Israel has carried out what it described as “precise and targeted” airstrikes on Iran in retaliation for the barrage of missile strikes launched by Tehran against Israel earlier this month.

It is the latest in a series of exchanges between the two countries that for months have sparked fears of an all-out regional war.

But while Iran says Saturday’s strikes against military sites killed two soldiers, early indications suggest the attacks were more limited than had been feared.

Here’s what we know.

Around 02:15 local time (22:45 GMT on Friday), Iranian media reported explosions in and around the capital, Tehran.

Video uploaded to social media and verified by the BBC showed projectiles in the sky over the city, while residents in some areas reported hearing loud booms.

Shortly after, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed it was carrying out “precise” strikes on “military targets” in Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant followed the operation from the IDF’s command and control centre in Tel Aviv.

Just after 06:00 (03:00 GMT), the IDF said the strikes had concluded.

The White House described the strikes as an “exercise of self-defence”. A senior administration official said the US had worked with Israel to encourage a “targeted and proportional” response.

The extent of the attacks – and the damage caused – remains unclear at this stage.

The IDF said it hit around 20 targets, including missile manufacturing facilities, surface-to-air-missiles and other military sites.

The Iranian military confirmed that two soldiers had died “while battling projectiles”.

Iranian authorities said sites in Tehran, Khuzestan and Ilam provinces were targeted. The country’s air defence said it had “successfully intercepted” the attacks, but that “some areas sustained limited damage”.

BBC Verify has identified damage at a defence ministry base to the east of Tehran, and at an air defence base to the south.

A senior US administration official said the attacks did not damage Iranian oil infrastructure or nuclear facilities, targets President Joe Biden had urged Israel not to hit.

Syrian state media also reported strikes on military sites in central and southern Syria, though Israel has not confirmed striking the country.

Iran is the primary backer of a range of groups across the Middle East – often described as proxy groups – that are hostile to Israel, including Hamas and Hezbollah, which Israel is currently at war with.

In April, Iran launched its first direct attack on Israel, with about 300 missiles and drones, in retaliation for an Israeli air strike on an Iranian embassy compound in Syria that killed several top commanders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Israel responded with a “limited” strike on a missile defence system in the Iranian region of Isfahan, which Iran chose not to respond to.

Later, in July, Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander in an airstrike on Beirut. The next day, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an explosion in Tehran. Iran blamed Israel, though Israel did not comment.

In late September, Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Brig-Gen Abbas Nilforoushan, a high-ranking Iranian official, in Beirut.

On October 1, Iran launched 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, which it said was in response to the deaths of Haniyeh, Nasrallah and Nilforoushan.

• Read more: Why did Israel attack Iran?

Early signs indicate this attack was not as serious as some had feared.

US outlet Axios reported that prior to the attacks, Israel sent Iran a message revealing certain details about the strikes, and warning Tehran not to respond.

That could be a sign Israel does not want to escalate the situation further – at least for now.

“We are focused on our war objectives in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. It is Iran that continues to push for a wider regional escalation,” the IDF said in a statement.

A senior US official said “this should be the end of this direct exchange of fire between Israel and Iran”.

Iran’s foreign ministry said it was “entitled and obligated to defend itself” and described the attack as a violation of international law.

But it also said that Tehran recognises its “responsibilities towards regional peace and security”.

Images published by Iranian state media show life continuing in relative normality – with busy streets, people exercising in parks, and fruit and vegetable markets open as usual.

Iran closed its airspace for a few hours overnight, but it later reopened and there are several commercial flights in the air across the country.

But there are signs the Iranian government are keen to play down the impact of the attacks.

The IRGC has announced that it is a criminal offense to send “images or news” related to the attack to outlets that it deems “Israel-affiliated” or “hostile”. Usually, Iran refers to Western media as hostile.

Iranian media reported today that Tehran’s Prosecutor Office has filed charges against an unnamed website for “covering issues counter to national security”.

US National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said Israel’s response “avoided populated areas and focused solely on military targets, contrary to Iran’s attack against Israel that targeted Israel’s most populous city”.

But Washington’s aim, he added, is “to accelerate diplomacy and de-escalate tensions in the Middle East region”.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said Israel had the right to defend itself, but urged all sides to “show restraint” and called for Iran not to respond.

Saudi Arabia condemned the attack, and warned against any action that “threatens the security and the stability” of the region.

Egypt’s foreign ministry echoed those concerns, saying it was “gravely concerned” by the strikes.

Hamas described them as “a flagrant violation of Iranian sovereignty, and an escalation that targets the security of the region and the safety of its peoples”.

Israel’s attack on Iran deepens the war in the Middle East. Avoiding, or risking, an even worse escalation is at the heart of decisions being taken by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his key advisors.

They must decide on the least bad of a series of difficult choices. At one end of the spectrum is hitting back with another wave of ballistic missiles. Israel has already threatened to retaliate again if that happens.

At the other is deciding to draw a line under the destructive exchanges of direct strikes on their respective territories. The risk for Iran if it holds its fire is that looks weak, intimidated and deterred by Israel’s military power and political determination, backed up by the United States.

In the end, the supreme leader and his advisers are likely to take the decision that, in their view, does least harm to the survival of Iran’s Islamic regime.

Iran’s official media in the hours before and after Israel’s attacks carried defiant statements that, at face value, suggest the decision to respond had already been taken. Its language resembles Israel’s, citing its right to defend itself against attack. But the stakes are so high that Iran might decide to walk its threats back.

That is the hope of Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who fell in behind America’s insistence that Israel has acted in self-defence.

“I am clear that Israel has the right to defend itself against Iranian aggression,” he said. “I’m equally clear that we need to avoid further regional escalation and urge all sides to show restraint. Iran should not respond.”

Iran’s own statements have been consistent since its ballistic missile on Israel on 1 October. A week ago, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Turkey’s NTV network that “any attack on Iran will be considered crossing a red line for us. Such an attack will not go unanswered.”

Hours before the Israeli strikes, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baqai said: “Any aggression by the Israeli regime against Iran will be met with full force.” It was, he said, “highly misleading and baseless” to suggest that Iran would not respond to a limited Israeli attack.

As the Israeli aircraft were heading back to base Iran’s foreign ministry invoked its right to self defence “as enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter”. A statement said Iran believed it was both entitled and obligated to respond to foreign acts of aggression.

Israel has set the pace of escalation since the spring. It sees Iran as the crucial backer of the Hamas attacks that killed about 1,200 people – Israelis and more than 70 foreign nationals – on 7 October last year. Fearing that Israel was looking for a chance to strike, Iran signalled repeatedly that it did not want a full-on war with Israel.

