe [it],” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Russian media.

Gori’s memory of Georgia’s northern neighbour is not based solely on what happened in 2008.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin grew up here and tourists come here to see his childhood home and personal railway carriage, although the guides no longer gloss over the millions he sent to their deaths in Soviet gulags.

Opposition campaigners in Gori say some voters retain a lingering affection for the Soviet period, but that most people have moved on.

The broad consensus here and across Georgia is that their future lies within the European Union, rather than outside it. What is less clear is who they think will give them that chance.

The UK has said it would consider providing intelligence gathered from surveillance flights over Gaza to the International Criminal Court (ICC) if requested.

The ICC is already carrying out an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by both Hamas and Israel.

The Royal Air Force (RAF) has flown hundreds of surveillance flights over Gaza since last December, reportedly using Shadow R1 spy planes based in nearby Cyprus.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said these flights were to gather intelligence related to the hostages seized by Hamas on 7 October last year.

But it has also stated it is willing to share intelligence relating to war crimes with the ICC.

The MoD has denied reports it is providing wider targeting information to Israel or that RAF aircraft have been used to fly weapons into Israel during its war in Gaza.

The MoD said in a statement: “In line with our international obligations, we would consider any formal request from the International Criminal Court to provide information relating to investigations into war crimes.

“The UK is not a participant in the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

“Our mandate is narrowly defined to focus on securing the release of the hostages only, including British nationals, with the RAF routinely conducting unarmed flights since December 2023 for this sole purpose.”

As yet there has been no formal request from the ICC.

In May, ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan said there were reasonable grounds to believe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leaders Yahiya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh bore criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity from the day of Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October onwards.

Deif, Haniyeh and Sinwar have all been killed in recent weeks and any request for the arrest warrants of Netanyahu and Gallant must yet be approved by ICC judges.

Following the UK general election the new Labour government lifted opposition to the ICC having the right to seek an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, a change in policy Mr Khan told the BBC he welcomed.

In recent months the British government has also restricted UK arms sales to Israel and refunded the UN agency helping Palestinians.

From the outside, it is hard to comprehend the depth of suffering experienced by civilians in Gaza.

On Monday 21 October, a video emerged from Jabalia that gave an unusually detailed insight into the pressure and the horror imposed on civilians by Israel’s current offensive in northern Gaza. Watching it, you feel almost like an eyewitness.

Every day, like many journalists who are forced to report the war from outside Gaza because Israel will not let us in, I watch many videos that emerge online, harrowing scenes of wounded, dying and bereaved people in hospitals, of men in the rubble rescuing survivors and digging out bodies, and civilians forced to move by the Israelis, walking through thick sand where roads used to be, past the unrecognisable ruins.

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They are all horrible to see, and so was the one that came from the attack in Jabalia on Monday morning. But for me it was unusual because it showed the pain, grief, chaos, panic and hopelessness in the seconds and minutes immediately after an attack.

The moment is so extreme that taking out a phone to film it is the last thing most people do. Over many years as a reporter in wars, I have seen and experienced the same disbelief and shock. It takes time for the brain to catch up with the utterly changed reality that your eyes are seeing.

The Jabalia Boys Elementary school was attacked just after 09:00 in the morning, on 21 October. It was no longer a place of learning but had been turned into a shelter for displaced civilians, like many schools in Gaza run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. All the ones still standing, that is.

In the video, a paramedic called Nevine al Dawawi, increasingly panic-stricken, runs between dead and dying civilians, using her phone to document what is happening (when I reported this first, on the day of the strike, she was misidentified as Nabila.)

We managed to track down Nevine in Gaza City. She was able to give us her own account of what happened on Monday morning. She answered questions, and much more composed now, she played back the video.

In it, she is agitated and scared, running between civilians lying in their own blood, next to dead bodies.

“Calm down,” she screams at a badly hurt woman sitting in a pool of blood.

“I swear I don’t have anything to stop the bleeding.”

She runs down a passage pockmarked by shrapnel. On a stairwell she sees more casualties, turns away in horror, picks up a bag and says “let’s go, so no-one else gets killed”.

A man’s voice on the video says, “stay with us Nevine.” Grabbing the bag, which is full of wound dressings, she goes back to the stairwell that is running with blood. A child’s voice says, please help, my sister is dying, please help me.

A woman says my children are gone. Nevine asked how she knew.

“Look at them,” the woman says. One is very still, the other has a severe head wound and is either dead or dying.

Nevine hands over dressings, even though it is too late. They are all she has, and she is the only paramedic there.

Nevine told us that the woman on the stairs whose children were killed was Lina Ibrahim Abu Namos. Journalists working for the BBC found her in Kamal Adwan hospital in Jabalia where she is being treated for shrapnel injuries. Two of Lina’s seven children were killed, her eldest daughter and her only son.

Her husband wasn’t with them when the attack happened, as he was already being treated for wounds sustained in an earlier attack.

“I saw my daughter dying, with my own eyes. She was dying in front of me. I couldn’t stop it, and she was my eldest, my whole life, honestly, my entire life. When your eldest dies in front of you…”

“I couldn’t save her, and I was also wounded. I couldn’t handle myself, I found myself falling on the ground. I started crawling towards her.”

Nevine, the paramedic, explained that they had been “besieged” at the school for 16 or 17 days. Above them was the buzz of quadcopters, small drones used extensively by the IDF. It has a range of them, for surveillance and espionage, to issue orders through loudspeakers, for dropping bombs or firing at Palestinians they want to kill.

“We were living in so much fear. When the school was hit, we had people killed and injured. There was nothing there to eat or drink. The water tanker that was usually sent to us was bombed by the Israelis. It was like that for days. Three days ago, a quadcopter descended on the school at nine in the morning, giving us an ultimatum to get out by 10. The quadcopter loudspeaker said we had to evacuate the school because we were in a dangerous fighting zone.”

“We didn’t have time to pack our stuff. It gave us just one hour. After just 10 minutes, Israeli airplanes bombed the school. It was a big massacre with over 30 wounded and more than 10 killed.”

In the video, the wounded and dead on the bloody stairs are not the only casualties. Nevine leaves the stairwell, and runs to a man probably in his sixties, who is leaning over a pile of bags with his head in his hands. She looks to see if somehow, he has survived a severe neck wound and screams when she sees that he has not.

“Help him, he’s dead – it’s Uncle Abu Mohammed.”

Three days later I sent questions for a Palestinian freelance journalist to ask her at al Ahli hospital in Gaza City. One was about Abu Mohammed.

“He was our neighbour. His two sons were also killed… one had half his head gone.”

She talked our reporter through the video as she played it back on her phone.

“The video showed girls torn to pieces. It also shows men with their intestines protruding from stomach wounds… A 10-year-old boy had his bowels bulging outside his stomach. His mum was killed, injured in the heart.”

“Some women who were taking cover were also injured and others killed. A cleaner at the school was shredded into pieces. A 12-year-old girl had a leg blown off. So did a woman displaced from Beit Hanoun, a town in Gaza’s north. She was aged between 35 and 40.”

The day before the attack on the school, as Israel’s offensive intensified, Tor Wennesland – the senior UN diplomat in Jerusalem – issued a strong statement.

“The nightmare in Gaza is intensifying. Horrifying scenes are unfolding in the northern Strip amidst conflict, relentless Israeli strikes and an ever-worsening humanitarian crisis.”

“Nowhere is safe in Gaza. I condemn the continuing attacks on civilians. This war must end, the hostages held by Hamas must be freed, the displacement of Palestinians must cease, and civilians must be protected wherever they are. Humanitarian aid must be delivered unimpeded.”

Israel insists that it acts in self-defence, and claims its forces respect the laws of war. Almost every day for the last year in Gaza, and more recently in Lebanon it says that civilians get killed because armed groups use them as human shields.

We put that to the paramedic, Nevine al Dawawi.

The IDF claimed Hamas was using civilians as human shields, is that true?

“No, Hamas was not using civilians as human shields. They were protecting us and standing with us.”

For many in Israel, her statement that Hamas were in the area will be taken as a justification for the horrors that the IDF brought down on the civilians just after 9 in the morning on Monday 21 October.

But war crimes lawyers will ask whether the attack was justified. The laws of war say that civilians must be protected, and that casualties inflicted on them should be in proportion to the military threat faced by an attacking force.

If senior Hamas commanders were there, or a big concentration of fighters preparing to fight, perhaps the attack could be justified by the Israel Defense Forces’ own lawyers.

But if Hamas, whose structure as a fighting force has been dismantled in a year of relentless Israeli attacks, had only a few local men with guns in the area, then the attack would breach the law.

In the unlikely event that the Palestinians in the video ever had a day in court, their lawyers could say that the military threat to the IDF at that moment did not justify wounding 30 civilians, inflicting life changing injuries, and killing more than 10 others, including many children.

I am forced to use conditional tenses because I am writing this in Jerusalem, not after interviewing eyewitnesses at the scene of the attack in Jabalia in Gaza. Reporters will always struggle to get to get to the best possible version of the truth they can find when they are stopped from getting to the place where the story happened.

Israel allowed reporters into their border communities along the border with Gaza in the days after the Hamas attacks last year. I was in Kfar Azza kibbutz when they were still recovering the bodies of dead Israelis, as soldiers checked buildings with bursts of gunfire. They wanted us to see where Hamas had killed around 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and dragged more than 250 into captivity in Gaza.

The evidence is piling up that Israel has done things in Gaza that it does not want journalists to see, which is why they will not let us cross into the territory, except on rare and highly controlled visits with the army. I have been in only once, in the first month of the war, when Israeli firepower had already turned the areas of northern Gaza that I saw into a wasteland.

As a result, journalists rely on videos and statements that emerge from Palestinians inside Gaza, including some very brave journalists, and from international diplomats, medics and aid workers who are allowed into Gaza, and witnesses like Nevine with smartphones.

In the hospital, Lina Ibrahim Abu Namos was haunted by her loss of her eldest daughter, her only son, and everything they called home.

“I had seven children, and now I only have five left… What can I say? I don’t even know. By God, they have broken our hearts. We are exhausted, emotionally drained. We’ve lost everything.”

“What crime have the children committed? What have they done? What have we done to deserve this?”

“What have we done to the Israelis? I swear, they’ve destroyed our children.”

“I’m so scared. I don’t eat or drink. Nothing. All I need is for my children to stay around me, because we are scared and we’ve been displaced from one place to another. What is left for my daughters and for me? There’s no home, nowhere safe, nothing. I’m just one of many people with nowhere to go, no safety. I’m exhausted.”

Israel’s intensified bombing campaign of Lebanon has caused more damage to buildings in two weeks than occurred during a year of cross-border fighting with Hezbollah, according to satellite-based radar data assessed by the BBC.

Data shows that more than 3,600 buildings in Lebanon appear to have been damaged or destroyed between 2 and 14 October 2024. This represents about 54% of the total estimated damage since cross-border hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah broke out just over a year ago.

The damage data was gathered by Corey Scher of City University of New York and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. They compared radar satellite images to reveal sudden changes in the height or structure of buildings which indicate damage.

Wim Zwijnenburg, an environmental expert from the Pax for Peace organisation, reviewed the satellite-based radar data and warned of the impact of Israel’s bombing.

“The Israeli military campaign seems to be creating a ‘dead zone’ in the south of Lebanon to drive out the population, and making it difficult for Hezbollah to re-establish positions, at the cost of the civilian population,” he said.

Cross-border hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah broke out after the armed Lebanese group started firing rockets in and around northern Israel in support of Palestinians on 8 October 2023, the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel.

Israel invaded southern Lebanon in a dramatic escalation on 30 September to destroy, it said, Hezbollah weapons and infrastructure in “limited, localised, targeted raids”.

Satellite photos, radar imagery, and military records show recent Israeli bombardment in Lebanon has focused on the southern border region. It has also expanded to central and northern areas, including the Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs.

The Israeli army said it hit thousands of Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, including the capital, Beirut.

Most of the strikes on Beirut have targeted Dahieh, a southern suburb that is home to thousands of civilians. The Israeli military claims the area is home to Hezbollah’s command headquarters.

A series of Israeli strikes on buildings in the area killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September.

Separate data from the US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled), which has been analysed by the BBC, indicates at least 2,700 attacks by the Israeli military on Lebanese areas from 1 September until 11 October 2024. While these attacks primarily focus on southern border areas, they have also extended to northern and central regions. Each Israeli attack can also include several bombings.

Hezbollah has carried out around 540 attacks against Israel in the same timeframe, according to Acled. Each Hezbollah attack can include a barrage of rockets, missiles and drones.

The Israeli military says air strikes in Lebanon are targeting Hezbollah infrastructure.

It regularly adds it wants to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents of Israeli border areas displaced by attacks from the Iran-backed group.

About 60,000 people have been evacuated from northern Israel because of near-daily attacks by Hezbollah. But some rockets have reached further south and damaged homes in and around the coastal city of Haifa.

Hezbollah reiterated it would continue sending rockets into Israel unless a ceasefire is reached. The group’s deputy secretary general claimed rockets would focus on military targets, but warned Hezbollah had the right to attack anywhere in Israel in response to strikes across Lebanon.

On the Lebanese side, many Israeli air strikes targeted the city of Tyre, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut, according to the BBC’s analysis of the latest monthly data collected by Acled.

Lebanon’s government says up to 1.3 million people have been internally displaced, whilst Prime Minister Najib Mikati warned of the “largest displacement” in the country’s history.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has been issuing evacuation orders to residents across the country, including areas of Beirut.

In the south, the army instructed residents of several villages to leave their homes and “immediately head north of the Awali River,” which meets the coast about 50 km (30 miles) from the Israeli border.

“This is a humanitarian catastrophe,” Gabriel Karlsson, Middle East Manager at the British Red Cross in Beirut, told the BBC.

He said there are insufficient shelters to accommodate so many evacuees.

“I saw children sleeping in the streets,” Karlsson added, urging humanitarian organisations to coordinate their efforts to address the escalating crisis.

Lebanese officials say at least 2,350 have been killed and over 10,000 injured in Israeli attacks. The Lebanon health minister said many casualties were civilians.

On the Israeli side, 60 people have been killed and more than 570 wounded by Hezbollah attacks, Israeli authorities say.

“Collateral damage is inevitable in war”, Amos Yadlin, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, told the BBC.

The retired major-general blamed Hezbollah for the war and claimed Israel’s ground offensive would force the group out from the border areas.

Zwijnenburg, from the Pax for Peace organisation, however, has warned of the impact of Israel’s military campaign on civilians and the populated areas.

“The heavy blast radius kills and maims civilians nearby”, he said, in reference to Israeli air strikes.

“Open-source data combined with satellite imagery also showed that civilian infrastructure such as irrigation channels, gas stations and electricity grids were damaged, which is worsening the humanitarian situation,” he added.

Negotiations over a potential Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal are set to resume in Doha in the coming days, officials from the US, Israel and Qatar have said.

A spokesperson for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said an Israeli delegation will travel to Qatar on Sunday.

It is not yet clear whether Hamas has agreed to participate in the talks.

The US believes the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar last week – seen as one of the group’s most extreme figures – may open the door to an agreement, though Hamas has accused Israel of being the primary block to any deal.

“With Sinwar gone,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told journalists, “there is a real opportunity to bring [the hostages] home and to accomplish the objective.”

That objective, Mr Blinken said, was to reach a deal “so that Israel can withdraw, so that Hamas cannot reconstitute, and so that the Palestinian people can rebuild their lives and rebuild their futures”.

Qatar’s foreign minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said Qatari mediators had “re-engaged” with Hamas since Sinwar’s death, but there was “no clarity” over the groups current plans with regards to ceasefire talks.

“There has been an engagement with the representatives from the political office in Doha. We had some meetings with them in the last couple of days,” he said, adding that Egypt was also in “ongoing” discussions with Hamas.

A Hamas delegation met with Egyptian intelligence officials in Cairo on Thursday evening to discuss the situation in Gaza, one senior Palestinian official and one Egyptian official told the BBC.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a post on X that he welcomes Egypt’s “readiness to advance a deal for the release of the hostages”.