That did not mean it was prepared to stop its constant, often deadly, but lower-level pressure on Israel and its allies.

The men in Tehran thought they had a better idea than all-out war. Instead, Iran used the allies and proxies in its so-called “axis of resistance” to attack Israel. The Houthis in Yemen blocked and destroyed shipping in the Red Sea. Hezbollah rocket fire from Lebanon forced at least 60,000 Israelis from their homes.

Six months into the war, Israel’s retaliation forced perhaps twice as many Lebanese from their homes in the south, but Israel was prepared to do much more. It warned that if Hezbollah did not hold its fire into Israel and move back from the border it would take action.

When that did not happen, Israel decided to break out of a battlefield that had been shaped by Iran’s limited, but attritional war. It landed a series of powerful blows that threw the Islamic regime in Tehran off balance and left its strategy in tatters. That is why, after the latest Israeli strikes, Iranian leaders have only hard choices.

Israel interpreted Iran’s reluctance to fight an all-out war as weakness, and upped the pressure both on Iran and its axis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s commanders could afford to take risks. They had President Joe Biden’s unequivocal support, a safety net that came not just in the shape of massive deliveries of munitions, but with his decision to send significant American sea and air reinforcements to the Middle East to back up the US commitment to defend Israel.

On 1 April an Israeli airstrike destroyed part of Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus, the Syrian capital. It killed a top Iranian commander, Brig Gen Mohammed Reza Zahedi, along with other senior officers from the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The Americans were furious that they had not been warned and given time to put their own forces on alert. But Joe Biden’s support did not waver as Israel faced the consequences of its actions. On 13 April Iran attacked with drones, cruise and ballistic missiles. Most were shot down by Israel’s defences, with considerable help from armed forces of the US, UK, France and Jordan.

Biden apparently asked Israel to “take the win” hoping that might stop what had become the most dangerous moment in the widening Middle East war. When Israel confined its response to a strike on an air defence site, Biden’s plan seemed to be working.

But since the summer, Israel has repeatedly escalated the war with Iran and its axis of allies and proxies. The biggest blows were landed in a major offensive against Iran’s most important ally, Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran had spent years building up Hezbollah’s arsenal of weapons as a key part of its forward defence. The idea was an Israeli attack on Iran would be deterred by the knowledge that Hezbollah would hammer Israel from just over the border in Lebanon.

But Israel moved first, implementing plans it had developed since Hezbollah fought it to a standstill in the 2006 war. It blew up booby trapped pagers and walkie talkies it had deceived Hezbollah into buying, invaded south Lebanon and killed Hezbollah’s leader Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah, a man who had been a symbol of defiant resistance to Israel for decades. The authorities in Beirut say that Israel’s offensive in Lebanon has so far killed more than 2,500 people, displaced more than 1.2 million and caused enormous damage to a country already on its knees after its economy largely collapsed.

Hezbollah is still fighting and killing Israeli soldiers inside Lebanon and firing large numbers of rockets. But it is reeling after losing its leader and much of its arsenal.

Faced with the near collapse of its strategy, Iran concluded it had to hit back. Allowing its allies to fight and die without responding would destroy its position as the leader of the anti-Israeli and anti-western forces in the region. Its answer was a much bigger ballistic missile attack on Israel on 1 October.

The airstrikes on Friday 25 October were Israel’s response. They took longer to come than many expected. Leaks of Israeli plans could have been a factor.

Israel is also carrying out a major offensive in northern Gaza. The UN human rights chief Volker Turk has called it the darkest moment of Gaza’s war, with the Israeli military subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and the risk of starvation.

It’s impossible for an outsider to know whether the timing of Israel’s attacks on Iran was designed to draw international attention away from northern Gaza. But it might have been part of the calculation.

It is hard to stop successive rounds of strikes and counter strikes when the countries concerned believe they will be seen as weak, and deterred, if they don’t respond. That is how wars spin out of control.

The question now is whether Iran is prepared to give Israel the last word, at least on this stage of the war. President Biden backed Israel’s decision to retaliate after 1 October. But once again he tried to head off an even deadlier escalation, telling Israel publicly not to bomb Iran’s most important assets, its nuclear, oil and gas installations. He augmented Israel’s defences by deploying the THAAD anti-missile system to Israel, and prime minister Netanyahu agreed to take his advice.

The American elections on 5 November are part of both Israel and Iran’s calculations about what happens next. If Donald Trump gets his second term, he might be less concerned than Biden about answering Iranian retaliation, if it happens, with strikes on nuclear, oil and gas facilities.

Once again, the Middle East is waiting. Israel’s decision not to hit Iran’s most valuable assets might, perhaps, give Tehran the chance to postpone a response, at least long enough for diplomats to do their work. At the UN General Assembly last month, the Iranians were suggesting that they were open to a new round of nuclear negotiations.

All this should matter greatly to the world outside the Middle East. Iran has always denied it wants a nuclear bomb. But its nuclear expertise and enrichment of uranium have put a weapon within its reach. Its leaders must be looking for a new way to deter their enemies. Developing a nuclear warhead for their ballistic missiles might be on their agenda.

Israel’s attack on Iran has been anticipated since the latter launched nearly 200 ballistic missiles on Israel almost a month ago.

In a statement announcing that the operation was under way on Saturday, Israel’s military spokesman said Israel had the “right and duty” to respond and that its defensive and offensive capabilities were fully mobilised.

Iranian state media has confirmed that explosions have been heard in the west of Tehran.

But there’s no clarity as yet in precisely what the targets have been and whether they have been successfully hit by Israel.

News sites close to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards says that some military bases in the west and south-west of the Iranian capital have been targeted.

The Syrian state news agency says that Israeli air strikes have also targeted some military sites in central and southern areas of Syria.

• LIVE: Israel launches air strikes on Iran
• Explosions in Iran as Israel launches air strikes

The office of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has released a picture of him in the operations centre of the military headquarters during the attack.

For now, at least, Iranian media is playing down the impact. The true nature of what has happened is only likely to trickle out bit by bit from the Iranian authorities.

Israel may move more quickly to disclose the details of its attack. But that may depend on whether or not it plans to carry out another wave.

The Pentagon has given a briefing that the US was made aware of Israel’s plans beforehand and that there was no US involvement in the operation.

That’s significant in Washington’s efforts to try to prevent the conflict between Israel and Iran escalating into a confrontation that could move ever closer to all-out war.

The US will also be waiting for the dust to settle to see if Israel’s targets were limited to military targets or went beyond that to include facilities linked to Iran’s nuclear programme – which could trigger another major response from Tehran.

For now – on the scant evidence that is available – Israel may have heeded Washington’s warnings and reined in some of its more ambitious plans to cause maximum pain to the Iranian authorities.

It’s now up to the Iranian leadership to decide how to respond.

The semi-official Tasnim news agency has said there’s no doubt Israel will face what it called a “proportional reaction”.

The Israeli military has already said that if Iran were to make what it called the mistake of beginning a new round of escalation, it would be obligated to retaliate.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump‘s three-hour interview with America’s number one podcaster, Joe Rogan, has been released.

In the wide-ranging sit-down, the former president discusses everything from the “biggest mistake” of his White House tenure, what he told North Korea’s leader and whether extraterrestrial life exists.

Two years ago Rogan described Trump as “an existential threat to democracy” and refused to have him on his show. But the pair seemed friendly on Friday as they chatted about their shared interest in Ultimate Fighting Championship and mutual friends like Elon Musk.

The Republican’s campaign hopes the interview will consolidate his influence with male voters, who make up the core of listeners to the Joe Rogan Experience, which has 14.5 million Spotify followers and 17.5 million YouTube subscribers.

Trump took a major detour to visit Rogan in Austin, Texas, causing him to show up almost three hours late to a rally in Traverse City, Michigan, a crucial swing state where both he and his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, have been campaigning hard.

Trump told Rogan the “biggest mistake” of his 2017-21 presidency was “I picked a few people I shouldn’t have picked”.

“Neocons or bad people or disloyal people,” he told Rogan, referring to neoconservatives, policy-makers who champion an interventionist US foreign policy.

“A guy like Kelly, who was a bully but a weak person,” Trump added, mentioning his former White House chief-of-staff John Kelly, who told the New York Times this week that he thought his former boss had “fascist” tendencies.

Trump also described his former US National Security Adviser John Bolton as “an idiot”, but useful at times.

“He was good in a certain way,” said Trump. “He’s a nutjob.

“And everytime I had to deal with a country when they saw this whack job standing behind me they said: ‘Oh man, Trump’s going to go to war with us.’ He was with Bush when they went stupidly into the Middle East.”

Trump said he got to know North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “very well” despite some nuclear sabre-rattling between the two initially when Trump said he told him: “Little Rocket Man, you’re going to burn in hell.”

“By the time I finished we had no problem with North Korea,” Trump said.

Trump said he urged Kim to stop building up his “substantial” weapons stockpile.

“I said: ‘Do you ever do anything else? Why don’t you go take it easy? Go to the beach, relax.

“I said: ‘You’re always building nuclear, you don’t have to do it. Relax!’ I said: ‘Let’s build some condos on your shore.’”

Trump also argued that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he had been president.

“I said, ‘Vladimir, you’re not going in,’” he told Rogan, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I used to talk to him all the time.

“I can’t tell you what I told him, because I think it would be inappropriate, but someday he’ll tell you, but he would have never gone in.”

Trump said Putin invaded Ukraine because “number one, he doesn’t respect Biden at all”. The White House has previously accused Trump of cozying up to foreign autocrats.

Asked for proof to back up his false claims that the 2020 presidential was stolen from him by mass voter fraud, Trump told Rogan: “We’ll do it another time.

“I would bring in papers that you would not believe, so many different papers. That election was so crooked, it was the most crooked.”

Rogan pressed him for evidence.

Trump alleged irregularities with the ballots in Wisconsin and that Democrats “used Covid to cheat”.

“Are you going to present this [proof] ever?” asked Rogan.

“Uh…,” said Trump before pivoting to talk about how 51 former intelligence agents aligned with Joe Biden had falsely suggested that stories about his son Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation.

“I lost by, like, I didn’t lose,” said Trump, quickly correcting himself.

Trump lashed out at his political opponents and praised his allies, many of whom are likely to appeal to Rogan’s fanbase.

He called his rival, Vice-President Kamala Harris, a “very low IQ person” and described California’s Gavin Newsom as “one of the worst governors in the world”.

Trump said that Elon Musk, who has appeared on Rogan’s podcast in the past, was “the greatest guy”.

Trump also said he is “completely” committed to bringing Robert F Kennedy Jr into a potential new Trump administration.

The former independent presidential candidate, who has a close friendship with Rogan, dropped out in August and endorsed Trump.

Trump said he disagrees with Kennedy on environmental policy so would instead ask the vaccine critic to “focus on health, do whatever you want”.

Trump said that he hadn’t ruled out there being life in space.

“There’s no reason not to think that Mars and all these planets don’t have life,” he said, referring to discussions he’d had with jet pilots who’d seen “very strange” things in the sky.

“Well, Mars – we’ve had probes there, and rovers, and I don’t think there’s any life there,” Rogan said.

“Maybe it’s life that we don’t know about,” said Trump.

Trump said that some senior figures at NBC had tried to talk him out of running for president to keep his show The Apprentice on air.

”They wanted me to stay,” he said. “All the top people came over to see me, try and talk me out of it, because they wanted to have me extend.”

Trump featured in 14 series of The Apprentice from 2004, but NBC cut ties with him after he launched his 2015 bid for the presidency, citing his “derogatory” comments about immigrants.

Trump has been under pressure from Democrats to release his medical records after Harris released hers earlier this month, which concluded she was in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency.

Trump’s team said at the time that his doctor described him as being in “perfect and excellent health”, without sharing his records.

Trump didn’t address the topic directly on Friday’s podcast.

But he told Rogan that during one physical, for which he didn’t give a date, doctors had described his ability to run on a steep treadmill as “unbelievable”.

“I was never one that could, like, run on a treadmill. When passing a physical, they asked me to run on a treadmill and then they make it steeper and steeper and steeper and the doctors said, it was at Walter Reed [hospital], they said: ‘It’s unbelievable!’ I’m telling you, I felt I could have gone all day.”

But he said treadmills are “really boring” so he prefers to stay healthy by playing golf.

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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.

Thousands of comic and gaming fans headed to London on Saturday for one of the most colourful days in the UK’s convention calendar.

Fans flocked to the ExCeL centre for the UK’s largest gaming, comic and pop culture convention, many of them dressed in elaborate costumes they had constructed themselves.

The event, called MCM X EGX, also brought together hundreds of actors, artists and video game publishers who gave fans a sneak peak at upcoming projects.

It was the first time the annual video games show had been combined with MCM – which runs Comic Con – meaning guests were treated to a wider range of activities, including lightsaber battles, costume contests and card game sessions.

Organisers told the BBC more than 100,000 people attended the show, travelling from across the UK and beyond.

On the multiple stages dotted around the expo, fans formed long queues to hear from over 700 panellists who were speaking.

The venue’s two halls were filled with displays, stalls and gameplay areas, with more than 450 exhibitors booking places to demonstrate products or sell merchandise.