Previous discussions over the long-sought after deal have centred around a proposal from US President Joe Biden in May, which was “positively” received by Hamas.

That proposal laid out a three-step plan that would begin with a six-week ceasefire, in which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would withdraw from populated areas of Gaza.

There would also be a “surge” of humanitarian aid, as well as an exchange of some hostages for Palestinian prisoners.

It would eventually lead to a permanent “cessation of hostilities” and a major reconstruction plan for Gaza.

But talks faltered, with a key sticking-point being Netanyahu’s insistence on an Israeli troop presence on the Gaza-Egypt border, known as the Philadelphi corridor.

Blinken is on his 11th visit to the Middle East since the start of the current war between Israel and Hamas more than a year ago, and is set to end his trip on Friday.

During the visit, he announced an additional $135 million of aid “in humanitarian assistance, water, sanitation, maternal health for Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, as well as in the region”, taking the total amount of US aid since the start of the war to some $1.2 billion.

An Israeli airstrike on a school building in central Gaza has killed at least 17 people, according to a local hospital.

Al-Awda hospital told AFP and Reuters that the strike on Thursday hit the Al-Shuhada school in the Nuseirat refugee camp.

The Hamas-run government media office reported the same death toll and said the school was being used as a shelter for displaced people.

Videos from the scene, verified by the BBC, show wounded children being carried out in the arms of men.

Israel said it had targeted a Hamas command centre at the site “used by the terrorists to plan and execute terrorist attacks” against Israel and its troops.

The government media office said “thousands of displaced people” were using the school as a shelter when the strike hit, “most of them children and women”.

Nine children were among the 17 killed, with more than 52 injured, the media office added.

Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for Gaza’s civil defence agency, also told AFP that 17 people were killed and dozens wounded.

In recent weeks, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has hit several buildings being used as shelters across Gaza, saying it was targeting Hamas personnel and infrastructure.

Israel does not allow international media organisations – including the BBC – independent access to Gaza, making it difficult to verify facts on the ground, so we rely on information from video footage and testimonies, as well as Israeli and Hamas official statements.

In northern Gaza, the IDF has been intensifying a weeks-long offensive against what it said were Hamas fighters who had regrouped there.

At least 650 people have been killed since the new offensive in the north began, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

The Israeli military said it was facilitating evacuations of civilians while it continued “operating against terrorists and terrorist infrastructure”.

But residents unwilling or unable to comply with Israeli evacuation orders are said to be living in increasingly desperate conditions, with food and other essential supplies running out.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that during the first three weeks of October, Israeli authorities permitted only four out of 70 coordinated aid missions to north Gaza.

The US warned Israel last week to urgently boost aid or risk having some military assistance cut off.

Cogat, the Israeli military body responsible for humanitarian affairs in Gaza, said that trucks carrying food, water and medical supplies had been transferred to the north over the past week.

OCHA said earlier this week that humanitarian access remains restricted.

The final stage of an emergency polio vaccination campaign in the area has been postponed by UN agencies because of intense Israeli bombardments, mass displacement and lack of access.

The last phase of the two-stage rollout – prompted by Gaza’s first case of polio in 25 years, which left a baby boy paralyzed – was due to begin on Wednesday.

Almost 120,000 children in northern Gaza had been expected to receive a second dose of the oral polio vaccine.

For years, Western critics have dismissed Brics as a relatively inconsequential entity.

But this past week, at its annual summit in Russia, the group triumphantly showcased just how far it has come.

Top leaders from 36 countries, as well as the UN Secretary General, attended the three-day event, and Brics formally welcomed four new members – Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. More membership expansions could soon follow. Brics had previously added only one new member – South Africa in 2010 – since its inception (as the Bric states) in 2006.

There’s a growing buzz around Brics, which has long projected itself as an alternative to Western-led models of global governance. Today, it’s becoming more prominent and influential as it capitalises on growing dissatisfaction with Western policies and financial structures.

Ironically, India – perhaps the most Western-oriented Brics member – is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the group’s evolution and expansion.

India enjoys deep ties with most new Brics members. Egypt is a growing trade and security partner in the Middle East. The UAE (along with Saudi Arabia, which has been offered Brics membership but hasn’t yet formally joined) is one of India’s most important partners overall. India’s relationship with Ethiopia is one of its longest and closest in Africa.

Brics’ original members continue to offer important benefits for India too.

Delhi can leverage Brics to signal its continued commitment to close friend Russia, despite Western efforts to isolate it. And working with rival China in Brics helps India in its slow, cautious effort to ease tensions with Beijing, especially on the heels of a border patrolling deal announced by Delhi on the eve of the summit. That announcement likely gave Prime Minister Narendra Modi the necessary diplomatic and political space to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the summit’s sidelines.

Additionally, Brics enables India to advance its core foreign policy principle of strategic autonomy, whereby it aims to balance relations with a wide spectrum of geopolitical players, without formally allying with any of them.

Delhi has important partnerships, both bilateral and multilateral, inside and outside the West. In that sense, its presence in an increasingly robust Brics and relations with its members can be balanced with its participation in a revitalised Indo-Pacific Quad and its strong ties with the US and other Western powers.

More broadly, Brics’ priorities are India’s priorities.

The joint statement issued after the recent summit trumpets the same principles and goals that Delhi articulates in its own public messaging and policy documents: engaging with the Global South (a critical outreach target for Delhi), promoting multilateralism and multipolarity, advocating for UN reform (Delhi badly wants a permanent seat on the UN Security Council), and criticising the Western sanctions regime (which impacts Delhi’s trade with Russia and infrastructure projects with Iran).

And yet, all this may appear to pose a problem for India.

With Brics gaining momentum, inducting new members, and attracting global discontents, the group is seemingly poised to begin implementing its longstanding vision – articulated emphatically by Beijing and Moscow – of serving as a counter to the West.

Additionally, Brics’ new members include Iran and, possibly further down the road, Belarus and Cuba – suggesting the future possibility of an outright anti-West tilt.

While India aims to balance its ties with the Western and non-Western worlds, it would not want to be part of any arrangement perceived as avowedly anti-West.

However, in reality, such fears are unfounded.

Brics is not an anti-West entity. Aside from Iran, all the new members have close ties with the West. Additionally, the many countries rumoured as possible future members don’t exactly constitute an anti-West bloc; they include Turkey, a Nato member, and Vietnam, a key US trade partner.

And even if Brics were to gain more anti-West members, the grouping would likely struggle to implement the types of initiatives that could pose an actual threat to the West.

The joint statement issued after the recent summit identified a range of plans, including an international payment system that would counter the US dollar and evade Western sanctions.

But here, a longstanding criticism of Brics – that it can’t get meaningful things done – continues to loom large. For one thing, Brics projects meant to reduce reliance on the US dollar likely aren’t viable, because many member states’ economies cannot afford to wean themselves off of it.

Additionally, the original Brics states have often struggled to see eye to eye, and cohesion and consensus will be even more difficult to achieve with an expanded membership.

India may get along well with most Brics members, but many new members don’t get along well with each other.

Iran has issues with both Egypt and the UAE, and Egypt-Ethiopia relations are tense.

One might hope that the recent easing of tensions between China and India could bode well for Brics.

But let’s be clear: despite their recent border accord, India’s ties with China remain highly strained.

An ongoing broader border dispute, intensifying bilateral competition across South Asia and in the Indian Ocean region, and China’s close alliance with Pakistan rule out the possibility of a détente anytime soon.

Brics today offers the best of all worlds for Delhi. It enables India to work with some of its closest friends in an expanding organisation that espouses principles close to India’s heart, from multilateralism to embracing the Global South.

It affords India the opportunity to stake out more balance in its relations with the West and non-Western states, in an era when Delhi’s relations with the US and its Western allies (with the notable exception of Canada) have charted new heights.

At the same time, Brics’ continuing struggles to achieve more internal cohesion and to get more done on a concrete level ensure that the group is unlikely to pose a major threat to the West, much less to become an anti-West behemoth – neither of which India would want.

The most likely outcome to emerge from the recent summit, as suggested by the joint statement, is a Brics commitment to partner on a series of noncontroversial, low-hanging-fruit initiatives focused on climate change, higher education, public health, and science and technology, among others.

Such cooperation would entail member states working with each other, and not against the West – an ideal arrangement for India.

These collaborations in decidedly safe spaces would also demonstrate that an ascendant Brics need not make the West uncomfortable. And that would offer some useful reassurance after the group’s well-attended summit in Russia likely attracted some nervous attention in Western capitals.

“The louder you can talk, the better, because I’ve played rock and roll for 50 years.”

Bruce Springsteen has just E Street Shuffled into the room. Uncannily charismatic, he carries the practised ease of someone who knows the destabilising effect their presence can have on regular people.

He takes time to greet every member of the BBC’s film crew individually, then breaks the ice with a joke about a journalist who mistakenly called him “Springstein”. That reminds me of a local radio DJ in Belfast who always used to introduce him as “Bruce Springsprong”.

“Really?” he laughs. “Well, I’ve been called worse.”

In fact, we’ve been pre-warned that he doesn’t like being called The Boss – the nickname coined in the early days of his career with The E Street Band, when he’d be responsible for collecting and distributing the takings after a show.

“I hate being called ‘Boss’,” he told Creem magazine in 1980. “Always did, from the beginning. I hate bosses. I hate being called the boss.”

The term is conspicuously absent from his new Disney+ documentary, Road Diary, which charts the process of putting together Springsteen’s first tour since the pandemic – from handwritten notebooks to footage of his band “shaking off the cobwebs” after six years apart.

At times, the preparations lack the rigour you might expect.

“It’s all a little bit casual,” frets Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen’s guitarist and one of his oldest friends, after the star calls time on rehearsals.

“There’s a certain percentage [of songs] that we’re gonna [screw] up anyway,” Springsteen retorts.

“That’s what they’re paying for. They want to see it live. That means a few mistakes!”

If you’ve caught any of the star’s recent shows, you’ll know the stakes are never that high. The band are tighter than a tourniquet. Mistakes are noticeably absent.

The documentary comes exactly 60 years after Springsteen’s first gig, playing an $18 guitar with a band called The Rogues.

He’s never let anyone film the inner workings of his shows before, so why do it on this tour?

“Well, because I could be dead by the next one,” he laughs.

“I’m 75 years old now. I’ve decided that the waiting-to-do-things part of my life is over.”

“We’re closer to the end than we are to the beginning,” agrees Van Zandt, “but the point of this tour was that we’re not going out quietly, man.

“We’re going to balance that mortality with vitality.

That philosophy was fully on display at Sunderland’s Stadium of Light in May, when Springsteen braved torrential rain to play for three hours to 50,000 drenched fans.

The weather was so brutal that Springsteen lost his voice. Doctors ordered him not to sing for a week, forcing him to postpone several shows.

What made him continue?

“Well, I’m there to have a good time,” he says. “I’m going to insist on it, whether it’s raining or the sun is shining – because I’m there for the people that are there.

“I look out and I go, ‘These are my people. These are the people who’ve listened to my music for the past 30 or 40 years. I’m going to do the best show I possibly can’, you know?

“It sounds corny, but you have to love your audience and, for the most part, I’ve never found that hard to do.”

It took audiences a while to reciprocate, however.

Born in New Jersey, to Douglas Springsteen, a bus driver, and Adele Springsteen, a secretary, Bruce paid little attention to music until he saw Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show and bought himself a guitar.

He spent his teens playing around the city with a Beatles-inspired band named The Castiles (after a brand of shampoo), taking gigs wherever they’d have him.

“I’ve played pizza parlours, I’ve played bowling alleys. I’ve played [psychiatric] hospitals and Sing Sing prison. I even played a supermarket opening once,” he recalls.

Back then, the setlist was all R&B covers and Motown hits – but Springsteen was a nervous performer.

In his autobiography, he talks about blinking 100 times a minute and chewing his knuckles. Van Zandt calls him “the most introverted guy you’ve met in your whole life”.

So how did he become the performer who, with the E Street Band, started tearing up stages all around the world?

“Introversion is a funny thing,” he says. “There’s a yin and a yang to it.

“On my own, I can be very internal. I’ve written a lot of internal music – Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Nebraska, parts of The River – all about people who live these very intense, borderline violent, internal lives.

“But the joyful side of me, which I got from my mother, allows me to sing Rosalita and Born to Run and Hungry Heart.

“I’m Irish-Italian, so I got the blues and I got the joy at the same time.”

It’s a typical Springsteen answer – analytical, sincere, intrinsically linking his life to his music.

Van Zandt, who witnessed Springsteen’s transformation, sees it differently.

“His first two records didn’t do well. Record companies were ready to drop him. His only dream was about to die.

“So my very shy friend reaches inside and says, ‘I’ll put the guitar down and start fronting the band’, which is huge move, right? Because the guitar’s a defence, it’s actually a wall between you and your audience. So he had to put that away and learn a whole new craft.”

It all came to a head at New York’s Bottom Line Club, shortly before the release of Springsteen’s breakout album Born To Run in 1975.

Over the course of five nights and 10 shows, the star showcased his new sound to fans, journalists and radio progammers.

“And all of a sudden, he’s dancing on the tables,” Van Zandt recalls. “I’m like, ‘Wow, where’d that come from?’

“I think it was sort of a defensive urge, like, ‘You’re not going to stop me’.”

Whatever it was, it worked.

Born To Run was a massive commercial success, selling six million copies in the US alone.

The album was constructed with the same desperation as those live shows, pieced together over 14 months (six of them on the title track alone) as Springsteen fought and scraped to save his career.

The songs – Thunder Road, Jungleland, Born To Run – throbbed with longing, as his characters fought to escape the confines of small-town, blue collar American life.

It’s a story he was familiar with. As a child, he witnessed the chilling effects of unemployment and the Vietnam War on his neighbourhood.

His subsequent rise to fame reads like a movie treatment for the American Dream, but he’s aware that luck and timing played a role.

“I wouldn’t want to be a young band starting today,” he says. “The day of the quote ‘rock star’ is in twilight.

“But I’ve had some encouragement. My young friend, Zach Bryan, just sold out two stadium nights in Philadelphia, so there’s still some young people coming up.”

• Watch the full Bruce Springsteen interview on BBC iPlayer

No-one can match Springsteen, though, and he’s increasingly aware that time’s against him.

His last two albums confront mortality head-on, prompted by the realisation that he was the “last man standing” from his teenage band The Castiles.

On tour, he pays tribute to the E Street musicians who’ve crossed The River. Meanwhile his wife, Patti Scialfa, has cut back her appearances with the band, after being diagnosed with myeloma, a rare blood cancer, in 2018.

“She’s doing well, we caught it early,” Springsteen says.

“She’s having a tough time at the moment because she needs to have a shoulder replaced and a hip replaced. So that, on top of the myeloma, makes it very difficult for her to get out and get around.

“But she’s made a beautiful new record that’ll be coming out, hopefully, this year. And we’ve been married for 34 years. I love her to death.”

Despite the realities of age, Springsteen isn’t slowing down. He’s back in Europe next summer to make up for the concerts he missed after Sunderland, adding another 12 dates for good measure.

“Do you think you can outlast The E Street Band?”, he demands every night, daring the audience to meet their energy, joule for joule.

Their shared history is the show’s heartbeat. Famously, they’ll take requests from the audience, often playing other artists’ songs at the drop of a hat. Springsteen traces that ability back to their early club gigs.

“I know every song these guys have ever played, so I’ll go, ‘Oh yeah, we played that back in 1964, I think we can fake our way through that one’.”

And the secret to their 50-year camaraderie? Distance.

“When we’re not playing, we rarely see each other,” Springsteen confesses. “We’ve seen each other enough!”

He continues: “The arc of most bands is to break apart.

“Even two guys can’t stay together. Simon can’t stand Garfunkel, Don couldn’t stand Phil Everly, and then you have the kids in Oasis… so the tradition carries on.

“It’s the nature of people to not get along, so that’s something you need to write into your projection of the kind of band you want to be in.

“I don’t like drama. I don’t want people knocking heads. I don’t want to hear about a bunch of bull backstage. I don’t put up with any of that stuff. We weeded it out a long time ago.

“The band started out crazy and made its way to sanity.”

In the documentary, Springsteen promises they’ll keep playing “until the wheels come off”.

I wonder if that’s because, as he’s said in the past, the shows help him fend off depression.

“I’ve been pretty lucky with the depression,” he says “It hasn’t bothered me in quite a while, but I definitely go on stage to lose myself.

“You have to surrender to the moment and see what comes up. Learn a little bit about yourself.”

What has he learnt on his latest tour?

“Let me see,” he says, leaning back to think.

“I learnt that my back really hurts a lot.”

When the air strike hit on Monday night, Fouad Hassan, 74, was sitting on his balcony in south Beirut’s Jnah neighbourhood, reading his phone.

No evacuation order was given by the Israeli army before the rocket slammed into the home of his children and grandchildren a short walk away.

“When the bombing happened, I fainted,” Fouad says. “I was taken to get oxygen due to the smoke from the strike. When I got better, I realised that the entire neighbourhood was devastated.”

Now a pile of mangled steel and masonry lies where a number of residential buildings stood closely together. Where buildings are still standing, people’s possessions can be seen inside through holes blasted in the walls.

A digger and about 40 local men are doing the slow work to excavate and look for bodies under the rubble.

“Look at the destruction – a whole neighbourhood wiped out, the people here dead,” Fouad says, gesturing over the bomb site. “My granddaughter died here, and my grandson is still in a coma. Both were 23 years old.”

Fouad is a well-known figure in the community. An actor and comedian, he has appeared on Lebanese television and is known by his stage name Zaghloul. As we walk around the bomb site, locals come to shake Fouad’s hand and offer words of condolence.

Taking his phone from his pocket, Fouad shows us a picture of his granddaughter, Alaa. She looks confident, posing for the camera and wearing a smart gold dress.

“She was happily engaged, looking forward to getting married in three months,” Fouad says. “She applied to be Miss Lebanon and was shredded to pieces. Why? Why does the world allow this?”

Since Israel began escalating its air strikes against Hezbollah in September, rockets have hit across the length and breadth of the country. It is a military campaign that Israel’s leaders feel has brought them huge wins so far – having claimed the lives of Hezbollah’s senior leadership.

However it is also a campaign that has taken many innocent lives, with numerous reports of entire families being killed in strikes around the country.

Over 1,900 Lebanese people have been killed, according to government figures, since Israel stepped up the air strikes. The statistics do not differentiate between Hezbollah fighters and civilians.

Despite issuing no evacuation order to residents in advance on Monday night, the Israeli army subsequently stated that they were aiming for a “Hezbollah terrorist target”, but did not elaborate further.

First reports coming from the scene suggested that the compound of the Rafik Hariri hospital, the capital’s largest public hospital, had been struck, which the Israeli army denied.

The damage to the hospital is superficial, but across a road littered with parked cars that have their windows blown out, lies a poor neighbourhood that was hit.

Fouad’s son, Ahmed joins us. He shows us a picture of his son who lies in intensive care in the hospital, his face bandaged and bloody.

“This was my house; it’s gone now, just like everything else. We have no place to go and no clothes. This is a massacre. We have no base here, no Hezbollah, there’s nothing,” Ahmed tells us.

It is not clear why its army chooses to issue evacuation orders before some missile strikes and not others – but when Israel does strike without warning in a dense residential area, the human cost can be indiscriminate and high.

Fouad tells us of playing with the young children in the neighbourhood who were killed in the strike.

“Whenever I entered the neighbourhood, they would shout, ‘Grandpa, Grandpa! What did you bring us?’ I would give them candies, crisps, and popcorn. Their loss fills me with sorrow; they all died. Their mother is still trapped under the rubble with one of her children.”

As we begin to leave the site, a hush falls over those gathered and we see a stretcher carrying a wrapped body being taken away by the digger.

We are told that a mother was found next to a child.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is about to do one of the biggest interviews of his presidential campaign – with America’s number one podcaster, Joe Rogan.

With 14.5 million Spotify followers and 17.5 million YouTube subscribers, The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE for short) has built a massive, mostly male, audience since it first launched 15 years ago.

Confirming media reports of the upcoming interview, set to be taped on Friday, Trump described his counterpart as “a nice guy” with whom he expected a “very interesting” conversation.

“I do a lot of shows,” he told Fox News Radio on Wednesday. “Good, bad or indifferent. I do a lot of shows and they come out good.”

That response makes light of the Trump campaign’s calculated media strategy, which has focused on podcasts popular with younger men over traditional media outlets like 60 Minutes.

And it underplays just how big a deal this could be for the former president, long-time listeners say.

“Rogan is about to have the most listened-to podcast in human history,” says Matthew Foldi, a conservative journalist and self-styled JRE expert who has spent thousands of hours listening to the entire catalogue – in chronological order and at 3.5x speed – since 2020.

A New Jersey native, Rogan began his career as a stand-up comedian in the Boston area before relocating to California in the 1990s. He featured in two sitcoms – Hardball and NewsRadio – and gained national exposure as host of the US edition of the Fear Factor game show.

He became one of the first comics to venture into podcasting in 2009, quickly building an audience with his easy-going conversation style and sense of humour. By 2020, he had signed one of the largest licensing deals in the business, with Spotify, where he has dominated the podcasting ranks.

Known for discussing everything from current affairs and politics to aliens and drug use, Rogan hosts an ideologically diverse mix of guests – from astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson to far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to comedians like Chris Rock and Kevin Hart – in lengthy hours-long interviews.

Part of his appeal, says Kat Rosenfield, a freelance culture writer and novelist, is his willingness to talk to anyone, about anything.

“He is very naturally curious. He wants to ask questions. He wants to know what’s up with his guests and he has good instincts to make it an engaging listen.”

But his willingness to absorb contrarian perspectives has also landed him in hot water.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, he was criticised for promoting vaccine scepticism, leading to a coalition of medical experts to call out Spotify for allowing “false and societally harmful assertions” to spread.

In 2022, musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell removed their music from Spotify in protest over Rogan’s use of the platform to spread alleged Covid misinformation. The company ultimately took down some 70 previously-released episodes.

Also that year, Rogan came under fire when a video compilation of him repeatedly using racially insensitive language on his show made the rounds on social media. He has since apologised.

Ms Rosenfield casts Rogan’s personal politics as being libertarian – very socially liberal, as seen in his support for same-sex marriage and universal drug legalisation, but also someone who treasures free speech and gun rights.

In 2020, he endorsed Bernie Sanders for president after the then-Democratic candidate appeared on his show.

“Rogan seemed like a refreshing alternative at a moment when audiences sort of lost their trust in many [mainstream media] outlets,” Ms Rosenfield argues.

“He doesn’t think he’s smarter than his audience, which I think is quite endearing to people who listen to the show. He doesn’t talk down to people and he always says ‘don’t listen to me, I don’t know anything’.”

Trump and Rogan have not always seen eye-to-eye.

As recently as 2022, the podcaster said he did not want to “help” Trump electorally because he was “an existential threat to democracy”.

Earlier this year, he praised Robert F Kennedy Jr, then running as an independent presidential candidate, as “the only one that makes sense to me”.

That didn’t go down well with Trump, who said Rogan would get “booed” the next time he was at an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event.

But it’s also their shared love of the UFC, and mixed martial arts in general, hints at some of the common ground they may have during the interview.

Rogan is a long-time colour commentator and interviewer for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) events. Trump, too, is a fan of the sport, which he has discussed at length on other podcasts.

The two are both long-time friends of UFC CEO Dana White, who lauded Rogan this week as “the best combat sports commentator of all time” and has lavished praise on Trump as “the ultimate American badass”.

They also share two other allies – RFK Jr and Elon Musk, both of whom have recently got behind Trump.

Rogan spoke fondly of Trump on a recent show as a “wheeling, dealing billionaire character that everybody enjoyed” whose deregulation agenda had helped the economy.

He added that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza “scared the [expletive] out of him” – two wars Trump has vowed to end if elected, although he has not provided specifics on how.

Mr Foldi, the conservative journalist and Rogan super fan, says the attention that Trump will get from this podcast could help him dominate the closing days of the campaign and win over straggling undecided voters.

“This is the most viewed show on earth, and the eyeballs that you’re going to get… is second to none.”

Like Mr Foldi, who is 28, Rogan’s listeners are overwhelmingly young and male. Almost 80% are men, and half are between the ages of 18 and 34, according to Edison Research, which produces survey-based data on podcasting in the US.

Such figures suggest Rogan’s audience is part of a crucial voting bloc to whom the Trump campaign has made clear it is trying to reach.

In August, the campaign told reporters it is focused on persuading a group of voters it says makes up about 10% of the electorate in key swing states. This group is disproportionately young, male and racially diverse.

Cancelling traditional media interviews with the likes of CBS and NBC, Trump has instead spent time with podcasters who appeal to predominantly male audiences, including comedians Andrew Schulz and Theo Von, social media influencer Logan Paul, retired wrestler Mark Calaway (AKA The Undertaker) and YouTube pranksters The Nelk Boys.

But in sheer audience size and cultural reach, JRE is arguably the lynchpin of this podcast tour.

Harris too has made podcasts part of her media blitz, albeit to a lesser extent. She sat down earlier this month with Call Her Daddy – the top-ranked show among women – and spoke at length with host Alex Cooper about reproductive rights, the top issue galvanising Democrats and particularly female voters this year.

On Thursday, Harris taped an appearance on Club Shay Shay, a weekly podcast hosted by NFL legend Shannon Sharpe that is popular among black men. Polling suggests that voting bloc’s support for her is not as robust as for previous Democratic candidates.

In spite of objections from some corners, Harris’s team was in talks with Rogan’s staff about a potential appearance, according to Reuters, but her campaign has since confirmed she will not make an appearance due to scheduling conflicts.

About the same time that Rogan’s episode is being taped, Harris is scheduled to sit down with famed social psychologist Brene Brown for her podcast, Unlocking Us, which is popular with female listeners.

As anticipation for the Trump interview builds, Americans on social media are fantasising about the questions they would like Rogan to pose, on everything from alien declassification to documents about Jeffrey Epstein.

If Rogan stays true to form, Mr Foldi says, no topic will be out of bounds.

“For Trump, I see very little drawback because, whatever you think of the guy, he’s clearly comfortable in who he is,” he adds.

“The only way that you crumble on [JRE] is if he asks you about the core of who you are and you don’t have a comfortable answer.”

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose
• ELECTORAL COLLEGE: What is it?
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• GLOBAL: A third election outcome on minds of Moscow
• ON THE GROUND: Democrats take fight deep into Trump country
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

A selection of the week’s best photos from across the African continent:

• Idris Elba: Why I’m planning a move to Africa
• All aboard the sparkling railway breaking new ground for East Africa
• Risking death to smuggle alcohol past Somali bandits
• Ghana gold rush sparks environmental disaster
• Why African leaders are secretive about their health

The headlines are pretty grim – without action the world could warm by a massive 3.1C this century, the UN says in a new report published today.

But how likely is that?

As is often the case with climate change and the science behind it – the answer is complicated.

The UN Emissions Gap report indicates that if only “current policies” are implemented the world could warm by up to 3.1C.

This would be “catastrophic” for the world according to the UN, leading to dramatic increases in extreme weather events including heatwaves and floods.

Working outside under that level of warming would be extremely difficult if not impossible.

But that number isn’t strictly new, and has to be seen in context.

The UN’s predictions of temperature rise have stayed essentially the same over the past three years since countries met in Glasgow for COP26.

The new report says: “A continuation of current policies is estimated to limit global warming to a maximum of 3.1C (range 1.9-3.8C) over the course of the century.”

This figure is in line with a projection from the most recent IPCC report from 2021 which showed a rise of up to 3.6C of warming this century under a higher level of emissions.

Today’s report says that if countries put into action the promises they have already made in their carbon cutting plans then temperatures will rise by 2.6C to 2.8C.

And if every country puts these plans into action and follows through on their existing net zero pledges, the Emissions Gap report says the rise could be contained to 1.9C.

These cooler scenarios are obviously far from guaranteed and let’s be clear – even a rise of 1.9C would be disastrous. We’ve heated our planet by 1.1C so far and we’re feeling the effects on so many levels, not least an increase in extreme weather and rising sea levels.

That these temperature projections haven’t really budged is one of the things that is frustrating the UN – while countries have made promises at COP27 and COP28, action on the ground has been very slow.

The UN report says that the goals of the Paris agreement to keep global temperatures under 2C while making efforts to stay below 1.5C are now in very serious danger.

However, it is important to bear in mind the timing of this report, coming just a few weeks before political leaders gather in Azerbaijan for COP29.

Countries have agreed to put new carbon cutting plans on the table by next spring. These will cover the ten years to 2035.

Scientists understand that if the emissions curve isn’t bent by then, extremely challenging temperature rises around or above 3C will be likely.

This next set of plans, called nationally determined contributions, have been described by the UN climate chief as among the most important documents produced this century.

So this report has to be seen as part of the push for higher ambition from world leaders.

What else is new in the report?

There are a number of factors that are new and helping to push up emissions according to the UN.

A boom in flying in 2023 saw carbon from aviation rise 19.5% compared to 2022, as passenger travel returned close to pre-pandemic levels.

Road transport emissions also rose, but there were other key factors including the impact of climate change, driving up temperatures forcing people to resort to more air conditioning.

“We are seeing or starting to see more severe impacts of climate change, so heat waves have driven up energy demand for cooling of homes and offices,” said Dr Anne Olhoff, from UNEP.

“They have also impacted the hydropower generation, which has gone down. And what do you then do when it goes down? You switch to more coal.”

Another element is the transition to electricity for vehicles and heating – the increasing number of electric vehicles and heat pumps are also driving up demand for power, often met by fossil fuel sources.

American voters will face a clear choice for president on election day, between Democratic Vice-President Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.

Here’s a look at what they stand for and how their policies compare on different issues.

Harris has said her day-one priority would be trying to reduce food and housing costs for working families.

She promises to ban price-gouging on groceries, help first-time home buyers and provide incentives to increase housing supply.

Inflation soared under the Biden presidency, as it did in many western countries, partly due to post-Covid supply issues and the Ukraine war. It has fallen since.

Trump has promised to “end inflation and make America affordable again” and when asked he says more drilling for oil will lower energy costs.

He has promised to deliver lower interest rates, something the president does not control, and he says deporting undocumented immigrants will ease pressure on housing. Economists warn that his vow to impose higher tax on imports could push up prices.

• US election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?
• Comparing Biden’s economy to Trump’s

Harris wants to raise taxes on big businesses and Americans making $400,000 (£305,000) a year.

But she has also unveiled a number of measures that would ease the tax burden on families, including an expansion of child tax credits.

She has broken with Biden over capital gains tax, supporting a more moderate rise from 23.6% to 28% compared with his 44.6%.

Trump proposes a number of tax cuts worth trillions, including an extension of his 2017 cuts which mostly helped the wealthy.

He says he will pay for them through higher growth and tariffs on imports. Analysts say both tax plans will add to the ballooning deficit, but Trump’s by more.

• Where Kamala Harris stands on 10 issues
• Where Donald Trump stands on 10 issues

Harris has made abortion rights central to her campaign, and she continues to advocate for legislation that would enshrine reproductive rights nationwide.

Trump has struggled to find a consistent message on abortion.

The three judges he appointed to the Supreme Court while president were pivotal in overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, a 1973 ruling known as Roe v Wade.

Harris was tasked with tackling the root causes of the southern border crisis and helped raise billions of dollars of private money to make regional investments aimed at stemming the flow north.

Record numbers of people crossed from Mexico at the end of 2023 but the numbers have fallen since to a four-year low. In this campaign, she has toughened her stance and emphasised her experience as a prosecutor in California taking on human traffickers.