But none of those numbers can capture the energy, passion and excitement of comics and games enthusiasts at the event, on what many told the BBC was the greatest day of the year.

“My favourite part is meeting other people who are cosplaying,” said Catherine Mariah as she travelled to the event on Saturday morning.

“By the end of the day you’ll be sad it’s all over – you’ll have the ‘con blues’!”

Gamers were given hands-on time with new releases including Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – the latest instalment in the hugely popular first-person shooter series.

Fans also got a preview of Avowed – an expansive fantasy role-playing game from US developer Obsidian, which is due for release in February next year.

Smaller projects were also on display, like the gesture-controlled indie game Jazzhands, developed by two University of Nottingham students at a 24-hour programming competition.

But despite strong fan interest in the video game side of the expo, the gaming industry has been struggling.

Several big brands pulled out of this year’s show after job cuts and an industry strike hit US development schedules.

Organisers at MCM X EGX may have hoped that combining EGX with Comic Con would keep the video games expo alive, while getting a bigger audience for the publishers who stuck with them.

Georgians are going to the polls to decide whether to end 12 years of increasingly authoritarian rule, in an election that will decide their future path towards the European Union.

Georgia borders Russia and the governing Georgian Dream party is accused by the opposition of moving away from the West and back into Russia’s orbit. The EU has frozen Georgia’s EU bid because of “democratic backsliding”.

“I voted for a new Georgia,” said pro-Western President Salome Zourabichvili.

Saturday’s vote has been described as the most crucial since Georgians backed independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. There were reports of scuffles and vote violations as tempers flared at polling stations.

About 3.5 million Georgians are eligible to vote until 16:00 GMT in this high-stakes election that the opposition is calling a choice between Europe or Russia, but which the government frames as a matter of peace or war.

Georgian Dream is widely expected to come first, but four opposition groups believe they can combine forces to remove it from power and revive Georgia’s EU process.

Four out of every five voters are said to back joining the EU in this South Caucasus state, which fought a five-day war with Russia in 2008.

It was only last December that the EU made Georgia a candidate. But that process was halted after the government passed a Russia-style law that requires groups to register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power” if they receive 20% of funding from abroad.

Politics here has become increasingly bitterly polarised, as Georgian Dream, under the guiding force of Georgia’s richest man, Bidzina Ivanishvili, seeks a fourth term of power.

If Ivanishvili’s party wins a big enough majority, he has vowed to ban opposition parties, notably the biggest, the United National Movement.

Georgian Dream, known as GD, is set to win about a third of the vote according to opinion polls, although they are widely seen as unreliable. If GD is to be unseated, all four of the main opposition groups will have to win upwards of 5% of the vote to qualify for the 150-seat parliament.

Ivanishvili’s rhetoric has become increasingly anti-Western and, after voting in Tbilisi, he told reporters that Georgians had a simple choice of either a government that served them, or an opposition of “foreign agents, who will carry out only the orders of a foreign country”.

President Zourabichvili has been outspoken in her backing for a broad opposition coalition government to end “one-party rule in Georgia”. As she voted she said there would be people “who are victorious, but no-one will lose”.

She has agreed a charter with the four big groups so that if they win, a technocrat government will fill the immediate vacuum. It would then reverse laws considered harmful to Georgia’s path to the EU and move to snap elections.

Tina Bokuchava, who’s chair of the biggest opposition party, United National Movement, insists all credible polls put the opposition ahead.

But while Georgian Dream tells voters they are still on course to join the EU, it has also warned them an opposition victory will trigger war with Russia.

Party billboards show split pictures of devastated cities in Ukraine alongside tranquil Georgia, with the slogan: “No to war! Choose peace.”

GD claims the opposition will help the West open a new front in Russia’s war in Ukraine, while Georgian Dream will keep the peace with its Russian neighbour, which still occupies 20% of its territory after the 2008 war.

Although the governing party’s claim is unfounded and its billboards have been widely condemned, its message appears to have got through.

In Kaspi, an industrial town to the north-west of Tbilisi, one woman aged 41 told the BBC: “I don’t like Georgian Dream, but I hate the [opposition United] National Movement – and at least we’ll be at peace.”

Another woman called Lali, 68, said the opposition might bring Europe closer, but they would bring war too.

Election observers have reported a number of violations at polling stations, including ballot stuffing and a physical attack on an opposition political figure in Marneuli, south of Tbilisi.

The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy said almost one in 10 of their observers had reported violations at polling stations. On the eve of the vote it said people’s ID cards had been seized, and pointed to Russian-sponsored disinformation operations.

The BBC spoke to one voter, Aleksandre, in a village north-west of the capital who said he had been threatened by a local GD man with losing his job if he did not sign up to vote for Georgian Dream: “I’m a bit scared of his threat but what can I do?”

Georgian Dream maintains it has made elections more transparent, with a new electronic system for vote counting.

“For 12 years we have an opposition that questions the legitimacy of Georgia’s government constantly. And that’s absolutely not a normal situation,” says Maka Bochorishvili, GD’s head of the parliament’s EU integration committee.

Critics say in some places there is a genuine fear that the vote is not really secret.

“All this speculation about forcing people to vote for certain political parties – at the end of the day you’re alone and casting your vote, and electronic machines are counting that vote,” said Bochorishvili.

Not far from the centre of Tbilisi, Vano Chkhikvadze points to graffiti daubed in red on the walls and ground outside his office at the Civil Society Foundation.

After the “foreign influence” law was passed, in the face of mass protests in the centre of Tbilisi and other big cities, he says he was personally labelled by Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze as a state traitor.

“We were getting phone calls in the middle of the night. Our kids even were getting phone calls. They were threatened.”

Ahead of the vote, the EU warned that Georgian Dream’s actions “signal a shift towards authoritarianism”.

Whoever wins, the loser is unlikely to accept defeat easily.

When an Aboriginal Australian senator loudly heckled King Charles moments after he delivered a speech in the nation’s Parliament House, it caught the world’s attention.

Lidia Thorpe’s cries of “not my King” and “this is not your land” shone a light on a country that is still grappling with its colonial past.

But in the debate that followed on the “appropriateness” of Thorpe’s protest, something else became clear: a split within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community itself.

In the wake of an unsuccessful referendum which – had it passed – would have granted them constitutional recognition, the question many of Australia’s first inhabitants are now grappling with is how they should go about getting the self-determination they have fought so long for.

Indigenous Australians are classed as the oldest living culture on earth, and have inhabited the continent for at least 65,000 years.

But for more than 200 years – since the 1770 arrival of Captain James Cook and subsequent British settlement – they have endured long chapters of colonial violence, including the theft of their lands, livelihoods, and even children.