Trump has vowed to seal the border by completing the construction of a wall and increasing enforcement. But he urged Republicans to ditch a hardline, cross-party immigration bill, backed by Harris. She says she would revive that deal if elected.

He has also promised the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history. Experts told the BBC this would face legal challenges.

• What Harris really did about the border crisis
• Could Trump really deport a million migrants?

Harris has vowed to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes”. She has pledged, if elected, to ensure the US and not China wins “the competition for the 21st Century”.

She has been a longtime advocate for a two-state solution between the Israelis and Palestinians, and has called for an end to the war in Gaza.

Trump has an isolationist foreign policy and wants the US to disentangle itself from conflicts elsewhere in the world.

He has said he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours through a negotiated settlement with Russia, a move that Democrats say would embolden Vladimir Putin.

Trump has positioned himself as a staunch supporter of Israel but said little on how he would end the war in Gaza.

Harris has criticised Trump’s sweeping plan to impose tariffs on imports, calling it a national tax on working families which will cost each household $4,000 a year.

She is expected to have a more targeted approach to taxing imports, maintaining the tariffs the Biden-Harris administration introduced on some Chinese imports like electric vehicles.

Trump has made tariffs a central pledge in this campaign. He has proposed new 10-20% tariffs on most foreign goods, and much higher ones on those from China.

He has also promised to entice companies to stay in the US to manufacture goods, by giving them a lower rate of corporate tax.

Harris, as vice-president, helped pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which has funnelled hundreds of billions of dollars to renewable energy, and electric vehicle tax credit and rebate programmes.

But she has dropped her opposition to fracking, a technique for recovering gas and oil opposed by environmentalists.

Trump, while in the White House, rolled back hundreds of environmental protections, including limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and vehicles.

In this campaign he has vowed to expand Arctic drilling and attacked electric cars.

Harris has been part of a White House administration which has reduced prescription drug costs and capped insulin prices at $35.

Trump, who has often vowed to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, has said that if elected he would only improve it, without offering specifics. The Act has been instrumental in getting health insurance to millions more people.

He has called for taxpayer-funded fertility treatment, but that could be opposed by Republicans in Congress.

Harris has tried to contrast her experience as a prosecutor with the fact Trump has been convicted of a crime.

Trump has vowed to demolish drugs cartels, crush gang violence and rebuild Democratic-run cities that he says are overrun with crime.

He has said he would use the military or the National Guard, a reserve force, to tackle opponents he calls “the enemy within” and “radical left lunatics” if they disrupt the election.

• Trump’s legal cases, explained

Harris has made preventing gun violence a key pledge, and she and Tim Walz – both gun owners – often advocate for tighter laws. But they will find that moves like expanding background checks or banning assault weapons will need the help of Congress.

Trump has positioned himself as a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, the constitutional right to bear arms. Addressing the National Rifle Association in May, he said he was their best friend.

Harris has called for the decriminalisation of marijuana for recreational use. She says too many people have been sent to prison for possession and points to disproportionate arrest numbers for black and Latino men.

Trump has softened his approach and said it’s time to end “needless arrests and incarcerations” of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• GLOBAL: A third election outcome on minds of Moscow
• ON THE GROUND: Democrats take fight deep into Trump country
• WWE: Why Trump is courting old friends from the ring

On Wednesday afternoon, Kamala Harris stood in front of the vice-presidential residence in Washington DC, and delivered a short but withering attack on her Republican presidential opponent.

Calling Donald Trump “increasingly unhinged and unstable”, she cited critical comments made by John Kelly, Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, in a New York Times interview.

The vice-president quoted Kelly describing Trump as someone who “certainly falls into the general definition of fascists” and who had spoken approvingly of Hitler several times.

She said her rival wanted “unchecked power” and later, during a CNN town hall event, was asked point-blank if she believed he was a “fascist”. “Yes, I do,” she replied.

Shortly after the town hall finished, Trump posted on X and Truth Social that Harris’s comments were a sign that she was losing. He said she was “increasingly raising her rhetoric, going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler, and anything else that comes to her warped mind”.

In the home stretch of political campaigns – particularly one as tight and hard-fought as the 2024 presidential race – there is a natural tendency for candidates to turn negative. Attacks tend to be more effective in motivating supporters to head to the polls and disrupting the opposing campaigns.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump winning?
• Foreign-born voters give their views on electoral system

For Harris, however, the heavier hand toward Trump stands in contrast to the more optimistic, “joyful” messaging of the early days of her campaign.

While she did warn at the Democratic convention of a Trump presidency without the guardrails, Harris largely stepped back from President Joe Biden’s core campaign message that Trump posed an existential threat to American democracy.

According to political strategist Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, however, it is clear why Harris was quick this time to amplify Kelly’s dark portrait of Trump as a man with authoritarian tendencies.

“Everything she does now is tactical,” he said. “The imperative was to make sure as many voters as possible know about what Kelly said.”

The vice-president’s latest remarks come on the heels of a multi-week strategy by her campaign to appeal to independent voters and moderate Republicans who could be open to supporting the Democratic ticket. Polls suggest the race is extremely tight, with neither candidate having a decisive lead in any of the battleground states.

The suburbs around the biggest cities in key battleground states – Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Phoenix, for instance – are populated by college-educated professionals who have traditionally voted for Republicans but who polls indicate have doubts about returning Trump to the White House.

“Her case for how she wins this thing is to create as broad a coalition as possible and bring over disaffected Republicans – people who just don’t feel that they can vote for Trump again,” Mr Bennett said.

Devynn DeVelasco, a 20-year-old independent from Nebraska, is one of those who had already been convinced by the long list of senior Republicans who worked for then-President Trump but now say he is unfit for office.

Although she hopes some Republicans will join her in supporting Harris, she worries there is fatigue around the claims made about the former president.

“When these reports [about Kelly’s comments] came out I wasn’t shocked, it didn’t change much,” Ms DeVelasco told the BBC.

• AMERICAST: Why Trump supporters queue for hours to see him

Republican strategist Denise Grace Gitsham said voters have been hearing similar rhetoric about Trump since 2016, so any new allegations were unlikely to move the dial.

“If you’re voting against Donald Trump because you don’t like his personality, you’re already a decided voter,” she told the BBC. “But if you’re somebody who’s looking at the policies and that matters more to you than a vibe or a personality, then you’re going to go with the person who you felt you did best under while they were in the White House.”

Both Harris and Trump have been sharpening their barbs in recent days. During a swing through Midwest battleground states on Monday, Harris repeatedly warned of the consequences of a Trump presidency – on abortion rights, on healthcare, on the economy and on US foreign policy.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• GLOBAL: A third election outcome on minds of Moscow
• ON THE GROUND: Democrats take fight deep into Trump country
• WWE: Why Trump is courting old friends from the ring
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

On Friday, she will hold a rally in Texas – the state she has said most dramatically represents the anti-abortion future if Trump is back in power. Next Tuesday, she will shift focus to Washington DC, with a rally reportedly planned by the National Mall, where Trump spoke before some of his supporters attacked the US Capitol.

Trump, meanwhile, has continued his drumbeat of attacks on his Democratic counterpart. At a town hall forum in North Carolina, he said Harris was “lazy” and “stupid” and only became her party nominee because of her ethnicity and gender.

He also issued his own warning, saying that “we may not have a country anymore” if Harris wins.

None of these lines are a particular departure for Trump, however, as he has spent most of his campaign attacking Democrats and sticking to his core message on immigration, trade and the economy.

Harris’s closing pitch, meanwhile, directed toward winning over anti-Trump Republicans and independents, isn’t without its risks, said Democratic strategist Bennett.

“You are always shorting one thing to try to help promote something else,” he said. “The candidate’s time and the time spent on advertising are the two most precious commodities. And how you spend those matters.”

Trump has been a polarising figure in American politics for more than eight years now. Most Americans have strongly held, and deeply ingrained, opinions about the man by now.

If anti-Trump sentiment puts Harris over the top on election day, her latest strategic emphasis will have paid off. If not, the second-guessing will come fast and furious.

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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.

Voters in the US go to the polls on 5 November to elect their next president.

The election was initially a rematch of 2020 but it was upended in July when President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris.

The big question now is – will America get its first woman president or a second Donald Trump term?

As election day approaches, we’ll be keeping track of the polls and seeing what effect the campaign has on the race for the White House.

Harris has had a small lead over Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July and she remains ahead – as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number.

Harris saw a bounce in her polling numbers in the first few weeks of her campaign, building a lead of nearly four percentage points towards the end of August.

The numbers were relatively stable through September, even after the only debate between the two candidates on 10 September, which was watched by nearly 70 million people.

In the last few days the gap between them has tightened, as you can see in the poll tracker chart below, with the trend lines showing the averages and the dots showing the individual poll results for each candidate.

While these national polls are a useful guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, they’re not necessarily an accurate way to predict the result of the election.

That’s because the US uses an electoral college system, in which each state is given a number of votes roughly in line with the size of its population. A total of 538 electoral college votes are up for grabs, so a candidate needs to hit 270 to win.

There are 50 states in the US but because most of them nearly always vote for the same party, in reality there are just a handful where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground states or swing states.

• What is the electoral college?

Right now the polls are very tight in the seven states considered battlegrounds in this election and neither candidate has a decisive lead in any of them, according to the polling averages.

If you look at the trends since Harris joined the race, it does help highlight some differences between the states – but it’s important to note that there are fewer state polls than national polls so we have less data to go on and every poll has a margin of error that means the numbers could be higher or lower.

In Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, the lead has changed hands a few times since the start of August but Trump has had a small lead for a few weeks now. It’s a similar story in Nevada but with Harris the candidate who has been slightly ahead.

In the three other states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – Harris has been leading since the start of August, sometimes by two or three points, but in recent days the polls have tightened significantly and Trump now has a very small lead in Pennsylvania.

All three of those states had been Democratic strongholds before Trump turned them red on his path to winning the presidency in 2016. Biden retook them in 2020 and if Harris can do the same then she will be on course to win the election.

In a sign of how the race has changed since Harris became the Democratic nominee, on the day that Biden quit the race he was trailing Trump by nearly five percentage points on average in the seven swing states.

In Pennsylvania, Biden was behind by nearly 4.5 percentage points when he dropped out, as the chart below shows. It is a key state for both campaigns as it has the highest number of electoral votes of the seven and therefore winning it makes it easier to reach the 270 votes needed.

The figures we have used in the graphics above are averages created by polling analysis website 538, which is part of American news network ABC News. To create them, 538 collects the data from individual polls carried out both nationally and in battleground states by lots of polling companies.

As part of its quality control, 538 only includes polls from companies that meet certain criteria, like being transparent about how many people they polled, when the poll was carried out and how the poll was conducted (telephone calls, text message, online, etc).

You can read more about the 538 methodology here.

At the moment, the polls suggest that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are within a couple of percentage points of each other in all of the swing states – and when the race is that close, it’s very hard to predict winners.

Polls underestimated support for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Polling companies will be trying to fix that problem in a number of ways, including how to make their results reflect the make-up of the voting population.

Those adjustments are difficult to get right and pollsters still have to make educated guesses about other factors like who will actually turn up to vote on 5 November.

• Listen: How do election polls work?

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• GLOBAL: Harris or Trump? What Chinese people want
• ON THE GROUND: Democrats take fight deep into Trump country
• FACT-CHECK: What the numbers really say about crime
• Read more about: Kamala Harris | Donald Trump | US election

A man who was twice homeless as a teenager before becoming a multimillionaire entrepreneur has topped a list celebrating influential black Britons.

Dean Forbes, who, after failing to make it as a professional footballer, began his career in a call centre, is now the boss of a software company.

He worked his way up from “abject poverty” on an estate in south-east London to become chief executive of Forterro, a Swedish software firm.

Forbes said topping the Powerlist 2025 was a “professional and career high”.

He told the BBC that although he grew up in a single-parent family on a housing estate in Lewisham, his disabled mum always encouraged her children to be positive, and gave them hope.

He said he had a “whale of a time” growing up despite having little money, living in a local community which “looked after each other”.

His said his mum taught him and his two brothers to “raise our expectations”, “never to be victims” and not dwell on misfortunes.

He twice became homeless as a teenager, but said he and his family always saw these as temporary challenges to be overcome.

He managed to get a place at Crystal Palace Academy, but it didn’t work out.

He points to that failure as a key moment in his eventual success, because it made him more determined.

“Thanks to that disappointment and rejection, it put me on this path which is beyond my wildest dreams,” he said.

He had been borrowing money to “keep up appearances” with friends like then-footballer Rio Ferdinand who were being “paid well”, but he was eventually left with an £88,000 debt pile.

To start to clear that, he got a job in a Motorola call centre, and he quickly worked his way up.

He moved to a software firm called Primavera which he helped build up, and made his first millions after it was sold to Oracle: he had taken an equity stake.

Forbes moved from there and was chief executive of two software firms, KDS and CoreHR, each time taking equity stakes, and making millions more.

He also has an equity stake in Forterro, which he said was a firm which makes more than €300m (£250m) in revenue per year and earnings of €130m.

Despite his wealth, he said he never wanted “to lose the value of a pound”.

He was able to buy his mum a home, and his children “have never had to deal with anything I had to deal with” in terms of poverty.

He now describes celebrities like Ferdinand and actor Idris Elba as close friends.

But he told the BBC his roots remained very important to him and he wanted to inspire and give opportunities to others who have not started out with advantages in life.

Forbes and his wife Danielle set up the Forbes Family Group, a philanthropic organisation for people in underserved communities.

They are working to try to break the cycle of poverty and disadvantage, and give people positive role models.

“My experience has made me painfully aware that there is so much talent in these communities – you just need to open the door a crack” to give people a chance, he said.

Forbes said that as he was growing up the only black people he could see who were successful seemed to be in entertainment, sport, or “doing unsavoury things” in criminal gangs.

He said he wanted to make success in business more “relatable” in part through mentoring and networking projects.

He has now been named number one on the Powerlist 2025, after being number two last year.

The annual Powerlist was first published in 2007, with its aim to provide role models for young black people, according to Powerful Media.

Forbes takes the place of British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful at the head of the list.

The top 10 of the Powerlist for 2025 is:

1. Dean Forbes, chief executive at software firm Forterro

2. Bernard Mensah, president of international at Bank of America

3. Afua Kyei, chief financial officer at the Bank of England

4. Emma Grede, chief executive at fashion brand Good American

5. Joshua Siaw, partner at law firm White & Case

6. Tunde Olanrewaju, senior partner at consultancy McKinsey

7. Alexander and Oliver Kent-Braham, founders of insurance firm Marshmallow

8. Adejoke Bakare, chef-owner at Michelin-starred restaurant Chishuru

9. Justin Onuekwusi, fund manager at St. James’s Place

10. Pamela Maynard, chief AI transformation officer at Microsoft

Venice is to double the number of days it charges tourists an entrance fee in 2025, following a “successful” trial last year, the city’s mayor said.

Luigi Brugnaro said the objective remained that of discouraging tourists from visiting the city on the same days “to give Venice the respect it deserves”.

Day trippers who book ahead will have to pay €5 (£4.17; $5.41) to access the Italian city on certain days between April and July, rising to €10 if they book less than four days in advance.

A charge was first introduced last April and it covered 29 days – mostly weekends and public holidays – over a four-month period.

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The tax will be applied every Friday to Sunday, and on public holidays, between 18 April and 27 July 2025, for a total of 54 days.

All visitors over the age of 14 will have to pay the charge on their phones and download a QR code to show inspectors, who will check people at random in common arrival areas, like the train station.

Those without a ticket risk getting a fine.

As with the previous charge, people with hotel and guest house reservations will be exempt, as will residents of the Veneto region, students enrolled at Venice university, and those visiting relatives who live in Venice.

“Venice has gone from being the city most exposed to and criticised for the phenomenon of overtourism, to being the city that is reacting to this phenomenon the earliest and most proactively on the global stage,” said city councillor Simone Venturini.

According to Italian media, in the first eight days of the scheme in April Venice authorities collected the amount they were hoping to make in three months.

By the end of the trial period in mid-July, the city had collected about €2.4m (£2m; $2.5m) in entrance fees.

But mayor Brugnaro said he would have to wait for further analysis to see whether the budget for the scheme completely breaks even.

The cost of the ticket booking platform and the communication campaign that followed the announcement of the initiative cost around €3m, Italian media reported.

Venice opposition councillor Giovanni Andrea Martini said in July that the entrance fee system was a “failure” as it had not helped spread out the flow of tourists that visit Venice.

At the time, Mr Martini also said that a potential raise of the fee from €5 to €10 was be “useless” and would merely “turn Venice into a museum”.

Last year Unesco said the city should be added to a list of world heritage sites in danger, as the impact of climate change and mass tourism threaten to cause irreversible changes to it.

And in 2021, large cruise ships were banned from entering the historic centre of Venice via the Giudecca canal after a ship crashed into a harbour.

Critics also argued that the ships were causing pollution and eroding the foundations of the city, which suffers from regular flooding.

A rare typescript of children’s story The Little Prince, one of the most translated books ever published, is set to go on sale for $1.25m (£963,313).

The typescript – a typed copy of a text – was produced in New York by its author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, while in exile from Nazi-occupied France in the 1940s, and is one of three known to be in existence.

The copy contains handwritten notes and sketches by Saint-Exupéry. It will go on sale at the Abu Dhabi Art Festival in the United Arab Emirates in November.

Having the typed manuscript “is an extremely rare event”, said Sammy Jay, senior literature specialist from the typescript’s seller Peter Harrington Rare Books.

Saint-Exupéry wrote Le Petit Prince, in the original French, for children while living in exile in New York during World War Two. It was published in 1943.

He was an experienced aviator and, after writing the book, he returned to Europe on a reconnaissance mission for the Free French air force fighting Nazi Germany. He disappeared on his last mission while over the Mediterranean, and it is unknown how exactly his plane went down.

The famous work of fiction is about a pilot stranded in a desert who meets a small boy called the Little Prince who is visiting Earth.

Since its publication, The Little Prince has gone on to sell millions of copies around the world.

Saint-Exupéry’s original handwritten manuscript is in New York. Two other typescripts are known to exist, one in France’s national library and another in the Harry Ransom Center in Texas.

Mr Jay told the BBC that Saint-Exupéry gave those two typescripts to friends before his disappearance, but the third one “wasn’t inscribed or given to someone”.

The third was in a private collection in France “for decades” and is the only copy that has come up to be sold to the public, he said, adding that it is “astounding” to have it.

“It’s very exciting because the quest [for me] is always to find something more and more amazing…I don’t know how I’m going to beat it,” Mr Jay said.

Peter Harrington Rare Books has possessed the typescript since the start of 2024 and has been cataloguing and conducting research on it, as well as making it ready for sale.

The cover shows evidence of stubbed-out cigarettes and the typescript contains Saint-Exupéry’s handwritten notes, annotations, and edits on its pages.

It also features what has been thought to be the first written appearance of one of the story’s most famous lines: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; the essential is invisible to the eye.”

This typescript is “much more intimate” than the other two, Mr Jay said, highlighting notes and “doodles” the author made on it.

Two sketches of the Little Prince accompany the artefact, one of which was a preliminary sketch for the book’s final illustration, according to Peter Harrington Rare Books.

The Little Prince is part of a “global literary heritage” as one of the most translated books in the world, Mr Jay said.

He said there was the possibility a museum or library outside of Europe could buy the typescript in November, which could show a “recognition of its global status”.

The owners of a container ship that crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge have been ordered to pay the US government more than $100m (£77.1m) in damages, the US justice department has announced.

Grace Ocean Private Limited and Synergy Marine Private Limited, the companies that owned and operated the Dali have agreed to pay, resolving a month-long civil lawsuit.

The justice department called the 26 March collision that killed six and sent tonnes of debris into the river “one of the worst transportation disasters in recent memory”.

Payment will go to the US Treasury and other federal agencies directly affected by the collision or involved in the response.

“This is a tremendous outcome that fully compensates the United States for the costs it incurred in responding to this disaster and holds the owner and operator of the Dali accountable,” said Brian Boynton, head of the justice department’s civil division, in a press release on Thursday.

The department said the settlement does not include any damages for the reconstruction of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The state has filed its own claim for those damages.

The settlement “strictly covers costs related to clearing the channel” and “not indicative of any liability,” a Synergy spokesperson said in a statement.

“No punitive damages have been imposed as part of this settlement. In accordance with the settlement, the United States has dismissed its claim,” it added.

The US blamed the incident on electrical and mechanical systems failures on the ship. It alleged the Dali was inadequately maintained, which it said caused the ship to lose power and crash into a bridge column.

Six men – all construction workers fixing potholes on the bridge – died when they were plunged into the water after the container ship hit the structure.

The Dali’s collision sent tonnes of debris into the Patapsco River, freezing traffic for months at one of the busiest ports in the US.

In response, the US coordinated dozens of federal, state and local agencies to remove 50,000 tonnes of steel, concrete, and asphalt from the shipping channel and from the Dali, the justice department said.

The bridge collapse also caused “economic devastation” as shipping was brought to a standstill. The Port of Baltimore reopened in June for commercial navigation.

The incident also blocked a key route for local commuters.

McDonald’s has temporarily removed quarter pounders and fresh, slivered onions from the menu in about a fifth of its US stores due to an outbreak of deadly E. coli poisoning.

So far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded 49 cases of illness across 10 states. Ten cases resulted in patients being admitted to hospital and one person has died.

Most of the cases of E. coli, a type of bacteria that can cause serious stomach problems, were recorded in western and Midwest states, according to the CDC.

As health officials continue to investigate the source of the outbreak, other major food companies have also said they are withdrawing onions in the US.

Here’s what we know so far.

The 49 E. coli cases have largely been concentrated in the states of Colorado and Nebraska so far, the CDC said on Tuesday.

Of the 26 people who became sick in Colorado, one older adult has died – the first, and only, death that has been linked to the outbreak.

The CDC said that an infected child is in hospital with a condition known as hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), which can cause kidney failure.

The first confirmed outbreak case was reported on 27 September, but McDonald’s said authorities only notified the company of their concerns late last week.

As of Wednesday, about a dozen of the people interviewed had identified eating a quarter pounder before contracting the illness.

The chain’s decision to remove the patties and onions from the menu affects stores in Colorado, Kansas, Utah, Wyoming, as well as parts of Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

Other hamburger items are not affected.

Burger King said on Thursday that about 5% of its restaurants receive onions from a supplier potentially linked to the outbreak. While there has been no indication of contamination or illness at those restaurants, the chain said they have disposed of the produce.

Investigators are eyeing the possibility that onions, a popular topping for McDonald’s quarter pounders, could be the cause of contamination.

The CDC and FDA said on Tuesday that they had not yet ruled out that the patties themselves could be to blame.

The chain has agreed with that assessment, though the company has said that its burgers are cooked to 175 degrees – which is above the 160 degree level needed to kill the E. coli bacteria

The cases involve purchases from multiple stores, making it unlikely that food preparation is to blame, McDonald’s said.

The company said the stores involved had used multiple suppliers for the beef patties, but shared a single supplier of onions – identified as California-based Taylor Farms, one of the world’s largest vegetable processors.

Taylor Farms, which works with major food suppliers such as US Foods, has issued its own recall of some batches of onions out of an abundance of caution.

Taylor Farms said in a statement provided to CBS News that it conducted tests on “raw and finished” onion products and “found no traces of E. coli”.

On Thursday, the fast food firm Yum! Brands said it was monitoring the outbreak and had decided to proactively remove fresh onions from “select Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC restaurants” in the US.

The company declined to say how many locations were affected by the decision.

E. coli are a diverse group of bacteria that normally live in the intestines of humans and animals.

Although many are harmless, some produce toxins that can make humans very ill.

Symptoms include severe and sometimes bloody diarrhoea, stomach cramps, vomiting and fever.

Some infections can lead to other more serious problems, including kidney failure.

Symptoms tend to emerge three to nine days after eating the contaminated food.

McDonald’s shares opened down 7% on Wednesday, after news of the outbreak became public. They have since recovered some ground.

The burger giant said this week that it was too early to say how damaging it would be for sales.

It said that it believed it had removed the problem from its supply chain and is aiming to return quarter pounders to the affected states in the next few weeks.

But the issue came as McDonalds was already on the defensive, as customers have cut back on fast food spending.

The change in consumer spending has forced McDonalds and other chains to lean heavily on discounts and other promotions.

The first lawsuit against McDonald’s over the outbreak has been filed by a man who fell ill two days after eating at a restaurant in Greeley, Colorado.

After seeking emergency care, Eric Stelly tested positive for E. coli and health officials confirmed his infection was linked to the outbreak, according to a press release from his lawyer, Ron Simon.

“We will make sure that all of the victims are fully compensated for their losses… and that McDonald’s and its suppliers permanently fix the health violations that caused the food to become contaminated with E. coli.,” said Mr Simon.

The lawsuit was filed in Chicago, where the headquarters of the fast-food chain is located.

The email address for the public to comment on laws proposed in Kenya’s Senate has crashed after an overwhelming response to a controversial bill.

The bill seeks to extend the terms in office for the president, county governors and MPs from five to seven years, among other constitutional amendments.

The plan was met with public anger and Kenyans have been mobilising on social media.

The upper house of the country’s parliament received more than “200,000 submissions, reaching the maximum capacity”, said a post on the Senate’s X account.

Even though it was put forward by one of its senators, Samson Cherargei, the party of President William Ruto has distanced itself from the plan.

United Democratic Alliance (UDA) secretary-general Hassan Omar had earlier described the bill as “repugnant and backward”, the Nation newspaper reports.

Cherargei defended his plan saying that seven years would give the president and others enough time to deliver on their pledges.

The public had until Friday to share their thoughts.

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Sources within parliament told The Star newspaper that emails were sent every second, adding that no bill had received such a number of responses.

While thanking people for their submissions, the Senate said that “due to high volumes… our email system has temporarily experienced issues”. It then provided an alternative address.

As well as increasing term lengths, the bill sets out to create the position of prime minister and increase funding to the county administrations.

A senate committee is now due to evaluate the public responses.

The proposed legislation comes at a time when Kenyan lawmakers are under intense scrutiny and as people continue to struggle with the high cost of living.

A series of demonstrations, beginning in June, against measures to increase taxes turned violent and led to at least 40 deaths.

The president then reversed his plans and sought to appease the mood by including opposition members in his cabinet.

But a deep cynicism about politicians remains and anything that smacks of extending their time in power is met with derision.

This is the second attempt to change the two-term limit on presidents since Ruto came to office in 2022.

Two years’ ago, a ruling party MP wanted to replace it with an age limit of 75 years. However, the proposal failed after a public outcry.

The president has previously rejected the scrapping of the term limit, calling the attempt “unnecessary and an exercise in futility”.

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A man from Northern Ireland has been given a life sentence with a minimum of 20 years in jail for the extreme online sexual abuse of children and the manslaughter of a 12-year-old girl.

Alexander McCartney from County Armagh admitted 185 charges – including more than 50 blackmail offences.

It is believed he targeted as many as 3,500 victims, aged 10 to 16, from countries across the world, between 2013 and 2019.

He pleaded guilty to manslaughter after a 12-year-old girl from the United States, Cimarron Thomas, took her own life while he was abusing her.

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On Friday, Mr Justice O’Hara told Belfast Crown Court that McCartney, who has been in custody for five years, would not be considered for release before 2039.

He said: “I do not sense remorse or shame.”

He added it was hard to think of “a sexual deviant who poses more risk than this defendant”.

Alexander McCartney is one of the world’s most prolific online child abusers and his litany of crimes has been described as “the UK’s largest catfishing case”.

Catfishing involves the use of a false identity online to befriend and exploit victims.

The ‘catfish’ is the person who has created the fake persona.

They target people through social media and messaging apps, usually for abuse and fraud.

From behind a computer screen at his home in Northern Ireland, McCartney brought fear and devastation to the lives of thousands of children across the world.

He approached the vast majority of his victims on Snapchat, although on a small number of occasions he used other social media sites including Instagram and Kik.

On his 64 devices, he pretended to be a young girl to lure his victims into sending intimate photos.

Sometimes he used pictures he had obtained from other young girls and pretended to be them when speaking to new victims.

Once he had the photos he would blackmail them for more extreme photographs.

If they did not send them he said he would expose them to their friends and family.

He forced the children to involve their younger siblings in the abuse, which also included family pets and objects.

A spokesperson for Snapchat said the sexual exploitation of any person is horrific and illegal and “our hearts go out to the victims in this case”.

“If we discover this activity, or it is reported to us, we remove it, lock the violating account and report it to the authorities.”

The company said it had extra protections for teenagers to make it difficult for them to be contacted by strangers.

“Through our in-app Family Centre parents can also see who their teens are talking to, and who their friends are,” they added.

In many cases terrified children begged McCartney to stop and begged that their pictures would not be put on the internet.

Some said they would kill or harm themselves.

One victim sent a picture with a cut on her arm. McCartney told them that he “didn’t give a shit”.

Another girl said: “I can’t stop shaking, I think I’m going to die.”

McCartney replied: “I don’t care.”

The police have said on occasions he shared the images with other paedophiles.

He kept records of the children he had abused and screenshotted their Snapchat location pins so he knew where they were based.

He was so relentless in his abuse that he had a template of messages that he would copy and paste to the children.

The court heard the harm McCartney caused was “unquantifiable” and he “degraded and humiliated” victims for his own sexual gratification.

Many of his child victims have never been identified, but all their lives have been changed forever.

Although investigators believe as many as 3,500 children were targeted; this case focussed on 70 of them in order to provide a manageable caseload for the court.

During the investigation, prosecutors discovered one case that had led to tragic consequences.

In 2018, he messaged 12-year-old Cimarron Thomas in West Virginia, USA. After complimenting her and getting a picture, he began his campaign of abuse.

He demanded more pictures of her and threatened to put her pictures online and expose her if she did not do what he said.

Scared, she did not tell anyone what was happening to her.

McCartney kept pursuing her and coming back for more photos and told her she had to include her little sister.

She refused to do so and said she would kill herself. He put up a countdown clock.

Cimarron shot herself in the head with her family’s legally held firearm, while she was still online with McCartney.

Her younger sister found her.

Tragically, 18 months later, Cimarron’s father Ben took his own life. When he died he did not know the reason why Cimarron had taken hers.

In a statement read outside the court on Friday, Cimarron’s grandparents, Peggy and Dale Thomas, called on parents to “please keep the doors of communication open concerning the evil of some people online”.

McCartney pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Cimarron Thomas earlier this year.

On Friday, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said it was initially contacted following a report from Police Scotland that a 13-year-old girl had been groomed by an adult suspect believed to be residing in Northern Ireland, using the alias of a 13-year-old girl.

PSNI Detective Ch Supt Eamonn Corrigan welcomed the sentencing and said McCartney is “nothing but a disgusting child predator”.

He added McCartney’s devices had “tens of thousands of photos and videos of underage girls performing sexual acts whilst being blackmailed”.

The detective said working with Homeland Security, the Public Prosecution Service and National Crime Agency, victims were located in America, New Zealand and at least 28 other countries.

“As far as I am concerned there is only one place for McCartney and that is behind bars,” Det Ch Supt Corrigan said.

Police said McCartney had become the first person in the UK to be sentenced for manslaughter when the victim resided in a foreign jurisdiction.

McCartney “may as well have pulled the trigger himself”, Mr Corrigan continued.

Catherine Kierans, acting head of the Public Prosecution Service Serious Crime Unit, said McCartney has caused “immeasurable damage”.

US Homeland Security added McCartney deserved every minute of his sentence.