As a result, today, they still face acute disadvantages in terms of health, wealth, education, and life expectancy compared to non-Indigenous Australians.

But, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up less than 4% of the national population, their struggles rarely translate into national voting issues, experts say.

Last year’s Voice to Parliament referendum – which asked whether Australia should recognise its first inhabitants in the constitution and allow them a body to advise the parliament – was a key exception.

The result was a resounding ‘No’, with one major analysis of the data suggesting many voters found the proposal divisive and ineffective.

And while the figures indicate a majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people voted ‘Yes’, support wasn’t unanimous. Thorpe herself was a leading ‘No’ campaigner, having criticised the measure as tokenistic and “an easy way to fake progress”.

But Larissa Baldwin-Roberts, a Widjabul Wia-bal woman and activist, says the ‘No’ outcome left most Indigenous Australians with “a sense of humiliation and rejection”. She adds that the debate itself – which saw countless examples of misinformation and disinformation – unleashed a wave of “racist rhetoric” that their communities are still recovering from.

The big-picture impact of the Voice, Ms Baldwin-Roberts argues, has been a growing sentiment that traditional reconciliation efforts are “dead”. Those approaches have long tried to bridge the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians through polite dialogue and education.

It was against this backdrop that Thorpe made her protest in parliament.

“You can’t reconcile with a country that doesn’t see you,” Ms Baldwin-Roberts tells the BBC. “You can’t reconcile with a country that doesn’t think that you deserve justice.”

Ms Baldwin-Roberts says “new strategies” are needed to disrupt the status quo. She sees Thorpe’s protest as “incredibly brave” and reflective of conversations many First Nations people are having.

“There are Indigenous communities around the country talking about our stolen children, our stolen histories – but she had access to that room. As an Australian senator she knows she’s going to get media, and it’s important to make this a talking point.”

Daniel Williams, who is of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, agreed.

“After the [referendum] last year, what do Indigenous people have left? How can we find [an] audience with the monarch to effect change?” he asked a political panel on the ABC.

“We’re talking about 200 years of pain that is continuing to be unanswered and unresolved.”

But others see it differently: there is a long history of Indigenous leaders petitioning the Royal Family to recognise their peoples’ struggle, but the independent’s senator’s act – for some – went too far.

Nova Peris, a former senator who was the first Aboriginal woman in parliament, described it as an “embarrassing” move which didn’t “reflect the manners, or approach to reconciliation, of Aboriginal Australians at large”.

Both sides of parliament dismissed it as disrespectful and a failed attempt at grandstanding.

Prof Tom Calma, a Kungarakan and Iwaidja man who was in the room, said it risked alienating “the other 96%” of Australia’s population who may not “see or understand the enduring impacts of colonisation”.

“I don’t think the protest – the way that Senator Thorpe went about it – brings people along with us. And in the spirit of reconciliation, we need allies.”

Mr Calma also felt that Thorpe’s demand that King Charles “give [Indigenous people] a treaty” was misplaced, given that those negotiations would be handled by Australia’s government, not the Crown.

As it stands, Australia is one of the only Commonwealth countries to have never signed a treaty, or treaties, with its first inhabitants, or to have recognised them in its founding document.

And with a general election expected before mid-next year, both sides of politics have sought to move on swiftly from the Voice debate, meaning there is much uncertainty over future policy.

For Ms Baldwin-Roberts, this week’s juxtaposition between the crowds of royal supporters decked out in regalia, and those engaging in protest nearby, reflects “a large separation and social reality between Australia’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations” that exists today.

And in order to bridge that gap, she believes “there has to be some level of reckoning”.

“We live in different spaces, it’s still a largely separated nation. So where do we go from here?”

Commonwealth leaders have agreed the “time has come” for a conversation about reparations for the slave trade, despite the UK’s desire to keep the subject off the agenda at a two-day summit in Samoa.

A document signed by 56 heads of government, including UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, acknowledges calls for “discussions on reparatory justice” for the “abhorrent” transatlantic slave trade.

The statement says it is time for a “meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation”.

Sir Keir said there had been no discussions about money at the meeting, and that the UK is “very clear” in its position that it would not pay reparations.

The UK has faced growing calls from Commonwealth leaders to apologise and pay reparations for the country’s historical role in the slave trade.

Reparations for the benefit of those who suffered as a result of slavery could take many forms, from financial to symbolic.

Ahead of the summit, Downing Street had insisted the issue would not be on the agenda.

Speaking at a press conference on Saturday, Sir Keir said Commonwealth leaders had a “positive two days” in Samoa and downplayed the prominence of reparations at the summit.

“The dominant theme of the two days has been resilience and climate,” he said, adding that the section of the joint statement discussing reparations amounts to “one paragraph in 20-something paragraphs”.

“None of the discussions have been about money. Our position is very, very clear in relation to that,” he said.

Last week, Chancellor Rachel Reeves told the BBC the UK would not pay reparations for slavery.

Before the statement was released, the leaders’ conclave – where commonwealth prime ministers and presidents meet without advisers – went on for about six hours.

The prime minister said it was not the conversation about reparations that had caused it to run on for so long.

One Downing Street source told the BBC: “We’ve been clear on our position and it’s not changing.”

And they have and it hasn’t – in fact the direct nature of their remarks about reparations on the way to the summit irritated some of those countries campaigning on it.

Half of the art of diplomacy is to keep things you want to talk about being talked about – keeping the conversation going, even if the prospect of imminent change is unlikely.

For those who think the time has come for countries like the UK to face up to their pasts, the communique allows them to say the conversation continues.

For the UK and others, they can say their position isn’t changing and also point to a range of other topics – trade, climate change and security for instance – that, they argue, the Commonwealth offers a vital forum for.

However, the prime minister did appear to leave the door open for further discussions about some form of reparatory justice, saying the “next opportunity to look at this” would be at the UK-Caribbean forum.

Frederick Mitchell, the foreign minister of the Bahamas, said leaders hoped to come up with a “comprehensive report” on the issue at that forum, to be held in London next March.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he expected the UK would eventually pay financial reparations to Caribbean countries.

Challenged on whether the wording of the joint statement was too vague, he said: “Behind the language is an attempt to go in a particular direction.”

Diplomats have said they expect reparatory justice to be a central focus of the agenda for the next Commonwealth summit in two years’ time.

Last year, a UN judge said the UK likely owed more than £18tn in reparations for its role in slavery in 14 Caribbean countries.

But reparatory justice could also take the form of a formal apology, educational programmes or public health assistance.

It’s well past the August holiday peak, but anger against over-tourism in Spain is spilling into the off-season, as holiday-makers continue to seek winter sun.

On Sunday locals in the Basque city of San Sebastian plan to take to the streets under the banner: “We are in danger; degrow tourism!”

And in November anti-tourism protesters will gather in Seville.

Thousands turned out last Sunday in the Canary Islands, so the problem is clearly not going away.

This year appears to have marked a watershed for attitudes to tourism in Spain and many other parts of Europe, as the post-Covid travel boom has seen the industry equal and often surpass records set before the pandemic.

Spain is expected to receive more than 90 million foreign visitors by the end of the year. The consultancy firm Braintrust estimates that the number of arrivals will rise to 115 million by 2040, well ahead of the current world leader, France.

This year’s protests began in April, in the Canary Islands, and included a hunger strike by six protesters in Tenerife in an attempt to halt two major tourism projects on the island.

They continued in many of the country’s most popular tourist destinations, such as the Balearic Islands, the Mediterranean city of Alicante, cities on the southern coast and Barcelona, where some protesters squirted foreign visitors with water pistols and shouted: “Tourists go home!”.

The grievances driving the upcoming protests are similar to those in the summer.

“Tourism, which for a few is the golden goose, is an economic model which is choking the rest of us,” said Bizilagunekin (or “with the neighbours”, in the Basque language), the civic association which is organising Sunday’s demonstration in San Sebastian.

The protest is the culmination of a series of debates, talks and other events in the city called “October against touristification”.

“What we’ve been seeing over the last eight or 10 years has been a huge acceleration of the process of ‘touristification’,” said Asier Basurto, a member of the platform. “All our city’s services have been put at the orders of the tourism industry.”

He insists the numbers of arrivals themselves are not the problem, it is the way the city caters to visitors rather than residents.

Public spaces are adapted for short-term visits and the tourism industry creates precarious jobs, he says.

Mr Basurto believes tourists are pushing up rentals, largely because of short-stay accommodation, sending local residents further and further away from San Sebastian’s historic centre.

“We’ve had a way of living for generations and generations – in which people are connected to each other and those who arrive are integrated,” he added.

“If we have a model whereby people just visit for five days and then leave then it becomes a soulless theme park, without culture, without a community.”

The complaint about tourism’s impact on rental rates is a common theme and feeds into a broader housing crisis across Spain. The country’s central bank has reported that nearly half of families who rent at market prices are at risk of poverty or social exclusion.

However, with tourism representing 13% of Spain’s GDP and directly providing around three million jobs, its supporters insist that the industry is essential to the economy and that it drove the country’s recovery in the wake of the pandemic.

They are particularly concerned by scenes such as that on Playa de las Américas in Tenerife on October 20, where one video showed two tourists sunbathing on the beach while protesters chanted just metres away from them.

There have also been reports in the Spanish media of more hostile behaviour, such as the locks of tourist apartments in Seville being covered in faeces.

Such incidents prompted David Morales, head of tourism for the conservative People’s Party (PP) in the Canary Islands, to insist on “the right of tourists to enjoy their holidays without being the target of interruptions or gestural or verbal attacks, and certainly not physical attacks”.

As the protests continue beyond the summer, there are particular concerns in destinations like the Canary Islands, where the climate means they receive large numbers of visitors during the winter months.

The president of the Circle of Impresarios and Professionals in Southern Tenerife (CEST), Javier Cabrera, warned that “under an umbrella of legitimate grievances, tourism-phobia is being cultivated”.

There has been an attempt to defuse the backlash, with a range of measures being implemented.

Barcelona city hall has announced that short-term tourist apartments will be banned from 2028.

Local authorities in Palma de Mallorca have put a cap on the number of cruise liners which can dock in its port.

In Tenerife, a new limit has been introduced on the number of visitors to some natural parks.

And in Seville, a new charge is planned for those entering the city’s popular Plaza de España square.

Yet Asier Basurto is not convinced and says the protests must continue.

“Those who advocate tourism can no longer say that everything is rosy,” he said.

“Either we change this now or it’s going to be too late.”

It was a phone call from a 13-year-old girl in Scotland in 2019 that eventually led to the capture of a social media predator described as one of the world’s most prolific child sex abusers.

Alexander McCartney from Northern Ireland pretended to be a teenage girl to befriend, then abuse and blackmail children around the world, often sharing images with other paedophiles.

Some of the children were as young as four. Some had never told anyone what they had been through – until police knocked on their door.

McCartney gradually admitted 185 charges including manslaughter after a 12-year-old girl he was abusing took her own life.

He has been jailed for a minimum of 20 years.

Following contact from police in Scotland, an urgent investigation by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) swung into operation in March 2019.

Detectives identified the home address of Alexander McCartney, arrested and interviewed him.

Sixty-four of McCartney’s devices were seized at his home in the rural Lissummon Road area outside Newry in four separate raids.

Those devices held hundreds of thousands of indecent photos and videos of underage girls performing sexual acts while being blackmailed.

McCartney made and used many fake accounts on online platforms, mainly Snapchat, to entrap and manipulate them.

PSNI Det Ch Supt Eamonn Corrigan said McCartney had been “offending on an industrial scale”.

He groomed victims into thinking they were talking online to a girl of a similar age, before encouraging them to send indecent images or engage in sexual activity via webcam or a mobile phone.

McCartney used the same pattern every time, the detective said, adding: “He threatened to share these images online for the pleasure of other paedophiles and use them to further abuse and harass the already terrified and exploited children.”

In one incident, it took McCartney just nine minutes to groom, sexually abuse and blackmail a girl of only 12 years of age.

As time went on, it became clear that McCartney’s depravity spanned not just across the UK, but across the world. The abuse included involving other people, family pets and objects.

The PSNI worked with colleagues in the United States Department of Homeland Security, the Public Prosecution Service and National Crime Agency, and victims were located in America, New Zealand and at least 28 other countries.

Many of these children were only identified through the evidence detectives located on McCartney’s devices.

According to the police, he “built a paedophile enterprise” and had “stolen childhoods” of his victims.

In the spring of 2019, police called Catherine Kierans, acting head of the Public Prosecution Service’s serious crime unit.

They said something “big was unfolding… it involved catfishing”.

Catfishing is where a person creates a false identity to gain the trust of people and exploit them.

Ms Kierans said little girls “an average age of 10-12 years old [were] being threatened in the most depraved way.”

She said some of the children who had been exploited had previously opened up about their abuse, others had remained silent.

“Some of the children had raised the alarm, which helped police to actually identify him in the first place.

“But some of the children, until police knocked the door, they had never told anyone what they’d been through.”

According to Ms Kierans, McCartney offended “around the clock”.

As the investigation spread across the globe, Ms Kierans said prosecutors realised McCartney had been “very assiduous about saving the images”.

“He would also save the map on Snapchat of where the child was in some cases, and that then enabled police to locate the children.”