“We are thankful that our law enforcement partners in Northern Ireland saw fit to apprehend and charge McCartney for his role in the girl’s death,” Special Agent Derek W Gordon said.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is about to do one of the biggest interviews of his presidential campaign – with America’s number one podcaster, Joe Rogan.

With 14.5 million Spotify followers and 17.5 million YouTube subscribers, The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE for short) has built a massive, mostly male, audience since it first launched 15 years ago.

Confirming media reports of the upcoming interview, set to be taped on Friday, Trump described his counterpart as “a nice guy” with whom he expected a “very interesting” conversation.

“I do a lot of shows,” he told Fox News Radio on Wednesday. “Good, bad or indifferent. I do a lot of shows and they come out good.”

That response makes light of the Trump campaign’s calculated media strategy, which has focused on podcasts popular with younger men over traditional media outlets like 60 Minutes.

And it underplays just how big a deal this could be for the former president, long-time listeners say.

“Rogan is about to have the most listened-to podcast in human history,” says Matthew Foldi, a conservative journalist and self-styled JRE expert who has spent thousands of hours listening to the entire catalogue – in chronological order and at 3.5x speed – since 2020.

A New Jersey native, Rogan began his career as a stand-up comedian in the Boston area before relocating to California in the 1990s. He featured in two sitcoms – Hardball and NewsRadio – and gained national exposure as host of the US edition of the Fear Factor game show.

He became one of the first comics to venture into podcasting in 2009, quickly building an audience with his easy-going conversation style and sense of humour. By 2020, he had signed one of the largest licensing deals in the business, with Spotify, where he has dominated the podcasting ranks.

Known for discussing everything from current affairs and politics to aliens and drug use, Rogan hosts an ideologically diverse mix of guests – from astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson to far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to comedians like Chris Rock and Kevin Hart – in lengthy hours-long interviews.

Part of his appeal, says Kat Rosenfield, a freelance culture writer and novelist, is his willingness to talk to anyone, about anything.

“He is very naturally curious. He wants to ask questions. He wants to know what’s up with his guests and he has good instincts to make it an engaging listen.”

But his willingness to absorb contrarian perspectives has also landed him in hot water.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, he was criticised for promoting vaccine scepticism, leading to a coalition of medical experts to call out Spotify for allowing “false and societally harmful assertions” to spread.

In 2022, musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell removed their music from Spotify in protest over Rogan’s use of the platform to spread alleged Covid misinformation. The company ultimately took down some 70 previously-released episodes.

Also that year, Rogan came under fire when a video compilation of him repeatedly using racially insensitive language on his show made the rounds on social media. He has since apologised.

Ms Rosenfield casts Rogan’s personal politics as being libertarian – very socially liberal, as seen in his support for same-sex marriage and universal drug legalisation, but also someone who treasures free speech and gun rights.

In 2020, he endorsed Bernie Sanders for president after the then-Democratic candidate appeared on his show.

“Rogan seemed like a refreshing alternative at a moment when audiences sort of lost their trust in many [mainstream media] outlets,” Ms Rosenfield argues.

“He doesn’t think he’s smarter than his audience, which I think is quite endearing to people who listen to the show. He doesn’t talk down to people and he always says ‘don’t listen to me, I don’t know anything’.”

Trump and Rogan have not always seen eye-to-eye.

As recently as 2022, the podcaster said he did not want to “help” Trump electorally because he was “an existential threat to democracy”.

Earlier this year, he praised Robert F Kennedy Jr, then running as an independent presidential candidate, as “the only one that makes sense to me”.

That didn’t go down well with Trump, who said Rogan would get “booed” the next time he was at an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event.

But it’s also their shared love of the UFC, and mixed martial arts in general, hints at some of the common ground they may have during the interview.

Rogan is a long-time colour commentator and interviewer for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) events. Trump, too, is a fan of the sport, which he has discussed at length on other podcasts.

The two are both long-time friends of UFC CEO Dana White, who lauded Rogan this week as “the best combat sports commentator of all time” and has lavished praise on Trump as “the ultimate American badass”.

They also share two other allies – RFK Jr and Elon Musk, both of whom have recently got behind Trump.

Rogan spoke fondly of Trump on a recent show as a “wheeling, dealing billionaire character that everybody enjoyed” whose deregulation agenda had helped the economy.

He added that the wars in Ukraine and Gaza “scared the [expletive] out of him” – two wars Trump has vowed to end if elected, although he has not provided specifics on how.

Mr Foldi, the conservative journalist and Rogan super fan, says the attention that Trump will get from this podcast could help him dominate the closing days of the campaign and win over straggling undecided voters.

“This is the most viewed show on earth, and the eyeballs that you’re going to get… is second to none.”

Like Mr Foldi, who is 28, Rogan’s listeners are overwhelmingly young and male. Almost 80% are men, and half are between the ages of 18 and 34, according to Edison Research, which produces survey-based data on podcasting in the US.

Such figures suggest Rogan’s audience is part of a crucial voting bloc to whom the Trump campaign has made clear it is trying to reach.

In August, the campaign told reporters it is focused on persuading a group of voters it says makes up about 10% of the electorate in key swing states. This group is disproportionately young, male and racially diverse.

Cancelling traditional media interviews with the likes of CBS and NBC, Trump has instead spent time with podcasters who appeal to predominantly male audiences, including comedians Andrew Schulz and Theo Von, social media influencer Logan Paul, retired wrestler Mark Calaway (AKA The Undertaker) and YouTube pranksters The Nelk Boys.

But in sheer audience size and cultural reach, JRE is arguably the lynchpin of this podcast tour.

Harris too has made podcasts part of her media blitz, albeit to a lesser extent. She sat down earlier this month with Call Her Daddy – the top-ranked show among women – and spoke at length with host Alex Cooper about reproductive rights, the top issue galvanising Democrats and particularly female voters this year.

On Thursday, Harris taped an appearance on Club Shay Shay, a weekly podcast hosted by NFL legend Shannon Sharpe that is popular among black men. Polling suggests that voting bloc’s support for her is not as robust as for previous Democratic candidates.

In spite of objections from some corners, Harris’s team was in talks with Rogan’s staff about a potential appearance, according to Reuters, but her campaign has since confirmed she will not make an appearance due to scheduling conflicts.

About the same time that Rogan’s episode is being taped, Harris is scheduled to sit down with famed social psychologist Brene Brown for her podcast, Unlocking Us, which is popular with female listeners.

As anticipation for the Trump interview builds, Americans on social media are fantasising about the questions they would like Rogan to pose, on everything from alien declassification to documents about Jeffrey Epstein.

If Rogan stays true to form, Mr Foldi says, no topic will be out of bounds.

“For Trump, I see very little drawback because, whatever you think of the guy, he’s clearly comfortable in who he is,” he adds.

“The only way that you crumble on [JRE] is if he asks you about the core of who you are and you don’t have a comfortable answer.”

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Archaeologists have found the remains of two medieval cities in the grassy mountains of eastern Uzbekistan, a discovery that could shift our understanding of the fabled Silk Road.

Known for the exchange of goods and ideas between the East and West, the trade routes were long believed to have linked lowland cities.

But using remote sensing technology, archeologists have now found at least two highland cities that sat along a key crossroad of the trade routes.

One of the cities – Tugunbulak, a metropolis spanning at least 120 hectares – sat more than 2,000m (6,600 ft) above sea level, an altitude thought to be inhospitable even today.

“The history of Central Asia is now changing with this finding,” said archaeologist Farhod Maksudov, who was part of the research team.

The team believes Tugunbulak and the smaller city, Tashbulak, were bustling settlements between the 8th and 11th centuries, during the Middle Ages, when the area was controlled by a powerful Turkic dynasty.

Only 3% of the world’s population live above this altitude today. Lhasa in Tibet and Cusco in Peru are among the rare examples.

The discovery led by Mr Maksudov, director of Uzbekistan’s National Center of Archaeology and Michael Frachetti, an archaeologist at Washington University in St Louis, was made possible with drones and a remote-sensing tool known as lidar, which uses reflected light to create three-dimensional mappings of the environment.

Their research was published in the scientific journal Nature this week, and experts who are not involved in it have hailed its significance in shedding light on the lifestyles of nomadic communities.

The team first discovered Tashbulak, the smaller city, in 2011 while trekking in the mountains. They found burial sites, thousands of pottery shards and other signs that the territory was populated.

Historical records allude to cities in the region, he said, but the team did not expect to find a 12-hectare medieval city some 2,200m above sea level.

“We were kind of blown away,” Mr Frachetti told the BBC.

Even trekking up there was rough, he added, as they encountered strong winds, storms and logistical challenges.

Four years later, a local forestry administrator tipped off the team to study another site close to Tashbulak.

“The official said, ‘I think I have some of those kinds of ceramics in my backyard.’

“So we went to his house… And discovered his house was built on a medieval citadel. He was like living on a huge city,” Mr Frachetti said.

The most challenging part in these discoveries was in convincing the academic community that these cities existed.

“We would say to people that we found this amazing site, and we would get scepticism, that maybe it’s not so big, or it’s just a mound, or a castle… That was the big challenge, how to document this city scientifically to actually illustrate what it was,” Mr Frachetti said.

In 2022, the team returned with a drone equipped with a lidar sensor, which helped peel back the surfaces to unveil walls, guard towers, intricate architectural features and other fortifications in Tugunbulak.

The researchers suggest that communities may have chosen to settle in Tugunbulak and Tashbulak to tap strong winds to fuel fires needed to smelt iron ores – which the region was rich in. Preliminary excavations have also uncovered production kilns.

“Whoever had iron in their hands in medieval time was very powerful,” Mr Maksudov said.

But this could also have led to the communities’ downfall, he said. This area used to be covered by a thick juniper forest, but these could have been cut to facilitate iron production. “The area became environmentally very unstable because of the flash floods, because of the avalanches,” he said.

Typically, scholars have expected to find evidence of settlements lower down in the valley, “so these finds are remarkable”, said Peter Frankopan, a global history professor at Oxford University.

“What an amazing treasure trove… that shows the deep interconnections criss-crossing Asia, as well as the links between exploitation of natural resources more than a millennium ago,” he said.

High-altitude urban sites are “extraordinarily rare” in the archaeological record because communities face unique challenges in settling there, said Zachary Silvia, an archaeologist at Brown University.

The team’s work provides an “immense contribution to the study of medieval urbanism in Central Asia”, he wrote in a commentary on Nature.

Voters in the US go to the polls on 5 November to elect their next president.

The election was initially a rematch of 2020 but it was upended in July when President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris.

The big question now is – will America get its first woman president or a second Donald Trump term?

As election day approaches, we’ll be keeping track of the polls and seeing what effect the campaign has on the race for the White House.

Harris has had a small lead over Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July and she remains ahead – as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number.

Harris saw a bounce in her polling numbers in the first few weeks of her campaign, building a lead of nearly four percentage points towards the end of August.

The numbers were relatively stable through September, even after the only debate between the two candidates on 10 September, which was watched by nearly 70 million people.

In the last few days the gap between them has tightened, as you can see in the poll tracker chart below, with the trend lines showing the averages and the dots showing the individual poll results for each candidate.

While these national polls are a useful guide as to how popular a candidate is across the country as a whole, they’re not necessarily an accurate way to predict the result of the election.

That’s because the US uses an electoral college system, in which each state is given a number of votes roughly in line with the size of its population. A total of 538 electoral college votes are up for grabs, so a candidate needs to hit 270 to win.

There are 50 states in the US but because most of them nearly always vote for the same party, in reality there are just a handful where both candidates stand a chance of winning. These are the places where the election will be won and lost and are known as battleground states or swing states.

• What is the electoral college?

Right now the polls are very tight in the seven states considered battlegrounds in this election and neither candidate has a decisive lead in any of them, according to the polling averages.

If you look at the trends since Harris joined the race, it does help highlight some differences between the states – but it’s important to note that there are fewer state polls than national polls so we have less data to go on and every poll has a margin of error that means the numbers could be higher or lower.

In Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, the lead has changed hands a few times since the start of August but Trump has had a small lead for a few weeks now. It’s a similar story in Nevada but with Harris the candidate who has been slightly ahead.

In the three other states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – Harris has been leading since the start of August, sometimes by two or three points, but in recent days the polls have tightened significantly and Trump now has a very small lead in Pennsylvania.

All three of those states had been Democratic strongholds before Trump turned them red on his path to winning the presidency in 2016. Biden retook them in 2020 and if Harris can do the same then she will be on course to win the election.

In a sign of how the race has changed since Harris became the Democratic nominee, on the day that Biden quit the race he was trailing Trump by nearly five percentage points on average in the seven swing states.

In Pennsylvania, Biden was behind by nearly 4.5 percentage points when he dropped out, as the chart below shows. It is a key state for both campaigns as it has the highest number of electoral votes of the seven and therefore winning it makes it easier to reach the 270 votes needed.

The figures we have used in the graphics above are averages created by polling analysis website 538, which is part of American news network ABC News. To create them, 538 collects the data from individual polls carried out both nationally and in battleground states by lots of polling companies.

As part of its quality control, 538 only includes polls from companies that meet certain criteria, like being transparent about how many people they polled, when the poll was carried out and how the poll was conducted (telephone calls, text message, online, etc).

You can read more about the 538 methodology here.

At the moment, the polls suggest that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are within a couple of percentage points of each other in all of the swing states – and when the race is that close, it’s very hard to predict winners.

Polls underestimated support for Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Polling companies will be trying to fix that problem in a number of ways, including how to make their results reflect the make-up of the voting population.

Those adjustments are difficult to get right and pollsters still have to make educated guesses about other factors like who will actually turn up to vote on 5 November.

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Two months ago, Kamala Harris was crowned as the Democratic presidential nominee at a jubilant national convention in Chicago.

For thousands of party faithful, she was the electoral saviour, replacing an 81-year-old incumbent who seemed incapable of defeating Donald Trump and winning another term.

But even then, senior party strategists told me they worried Democrats were overconfident about her path to victory. Now, as election day looms and anxieties grow, it seems their concerns were well-founded.

There is no doubt that Harris enjoyed a surge of momentum, and an instant and significant boost in the polls compared to President Joe Biden, who was lagging far behind Trump. Yet it appears she was winning back those who normally vote Democratic anyway, but who had worried about Biden and his age.

For victory, Harris needs to attract voters from beyond the Democrats’ base, while holding together the fragile coalition that helped Biden win in 2020.

The latest polls show a race that has tightened in recent weeks and is now essentially a tie.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump winning?
• Follow the latest from campaign trail

Worrying for Democrats is that Trump has gained ground in the crucial “blue wall” states that offer Harris her clearest path to victory – Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – as well as among black and Latino voters.

Although the race is neck-and-neck in the key swing states, poll numbers are within the margin of error. In other words, they could be wrong.

But Harris’s criticism of Trump, her Republican opponent, has become much darker in the last few days. At the convention, she laughed at Trump, dismissing him as an “unserious man” and “weird”. Now she is calling him a “fascist” and “increasingly unhinged and unstable”.

Her original message of wanting to bring “joy” has turned to one of fear – warning of what she says are the dangerous consequences of a second Trump term.

Polling suggests Harris is likely to win the popular vote. But that won’t be enough. She has to win key battleground states to win in the electoral college.

But in recent weeks as I’ve travelled through most of those states, the reservations many voters still have about Harris – a woman they feel they still don’t know enough about – have been clear.

Harris has a very particular problem in Michigan, which has the highest concentration of Arab-American voters in the US.

Biden won the state in 2020 by just over 150,000 votes, but his administration’s inability to rein in Israel’s attacks in Gaza and Lebanon has deeply hurt the party’s standing among the 300,000 Arab-Americans living here.

Harris, Biden’s vice-president, is being held equally responsible.

In the Haraz coffee shop in Dearborn, a Middle Eastern-style café serving Turkish coffee and pomegranate juice, I met a group of lifelong Democrats who normally would be out campaigning.