His arraignment in 2021 was delayed as police discovered the suicide of a little girl in West Virginia, USA.

“From the beginning, the level of abuse was so horrific that we were fearful that when these children were identified, would they be okay?” Ms Kierans said.

“Unfortunately, our worst fears were realised when we discovered, some way in, that one of the little girls had taken her own life.

“Working closely with the American authorities, we were able to prove that this child took her own life during the abuse, when she was still online with McCartney.

“At that point, the death of the child was so intrinsically linked to the abuse that we felt we had a strong case to say that he killed her.”

That little girl was 12-year-old Cimarron Thomas who, in 2018, shot herself while McCartney was abusing her.

McCartney was charged with her manslaughter.

Ms Kierans said it is believed to be the first time an abuser anywhere in the world has been held accountable for manslaughter where the victim and perpetrator have never met in person.

Such was the magnitude of the case that prosecutors had to be judicious with the charges.

“We couldn’t put 3,000 charges on the indictment,” Ms Kierans said.

“In the end, there were about 200 charges [relating to around 70 victims] which is probably one of the largest indictments that we’ve seen in Northern Ireland.”

McCartney grew up five miles outside of Newry and just off the main road to Armagh city.

It’s about as rural as it gets. Farms, a church and a few businesses.

When he first appeared at Newry Magistrates’ Court in July 2019 he was just 21, with long, fuzzy hair and the wide-eyed look of someone surprised to be sitting where he was.

He has spent more than five years on remand at Maghaberry Prison – leaving only for court appearances and further questioning by the police.

In those hearings, he said little other than to confirm his name and date of birth and to gradually enter softly-spoken guilty pleas.

McCartney attended Newry High School and was into gaming.

One source told BBC News NI: “He was introverted and socially awkward. He didn’t interact with people much outside of his group of friends.

“He was maybe at the edges of things, but he had friends who obviously knew nothing about this.”

He then took a course at the Southern Regional College in Newry where he was described as “quiet and didn’t really get involved with the rest of the class”.

When he was eventually charged in 2019 he was a computer science student at Ulster University.

For those living in and around his home, the case has been harrowing.

“The whole place was stunned,” one resident said.

“It was whispers at the start, then disbelief. I’m sure people talk about it in their own homes but it doesn’t get discussed publicly as people don’t know what to say.”

Another said: “He came across as a pleasant, affable, intelligent young man.

“There is nothing extraordinary about him.”

But what is extraordinary is the enormity of his offending; many of his victims had pleaded for the abuse to stop but prosecutors said he “callously continued, at times forcing the victims to involve younger children, some aged just four”.

According to Catherine Kierans, McCartney’s depravity was such that it was “one of the most distressing and prolific cases of child sexual abuse we have ever seen in the PPS”.

Ms Kierans said some of the victims have still never been identified despite exhaustive efforts by police.

“McCartney’s crimes have harmed thousands of children and left them and their families dealing with the traumatic aftermath,” she said.

“Their courage stands in stark contrast to his cowardice in targeting vulnerable young girls.”

There is one image that keeps a Gaza musician going like no other – that of the territory’s only concert grand piano.

Khamis Abu Shaban had finally risked returning to the music school at which he taught – and which owns the piano – a few months into the current conflict.

What he saw, at the Gaza branch of the Palestinian music school, the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, was “a catastrophe”.

“More than half of the Conservatory was burned. All the instruments were broken, thrown outside. You start seeing cases of instruments as soon as you get close to the Conservatory on the streets. Violins, we had more than 50, completely smashed. Cellos, more than 40, completely smashed.”

Altogether, the Gaza branch of the Conservatory used to have more than 400 instruments – both Western classical ones and traditional Arabic instruments such as the oud, qanun and nay, a type of flute. Khamis says he felt “completely destroyed”.

But then he saw something which lifted his spirits.

“The only… instrument that I saw standing was the grand piano. Honestly, I smiled when I saw it. I smiled and I laughed.”

The Yamaha concert grand also withstood bombing in a previous war between Israel and Gaza’s rulers – Hamas – in 2014, and was carefully restored the following year by a French music technician. It became a symbol for many of aspirations that the territory could develop a flourishing musical culture.

“I started talking to the piano,” says Khamis. “I asked: ‘Are you the only survivor of all the instruments? You don’t want to die?’ I really laughed.”

Singing in Gaza

Tim Whewell reported from Gaza in 2015 on the rescue of the territory’s only concert grand piano after a previous war. Now, he finds out how musicians he met then are living and working through this war. He learns about a boy who started playing the violin after he lost his hand in an airstrike. And he finds out about the second near-miraculous survival of the grand piano.

Listen on BBC Sounds

It is too dangerous for the teachers and students to resume lessons at the music school, because of Israeli military operations in the area around it in north-west Gaza. Instead, they have started giving music lessons to tens of thousands of displaced children living in the makeshift camps where many Gazans now reside.

They teach outdoors, under canvas awnings, or in schools and shelters run by UNRWA, the United Nations agency that supports Palestinian refugees.

“Life goes on, and even with all this death around us, people need anything that can make them… not happy – no-one will be happy in this period – but something that can make them smile, be able to continue with life,” Khamis says.

The teachers – who are using whatever borrowed instruments they can find – include former students of the Conservatory, such as 16-year-old violinist Sama Nijim. One of her students is Mohammed Abu Eideh, a boy who lost his right hand in an airstrike.

He used to play the oud – his favourite instrument – but this requires two hands. So Sama devised a way for him to learn violin instead – by tying a violin bow to his arm with a scarf, so that he could bow without the use of a hand.

Such versatility on the part of the staff can also be seen in teacher Osama Jahjouh’s fashioning of a nay – or traditional flute – out of a plastic pipe, because the Conservatory nays have been lost.

Fuad Khader, who created a children’s choir in Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of Gaza, says that at first it was difficult to persuade parents to let their children take part in the activities.

“They asked: ‘People are dying, and you want to teach kids to sing?’” he says. “But I just told them: ‘Everyone has to do something. I’m a musician. And this is my job.’”

Another teacher, Ahmed Abu Amsha, says the music lessons had a transformative effect on the children.

“After a week, the families came to me and told me: ‘You have changed our kids. They are getting better. They are singing, they are laughing.’”

But he adds: “Sometimes we are singing a song – and suddenly there’s a big explosion, that makes us go silent and look at each other. And I say: ‘Don’t worry, let’s continue.’ I have to be strong in front of the children. And in some moments, they forget they are in a war.

“But when they go, I’m not strong,” he says.