I expected to hear some of them say they couldn’t vote for Harris, and would be sitting out the vote. But Samraa Luqman, who describes herself as further left than most Democrats, said she is not only voting Trump but is actively encouraging others to do so.

“I believe there has to be accountability for all the lives lost,” she told me. “I do not forgive the Democrats for it, and I will not be scared into voting for them.”

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Chadi Abdulrazek said he could never have imagined voting for Trump a year ago, but now Samraa may persuade him.

“If I do want to punish the Democrats, specifically this administration, then I might have to consider that,” he said. ”Every time I say that, I feel like I have to go and throw up. But also I think about my family, my people, in Palestine and in Lebanon”

Harris has spoken about her anger over the suffering in Gaza and Lebanon, but these voters want her to say she will refuse to supply weapons to Israel if they are used in strikes that kill civilians.

In Michigan, the working-class and union vote could prove pivotal, too. Jean Ducheman, a United Auto Workers union official in the city of Lansing, Michigan, is more optimistic about Harris.

When I spoke to him in July, he wanted Biden to step aside because of his age. But he also had deep reservations about Harris. Now he says he is convinced she is the best choice and that she is winning over some of his undecided colleagues.

Mr Ducheman believes that campaigning extensively in Michigan has made a real difference.

“She came and spoke to us and that’s really appreciated,” he said, despite the fact that some unions have chosen not to endorse Harris.

The most important swing state is Pennsylvania because it has the largest number of votes in the all-important electoral college. With polls deadlocked, both sides have poured hundreds of millions into advertising here to reach undecided voters.

On every visit, I’ve found voters care the most about the economy. And it’s an area where Trump seems to enjoy a significant advantage: No matter how much Democrats point to rosy job numbers or economic growth, people simply felt better off four years ago before record-high inflation cut into monthly budgets.

At a national hunting and fishing event in Bald Eagle National Park, I met Gene Wool, one of those hard-to-find undecideds.

He said he was reluctant to vote for Trump because of what he described as the “scandals surrounding him”.

But Mr Wool is sure that when Trump was in office, food and petrol prices were lower.

“Most of my friends are probably going to vote for Trump,” he says, adding that he thinks Pennsylvania will swing that way, too.

Harris is focusing on women in the Pennsylvania suburbs – especially those who may usually vote Republican but are turned off byTrump’s rhetoric and behaviour.

Recent Harris events where she has appeared with moderate Republicans like former congresswoman Liz Cheney are aimed at persuading this group that it’s preferable to vote Democratic even if you don’t agree with Harris’s policies – just to keep Trump out of the White House.

Harris holds a very strong lead among female voters across the nation in an election with the country’s biggest ever gender divide.

She has not campaigned on the historic nature of her candidacy, almost never mentioning that if elected she would be the first female president. But she does stress her support for women’s reproductive rights.

Trump boasts of appointing the Supreme Court justices who ended the nation’s right to an abortion, in place for over 50 years. But he knows that the very strict abortion bans some states introduced afterwards are deeply unpopular with a lot of voters, forcing him to walk a careful line.

Early one evening in Phoenix, Arizona, recently, I joined some volunteers in a trendy downtown bar having a “postcard party”. They were writing personal messages about why they believe in abortion rights to be sent to Arizona voters. Many are not usually politically active.

In Arizona, one of the two battleground states in America’s west, there is a proposition on the ballot to decide whether to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution – effectively overturning the current law that forbids terminating a pregnancy after 15 weeks.

The hope for Democrats is that women in the ten states with such abortion ballot measures are driven to the polls by that issue, and while there, cast a presidential vote for Harris.

Nicole Nye told me it was the first time she had become involved in a political campaign, and she has already recruited a voter – her 62-year-old mother who had never voted before.

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“I said to her [that] I’m very concerned about my rights. She was fortunate enough to grow up in a time when those rights had been secured for her …It’s concerning that that’s up in the air for me.”

Arizona polls suggest voters are likely to support the proposition by a wide margin, but that may not translate into votes for Harris. As many as one in five people say they plan to vote to guarantee abortion rights in Arizona, but at the same time cast a ballot for Trump.

Neither Harris nor Trump know who will be the next president of the United States. Nor do any of the pollsters or political pundits.

But it appears Harris has not been able to sustain the excitement and optimism she generated when she first became a presidential candidate. She now has to slog it out, fighting for every vote, to stand a chance of breaking what the last woman to run for US president, Hillary Clinton, called “the highest, hardest glass ceiling”.

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.

It costs €15,000 (£12,500) for the whole “package”, we are told. For that we would be given an inflatable dinghy, with an outboard motor and 60 life jackets, to get across the English Channel.

This is the “good price” offered by two small-boat smugglers to an undercover BBC journalist in Essen – a western German city where many migrants live or pass through.

A five-month-long BBC investigation has exposed the significant German connection to the lethal human smuggling trade across the English Channel.

As the new UK government promises to “smash the gangs”, Germany has become a central location for the storage of boats and engines eventually used in Channel crossings – confirmed to the BBC by Britain’s National Crime Agency.

During covert filming, smugglers revealed to us that they store boats in multiple secret warehouses – as they play cat-and-mouse games with German police.

This year is already the deadliest for migrant Channel crossings, UN figures show, while more than 28,000 people have so far made the journey in small, dangerously packed boats.

__

Our undercover reporter is waiting outside the central station in the city of Essen.

He is wearing a secret camera and posing as a Middle Eastern migrant, eager to cross the Channel to the UK with his family and friends.

He must remain anonymous, for his safety, but we will refer to him as Hamza.

He approaches a man. It is someone Hamza has been in touch with for months, via WhatsApp calls, after getting his number through a contact within the migrant community – but this is the first time they have met.

This man’s name – or at least the name he has given us – is Abu Sahar.

Since Hamza contacted him, they have discussed how Sahar can help provide a dinghy to get to the south coast of England.

Hamza has told him that bad experiences with the smuggling gangs in the Calais region have driven him, his family and friends to try to manage their crossing alone – an unusual step.

Sahar has already sent a video of an inflated dinghy which, he has suggested, is “new”, available and being kept in a warehouse in the Essen area.

He will go on to supply more footage including other, similar looking, boats as well as outboard engines being fired up.

Hamza has said he wants to check the quality of the items on offer himself and that is why he has insisted on an in-person meeting.

A BBC team is nearby, monitoring Hamza’s movements, in case anything goes wrong, or we need to extract him quickly.

As the two men walk through the centre of Essen, Sahar declares it is too “risky” to go to the warehouse to see the boat, even though he says it is less than 15 minutes’ drive away.

When Hamza asks about why the boats are kept in this part of Germany, Sahar talks about “safety” and “logistics”.

Essen is just a four- to five-hour drive from the Calais area – close enough to get boats there fast, but not too close to the more heavily monitored beaches of northern France.

While police raids do happen, including under European Arrest Warrants, the facilitation of people-smuggling is not technically illegal in Germany if it is to a third country outside the EU, which the UK now is after Brexit.

The interior ministry in Berlin argues that, because Germany and the UK aren’t geographical neighbours, “no direct smuggling” actually takes place – but a UK Home Office source told the BBC there is “frustration” about Germany’s legal framework.

Sahar takes Hamza to a cafe where they order coffees and light cigarettes, although they move tables because there are Arabic speakers next to them and Sahar doesn’t want to be overheard.

Just over 35 minutes later, Sahar gets up out of his chair and tells Hamza: “Lower your voice, he’s coming.”

A well-dressed man in a baseball cap approaches. He is referred to as “al-Khal”, which means “the Uncle” – a phrase in Arabic that implies someone who commands significant respect.

Khal is accompanied by another man who will remain largely silent, but appears to be his bodyguard.

There are some handshakes before Khal talks to the waitress in German and then switches back to Arabic, his native tongue.

Hamza is told to hand over his phone, which is placed on a separate table.

The bodyguard sits next to Hamza and will spend much of the next 22 minutes staring intently at him.

During the meeting, because of strict German law, the BBC can only record video, not the audio.

Our reporting of it is therefore partly based on the immediate recollection of our undercover journalist – an established method in German investigative reporting.

It is backed up by messages, call records and voice notes between Hamza and the smugglers.

“Don’t raise your voice,” says Khal as he instructs Hamza to explain who he is and what he wants.

Hamza repeats his cover story, apparently convincingly.

He also suggests the boat purchase they are now discussing may not, in fact, even be illegal because of grey areas in German law.

But Khal dismisses that suggestion.

“Who told you that?” he asks. “It’s not legal.”

Even if there are legal loopholes in Germany around boat-smuggling, it appears these men know they are involved in a wider criminal network.

During their coffee, Khal sometimes prods Hamza in the chest as the smugglers disclose they have about 10 warehouses in the Essen area.

That, it is implied, is a way of dividing up their goods in case of a police raid – which there was a “few days ago”.

Sometimes, it is suggested, they get word the police are coming and give them “bait” – meaning supplies are confiscated but seemingly not enough to seriously disrupt the operation.

The smugglers talk about their ability to get equipment to Calais within “three, four hours”, which indicates they feel bold enough to use motorways, rather than back roads.

Essen’s location means boats can be delivered within a morning or afternoon, should a good weather forecast prompt a surge in crossing attempts and therefore demand.

According to research by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, boats are typically transported by vans or cars from Germany, Belgium or the Netherlands to the French coast, with Germany a “particularly important transit point”.

Most of the vessels, they found, have been manufactured in China before being sent, by container, to Turkey and then moved into Europe.

One of the report’s authors, Tuesday Reitano, says Germany’s role as a hub has grown for various reasons including robust “anti-smuggling controls” in France, which have driven increasingly organised gangs to operate over longer distances.

She also believes the German authorities are less engaged with the issue of Channel crossings because, “It’s not a problem that’s on their border”.

Back at the cafe, Khal is apparently satisfied that Hamza is legitimate and starts talking money.

His preference is that Hamza takes the “package” deal which will cost €15,000 (£12,500).

That involves collecting the boat near Calais, along with an engine, fuel, pump and 60 lifejackets – more than Hamza has said he needs, but that is the blanket offer, and one that would more likely be made to a fellow smuggler directly organising the crossings in France.

Those smugglers’ profits are potentially “extraordinary” if you assume adults are being charged about €2,000 (£1,660) for a single trip with dozens of people on board – according to Global Initiative.

If a deal is agreed now, Khal claims he could get a boat to a location that is just 200m (655ft) from the French shoreline, by as soon as tomorrow.

Khal and Sahar also refer to a “new crossing point”, suggesting they have found a place less under the eye of the French authorities, though they don’t reveal its location.

There is a second, cheaper option, which Hamza has been pitching for all along.

For about €8,000 (£6,670) Hamza could pick up the boat himself, here at a warehouse in Essen, and drive it to northern France independently.

If you get caught, the smugglers tell him, we are not responsible.

Conversation turns to how Hamza would pay the gang, once he has decided what to do.

Khal wants the cash paid in Turkey, because “all the stuff” comes from there.

The money, he suggests, can be deposited through the Hawala system – a payment method that avoids formal banking and instead relies on a network of agents to deliver cash across borders.

Later, Hamza is sent an account name on WhatsApp.

Other messages and voice notes in Arabic, also sent after the cafe meeting, include Sahar describing brands of outboard motors. He “loves” Mercury ones, he says, although “if there is Yamaha, I prefer Yamaha”.

He talks about how they can “deliver and bury” the gear, implying it can be hidden underground near a crossing point, with Boulogne a better option because, “Calais, it’s hard”.

In what appears to be a sales pressure tactic, Hamza is also told the smugglers have “limited” stocks but plenty of buyers.

Khal is more careful in his communications, but in one voice note, forwarded by Sahar, he expresses unease after meeting Hamza, saying: “Your friend, he seems not OK.”

Nevertheless, he instructs Sahar to get a decision from Hamza about whether he wants to buy a boat or not: “Ask him in the next one or two hours.”

Eventually, Hamza tells them he can no longer go ahead with the deal.

The BBC paid no money to these men, whose real identities we have not been able to establish definitively.

We have shown footage we received of the boats to the Chair of the National Independent Lifeboat Association, Neil Dalton, who says he wouldn’t go in a “duck pond” in such vessels.

Comparing one to a “death trap”, he says it would be “appallingly dangerous” to pack dozens of people onto these boats for a Channel crossing, because of what appears to be a “tremendously flimsy” design.

Meanwhile, diplomats insist that co-operation between Germany and the UK, on tackling these gangs, has improved.

Arrests and warehouse raids have happened in Germany, in partnership with other countries – while so-called “collateral crime”, such as violence or money-laundering, can be prosecuted within Germany.

February saw a major raid where boats, engines, life vests and flotation devices for children were seized in Germany with 19 arrests – but these were made under Belgian and French judicial orders. A separate trial, following a similar operation in 2022, is being prosecuted in France.

• How dangerous are the Channel dinghies?

A UK Home Office spokesperson told the BBC the government is “rapidly accelerating” work with countries, including Germany, to “crack down on the criminal smuggling gangs”, but “there is always more to do together”.

That sentiment is echoed by the French authorities.

“It is important to demonstrate to the Germans that these boats are linked to offences on our coasts, which will allow them to intervene,” Pascal Marconville, a prosecutor in northern France, told the BBC earlier this month.

Berlin’s interior ministry told the BBC that bilateral cooperation was “very good” and that German authorities can take action at the request of the UK.

A spokesperson added that while it isn’t illegal to aid smuggling from Germany to the UK, it is punishable to aid smuggling to Belgium or France, where Channel crossings take place.

The BBC’s investigation highlights “exactly the sort of activity we want to be working to address”, Downing Street said.

Asked whether Germany should be doing more to stop inflatable dinghies being smuggled through the country, Keir Starmer’s official spokesperson said: “It is vital that we continue to step up our approach on enforcement, and that goes to other countries.

“We need to keep pace with the scale of their activity, and it’s something that we’ll be working very closely with the Germans and others on.”

Along the shores of north-eastern France, you can find the remnants of failed crossing attempts on boats that, according to the National Crime Agency, are becoming “ever more dangerous and unseaworthy”.

The deflated dinghies and abandoned life jackets on these beaches may look worthless, but someone will have paid huge sums for what they hoped was a route to a better life.

It is a trade in misery, desperation and, in the worst cases, death – but one that continues to evolve and thrive deep inside Europe.

Following publication, we asked al-Khal for a response but he did not reply.

Cimarron Thomas was 12 years old in 2018 when she used her father’s handgun to kill herself.

From West Virginia, USA, she played the violin, she loved elephants and chatting with her friends on Snapchat, and she was looking forward to her 13th birthday.

But she was being sexually abused and blackmailed online by a student from Northern Ireland, described as the UK’s most prolific catfisher.

Alexander McCartney, 26, from outside Newry, County Armagh, has been given a life sentence with a minimum of 20 years in jail for the manslaughter of Cimarron and the extreme sexual exploitation of other young girls.

In a tragic turn of events, Cimarron’s father, Ben, a US army veteran, took his own life 18 months later. He did not know about his daughter’s abuse or why she took her own life.

Cimarron’s grandparents, Peggy and Dale Thomas, detailed their pain in a victim impact statement read out in court.

“Our lives will never be the same again,” they said.

“We didn’t get to see her graduate, walk down the aisle, or have children.

“We have been robbed, and our lives have been changed forever.”

Cimarron Thomas lived with her mum, dad, and siblings.

They were an ordinary American family, but in 2018, a predator was about to bring destruction to their lives.

Using a fake persona, McCartney contacted her online, complimented her on her appearance, and began grooming her before she sent him an intimate photo.

The court heard that during the first abusive interaction, he kept her online for an hour and 45 minutes, demanding sexual and degrading images.

He told her if she didn’t send him more photos, he’d publish the ones he already had on the internet.

Cimarron went back to school and did not tell anyone about the abuse.

McCartney continued to pursue Cimarron and contacted her four days later using another fake account, saying: “I want to play one more time.”

Despite pleading for McCartney to stop and being visibly upset, he told her to “dry your eyes” and involve her younger sister, aged nine, in a sex act.

Cimarron refused and said she would rather kill herself.

McCartney then put up a countdown clock, telling her “goodbye and good luck”.

Three minutes later, Cimarron was found by her nine-year-old sister, who entered the room after she thought she heard a balloon pop.

She had shot herself in the head with the family’s legally-held firearm.

Cimarron was taken to hospital where she was pronounced dead.

Police have released the 911 call of the family calling for help.

On that fateful day in May 2018, Cimarron’s nine-year-old sister found her lying on the floor of her parents’ bedroom with a gun by her side.

Her family had no idea why she had taken her life and were unaware of the ordeal she had been subjected to.

Her mother, Stephanie, told investigators that she might have been unsure of her sexuality. Eighteen months later, Cimarron’s father then took his own life.

However, years later, the truth behind what had happened to Cimarron emerged.

Cimarron’s grandparents, Peggy and Dale, have taken part in an upcoming BBC documentary about McCartney, where they remember their granddaughter but speak about their suffering.

They hope that raising awareness of what they went through will prevent other families from suffering the same ordeal.

McCartney first appeared in court in Northern Ireland in late July 2019.

Police believe he targeted as many as 3,500 children on 64 devices between 2013 and 2019.

The court heard the harm McCartney caused was “unquantifiable”, and he “degraded and humiliated” victims for his own sexual gratification.

Many of his child victims have never been identified, but all their lives have been changed forever.

Then in April 2021, just before McCartney was to be arraigned on some of the charges relating to the case, investigators discovered what had happened to Cimarron.

In what is understood to be a legal first, he was charged with the manslaughter of Cimarron, which he pleaded guilty to.

McCartney eventually admitted about 185 charges involving about 70 child victims – aged between 10 and 16.

The Public Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland brought these forward as sample charges in order to produce an indictment the court could manage.

The court heard of the impact McCartney’s abuse had on his young victims; some said they have suffered flashbacks, shame, alopecia, and trust issues.

Other girls now felt paralysed when touched in any way by any man, that their childhoods had been stolen, and some had suicidal thoughts.

The litany of McCartney’s crimes spanned continents.

BBC News NI has spoken to a man from New Zealand, we’ve called him Stephen (not his real name), about the abuse suffered by his two girls after McCartney struck up a friendship with his eldest daughter, then 12, on Snapchat.

The girl, we’ve called her Rebecca (not her real name), believed that she was talking to another girl.

That Rebecca believed to be a friendship grew over a few months. Then McCartney asked Rebecca for a nude photograph, which she sent.

“He then used that to manipulate and blackmail her into sending more photos, which ended up including our youngest daughter as well as part of the blackmail,” Stephen said.

“And then, in time, through her contact list on Snapchat, he added Rebecca’s cousin as well, who was older at the time, and he then tried to threaten her with getting more photos.

“Thankfully, she was mature enough and smart enough to reach out to my wife, and then we went straight to the police from there.”

He said as soon as the first photo was sent, McCartney had power, adding that Rebecca was “playing by his rules”.

“He preyed on her innocence,” he added.

The father explained that his youngest daughter, who is two years younger, did not know what was happening.

“She just thought it was two sisters playing dress up and taking silly pictures, so she’s actually completely oblivious to it to this day.”

Stephen said McCartney’s offending has had a “profound impact” on his eldest daughter.

At the beginning of the year, she moved away for university but moved home after six weeks.

“I believe she missed out on opportunities because of trust issues. It’s something she’s going to deal with forever,” he said.

“We know she’s on this medication all the time, and the dark places that I’m sure her mind goes when she’s alone.”

Stephen said he and his wife have been devastated by what happened to their children, but there was a silver lining in that they were able to play a “small part in bringing him [McCartney] to justice and preventing further victims”.

The three part series, Teen Predator/ Online Killer, which looks at this case in greater detail will be available on BBC iPlayer, BBC One NI and BBC Three in the coming weeks.

For years, Western critics have dismissed Brics as a relatively inconsequential entity.

But this past week, at its annual summit in Russia, the group triumphantly showcased just how far it has come.

Top leaders from 36 countries, as well as the UN Secretary General, attended the three-day event, and Brics formally welcomed four new members – Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. More membership expansions could soon follow. Brics had previously added only one new member – South Africa in 2010 – since its inception (as the Bric states) in 2006.

There’s a growing buzz around Brics, which has long projected itself as an alternative to Western-led models of global governance. Today, it’s becoming more prominent and influential as it capitalises on growing dissatisfaction with Western policies and financial structures.

Ironically, India – perhaps the most Western-oriented Brics member – is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the group’s evolution and expansion.

India enjoys deep ties with most new Brics members. Egypt is a growing trade and security partner in the Middle East. The UAE (along with Saudi Arabia, which has been offered Brics membership but hasn’t yet formally joined) is one of India’s most important partners overall. India’s relationship with Ethiopia is one of its longest and closest in Africa.

Brics’ original members continue to offer important benefits for India too.

Delhi can leverage Brics to signal its continued commitment to close friend Russia, despite Western efforts to isolate it. And working with rival China in Brics helps India in its slow, cautious effort to ease tensions with Beijing, especially on the heels of a border patrolling deal announced by Delhi on the eve of the summit. That announcement likely gave Prime Minister Narendra Modi the necessary diplomatic and political space to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the summit’s sidelines.

Additionally, Brics enables India to advance its core foreign policy principle of strategic autonomy, whereby it aims to balance relations with a wide spectrum of geopolitical players, without formally allying with any of them.

Delhi has important partnerships, both bilateral and multilateral, inside and outside the West. In that sense, its presence in an increasingly robust Brics and relations with its members can be balanced with its participation in a revitalised Indo-Pacific Quad and its strong ties with the US and other Western powers.

More broadly, Brics’ priorities are India’s priorities.

The joint statement issued after the recent summit trumpets the same principles and goals that Delhi articulates in its own public messaging and policy documents: engaging with the Global South (a critical outreach target for Delhi), promoting multilateralism and multipolarity, advocating for UN reform (Delhi badly wants a permanent seat on the UN Security Council), and criticising the Western sanctions regime (which impacts Delhi’s trade with Russia and infrastructure projects with Iran).

And yet, all this may appear to pose a problem for India.

With Brics gaining momentum, inducting new members, and attracting global discontents, the group is seemingly poised to begin implementing its longstanding vision – articulated emphatically by Beijing and Moscow – of serving as a counter to the West.

Additionally, Brics’ new members include Iran and, possibly further down the road, Belarus and Cuba – suggesting the future possibility of an outright anti-West tilt.

While India aims to balance its ties with the Western and non-Western worlds, it would not want to be part of any arrangement perceived as avowedly anti-West.

However, in reality, such fears are unfounded.

Brics is not an anti-West entity. Aside from Iran, all the new members have close ties with the West. Additionally, the many countries rumoured as possible future members don’t exactly constitute an anti-West bloc; they include Turkey, a Nato member, and Vietnam, a key US trade partner.

And even if Brics were to gain more anti-West members, the grouping would likely struggle to implement the types of initiatives that could pose an actual threat to the West.

The joint statement issued after the recent summit identified a range of plans, including an international payment system that would counter the US dollar and evade Western sanctions.

But here, a longstanding criticism of Brics – that it can’t get meaningful things done – continues to loom large. For one thing, Brics projects meant to reduce reliance on the US dollar likely aren’t viable, because many member states’ economies cannot afford to wean themselves off of it.

Additionally, the original Brics states have often struggled to see eye to eye, and cohesion and consensus will be even more difficult to achieve with an expanded membership.

India may get along well with most Brics members, but many new members don’t get along well with each other.

Iran has issues with both Egypt and the UAE, and Egypt-Ethiopia relations are tense.

One might hope that the recent easing of tensions between China and India could bode well for Brics.

But let’s be clear: despite their recent border accord, India’s ties with China remain highly strained.

An ongoing broader border dispute, intensifying bilateral competition across South Asia and in the Indian Ocean region, and China’s close alliance with Pakistan rule out the possibility of a détente anytime soon.

Brics today offers the best of all worlds for Delhi. It enables India to work with some of its closest friends in an expanding organisation that espouses principles close to India’s heart, from multilateralism to embracing the Global South.

It affords India the opportunity to stake out more balance in its relations with the West and non-Western states, in an era when Delhi’s relations with the US and its Western allies (with the notable exception of Canada) have charted new heights.

At the same time, Brics’ continuing struggles to achieve more internal cohesion and to get more done on a concrete level ensure that the group is unlikely to pose a major threat to the West, much less to become an anti-West behemoth – neither of which India would want.

The most likely outcome to emerge from the recent summit, as suggested by the joint statement, is a Brics commitment to partner on a series of noncontroversial, low-hanging-fruit initiatives focused on climate change, higher education, public health, and science and technology, among others.

Such cooperation would entail member states working with each other, and not against the West – an ideal arrangement for India.

These collaborations in decidedly safe spaces would also demonstrate that an ascendant Brics need not make the West uncomfortable. And that would offer some useful reassurance after the group’s well-attended summit in Russia likely attracted some nervous attention in Western capitals.

Outrage has erupted on social media after Somalia’s Family Minister Gen Bashir Mohamed Jama shared photos on X of himself and another male delegate representing Somalia at a UN meeting about women’s issues.

“It is tone-deaf for the Somali government to have men on the frontline, representing women at the conference,” Fathiya Absie, a well-known Somali author and human rights activist, told the BBC.

A senior civil servant has told the BBC that two women also made up Somalia’s four-member delegation to the Women, Peace and Security Focal Points Network event in New York, but were not included in the photo.

Out of 197 delegates registered for the event from 57 countries, just 21 were men.

The group photo from the event – held earlier this week – has provoked further ridicule from Somalis online, with many saying the government does not take women’s issues seriously.

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Several photos were tweeted from the conference, one showing Gen Jama with his adviser, former MP Abdullahi Godah Barre; another showed them in the meeting room with another man, who the BBC was told was an aide.

“He was not the only male minister present – there were a lot of other male ministers, such as Japan and China,” Mohamed Bashir, a senior civil servant at Somalia’s Ministry of Family and Human Development, told the BBC.

The two female Somali delegates were Iman Elman, a prominent military officer, and Sadia Mohammed Nur, a civil servant from the ministry, he said.

The online backlash has reignited criticism of the government’s decision in July to rename what was the Ministry of Women and Human Rights Development to the Ministry of Family and Human Rights Development.

This is when Gen Jama, a senior military officer who has held posts including heading the spy agency and prisons service, was appointed to lead the ministry.

“Removing the word ‘women’ from the ministry’s title is an erasure of the struggles and specific needs of women. It generalises their issues under the broader term ‘family,'” Ms Absie said.

Women’s rights in Somalia have been under scrutiny for many years.

Women in Somalia – which has suffered a long civil war and a more recent Islamist insurgency – have long played a vital role in peacebuilding, often stepping into leadership roles and pushing for greater political participation.

Despite this, there are not many women in positions of political influence.

“Women were always the minority in leadership and now they have given the remaining ministries to men,” Ms Absie said.

Some did defend the government, saying they did not see anything wrong with having a man with experience fronting the family ministry.

But the voices of those calling for a stronger female presence are growing louder – and Mr Bashir said the ministry would be striving to give women a more significant role in future.

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Three Lebanese journalists have been killed in an Israeli air strike on a building known to be housing reporters in south-eastern Lebanon, witnesses have told the BBC.

The attack was carried out on a guesthouse in a compound in Hasbaya being used by more than a dozen journalists from at least seven media organisations – with a courtyard containing cars clearly marked with “press”.

The three men worked for broadcasters Al-Manar TV and Al Mayadeen TV, which issued statements paying tribute to their killed employees.

Lebanon’s information minister said the attack was deliberate and described it as a “war crime”.

The Israeli military has not yet commented, but has previously denied targeting journalists.

Those killed were camera operator Ghassan Najjar and engineer Mohamed Reda from pro-Iranian news channel Al Mayadeen, as well as camera operator Wissam Qassem from the Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Manar.

The Lebanese ministry of health said three others were injured in the blast.

Five reporters had been killed in prior Israeli strikes in Lebanon, including Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah.

Footage broadcast by Al-Jadeed TV – whose journalists were also sharing the house – showed a bombed-out building with a collapsed roof and floors covered in rubble.

A vehicle used for TV broadcasts was overturned on its side, its satellite dish mangled with cabling nearby.

“All official parties were told that this house was being used as a stay-house for journalists. We coordinated with them all,” an Al-Jadeed journalist, caked in concrete dust, said in a live broadcast while panting and coughing.

Lebanese journalists covering the conflict in the south of the country had to relocate from nearby Marj’youn to Hasbaya, as the former became too dangerous.

Youmna Fawwaz, a reporter for broadcaster MTV Lebanon, told the BBC that journalists in the compound were awoken at around 03:00 local time (01:00 BST) by the strike.

She said ceilings had fallen in on them, and they were surrounded by rubble and dust, with the sound of fighter jets overhead.

Each news organisation had their own building in the compound, she said, and the building housing the Al Mayadeen reporters was “obliterated” while Al-Manar employees were inside.

Ms Fawwaz said it was a media compound known as such to both Israel and Hezbollah.

“The airstrike was carried out on purpose. Everyone knew we were there. All the cars were labelled as press and TV. There wasn’t even a warning given to us.”

She added: “They are trying to terrorise us just like they do in Gaza. Israelis are trying to prevent us from covering the story.”

Lebanon’s information minister accused Israel of intentionally targeting journalists, in contravention of international law.

“The Israeli enemy waited for the journalists’ nighttime break to betray them in their sleep,” Ziad Makary wrote in a post on X.

“This is an assassination, after monitoring and tracking, with prior planning and design, as there were 18 journalists there representing seven media institutions.”

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Hasbaya, about five miles (eight kilometres) from the Israeli border, is inhabited by Muslims, Christians, as well as people from the Druze ethnic and religious minority.

It has seen attacks on its peripheries in recent weeks, but this was the first strike on the settlement itself.

The attack comes as part of an expanding conflict in Lebanon, where Israel has been intensifying air strikes for weeks – as well as launching a ground invasion on border towns and villages in the south.

On Friday UN peacekeepers said they were forced to withdraw from an observation post in Zahajra, in the south-west, after it was fired on by Israeli forces earlier this week.

Unifil has accused Israel of targeting its bases several times in recent weeks, causing injuries to peacekeepers. Israel denies this and has blamed previous incidents on clashes with nearby Hezbollah fighters.

In the northern Bekaa area, the Israeli military has confirmed it attacked the Jousieh border crossing between Syria and Lebanon overnight – which it said was being used by Hezbollah and Syrian security forces to smuggle weapons.

Lebanese authorities have recorded over 1,700 air strikes across the country in the past three weeks.

Hostilities broke out between Israel and Hezbollah on 8 October last year, the day after Hamas’s attack on Israel that killed around 1,200 people. The Iran-backed armed group has since been firing rockets and drones into Israel in what it described as “solidarity” with Palestinians in Gaza.

Nearly 2,600 people in Lebanon have been killed in the current conflict, according to the country’s health ministry – many of the deaths occurring since Israel began escalating its attacks on 23 September.

Around 60,000 people in northern Israel have been displaced by Hezbollah rocket fire, and the Israeli government has declared returning them to their homes to be a key objective.

In southern Lebanon, satellite imagery examined by the BBC shows Israel’s intensified bombing campaign has caused more damage to buildings in two weeks than occurred during a year of cross-border fighting.

Data shows that more than 3,600 buildings in Lebanon appear to have been damaged or destroyed between 2 and 14 October – about 54% of the total damage.

The attack on journalists in Lebanon comes days after the Israeli military accused six Al Jazeera journalists working in northern Gaza of being affiliated with Hamas or other armed Palestinian groups.

The Qatari broadcaster said it denies and “vehemently condemns” the allegations.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 123 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched a war in the territory last year.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health authority has reported more than 42,000 people killed since.

Two Israeli journalists have also been killed in the conflict.