“It’s like I’m sucking the bad energy from the kids. And when I try to go to sleep, it’s a horrible feeling… [I will be] thinking of a kid – how he’s seen dead bodies in the street, and his father is dead, and his sister and his uncle… Each child has a story to tell, and I try to heal them.”

As for the grand piano, Khamis Abu Shaban hopes students will one day be able to play it again.

He says that when he last saw it, several months into the war, he lifted the lid and found that some of the strings had been cut and some of the hammers broken.

“I’m familiar with how an instrument can be damaged,” he said. “A hammer cannot be broken just by shock waves, for example. Someone has opened it and started sabotaging the inside.”

But Khamis’ delight at having seen the piano is undiminished.

“Now, I see it still standing in front of me,” he laughs. “It’s telling me: ‘I’m not one to die. I’m still here for you. And I will stay.’”

The mining giants BHP and Vale have signed a deal with the Brazilian government to pay nearly $30bn (£23bn) in compensation for the Mariana dam collapse in 2015 that caused the country’s worst environmental disaster.

Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva attended the signing of the deal on Friday.

The dam collapse released toxic waste and mud, which flooded nearby towns, rivers and forests.

It killed 19 people, left hundreds others homeless, and poisoned the river.

President Lula said: “I hope the mining companies have learned their lesson; it would have cost them less to prevent the disaster.”

The dam was owned by Samarco, a joint venture between Vale and BHP.

Since the disaster, the companies have set up a foundation to compensate people, which has already carried out billions of dollars’ worth of repairs. This included building a new town to replace one of the towns that was destroyed.

However, many people in the community were still arguing they had not received justice or enough to rebuild their lives nine years on.

Separately to these legal proceedings in Brazil, more than 620,000 people had taken BHP to court in the UK, where BHP was headquartered at the time, in a trial that started earlier this week.

• ‘Nothing can bring a life back’: Brazil dam collapse survivors speak as UK trial begins

They are seeking about $47bn in damages in the civil trial. The first stage of it will determine if BHP – as a parent company – was liable. About 70,000 complainants are also taking Vale to court in The Netherlands.

Both companies deny liability and argue that this overseas legal action is “unnecessary” and duplicates legal proceedings in Brazil.

Some members of the community in Mariana had told the BBC they had joined the UK legal action after frustration that the Brazilian proceedings were taking too long, but suspected that the Brazilian settlement may be reached soon after the UK case opened due to more international pressure.

In 2016, both companies agreed to pay about $3.5bn in today’s rate in compensation but negotiations were reopened in 2021 due to the slow progress of Brazil’s justice system in resolving the dispute.

Friday’s agreement covers their past and future obligations to assist people, communities and ecosystems affected by the disaster.

The companies agreed to pay 100bn reais ($17.5bn; £13.5bn ) to local authorities over 20 years and 32bn reais towards compensating and resettling the victims and repairing the harm caused to the environment.

The remaining 38bn reais is the amount the companies say they have already paid in compensation.

How did one single social media post, taken down within hours for being false, still end up being viewed millions of times and presented as credible evidence about the Southport attack?

The fatal stabbings at a children’s dance class on 29 July sparked riots in England and Northern Ireland. Unrest was fuelled by misinformation on social media that the suspect was an illegal migrant.

Responsibility for the violence that ensued cannot be sourced to a single person or post – but the BBC has previously established a clear pattern of social media influencers driving a message for people to gather for protests.

In the hours immediately after the Southport attack, several posts from a mixture of sources – including self-styled news accounts – began sharing false claims. This misinformation soon merged together.

By the time violence started in the Merseyside town on the evening of 30 July, some of the claims had been amplified or repeated by well-known online influencers such as Andrew Tate, who had millions of views repeating false narratives on X.

However, one LinkedIn post in particular – analysed by the BBC – appears to have had an outsized effect in stirring up the false belief that the dance class suspect was a migrant.

It was written by a local man, who could have had no idea of how far his words would travel.

Eddie Murray – who lives near Southport – posted this message about three hours after the attack, stating that a migrant had carried it out:

“My two youngest children went to holiday club this morning in Southport for a day of fun only for a migrant to enter and murder/fatally wound multiple children. My kids are fine. They are shocked and in hysterics, but they are safe. My thoughts are with the other 30 kids and families that are suffering right now.

“If there’s any time to close the borders completely it’s right now! Enough is enough.”

The post implies that Mr Murray’s family were at the scene of the attack.

In fact, the BBC has been told that although they were in the area, they had been turned away from the dance class because it was full.

Mr Murray’s post is one of the earliest examples of local testimony to incorrectly use the word “migrant”.

He later told us he was only posting the information he had been given.

What happened next demonstrates how an unsubstantiated claim can spread at speed, with no concern for whether it is true.

In the hours immediately after the stabbings, little information was released by Merseyside Police. It is normal for officers not to release information about a suspect under arrest – especially, as in this case, when they are under 18. Even in cases where the suspect has died, it can be many hours before they are named officially.

A short police statement was issued just after 13:00 to say that “armed police have detained a male and seized a knife”.

What followed was intense speculation – most of it on social media.

Mr Murray’s post was only seen by a few hundred people and it was later taken down. LinkedIn told us the post had been removed because it didn’t meet its policies on “harmful or false content”.

However, by then it had been copied and posted elsewhere and, within a few hours, had been viewed more than two million times on social media, according to BBC Verify analysis.

We found that on X, within an hour of the original post, a screenshot had been posted by an account calling for mass deportations. This would go on to have more than 130,000 views in total.

Next, at 16:23, an online news website based in India called Upuknews shared a retweet of Eddie Murray’s post, which it described as “confirmed”. This had more than half a million views.

By now, online speculation about the suspect was running high. There was a huge appetite to know what had happened in Southport.

At the same time as Upuknews’s tweet, the Murray screenshot was posted on X by the co-leader of far-right group Britain First (and convicted criminal) Paul Golding. He claimed that the evidence was “stacking up that the Southport attack was carried out by a migrant”.

His post received nearly 110,000 views.

At 16:36, just 13 minutes later, Reform Party activist Nicholas Lissack tweeted he had “confirmed the authenticity of the post made by the father of the children who were present at the Southport Attack”.

Murray’s screenshot was also reposted by a white nationalist who wanted “the border closed” and made a call to “deport these savages”.

Many of these accounts are verified by X with purchased blue ticks, which means their posts have greater prominence on other users’ feeds.

Some of the accounts qualify for X monetisation and could receive direct payments from the platform.

Five hours after the attack, at 16:49, a false name for the suspect appeared on X alongside Eddie Murray’s screenshot, BBC analysis has found.

Bernie Spofforth, an account-holder once temporarily removed from X for allegedly posting misinformation about Covid, said the suspect had been named as “Ali-Al-Shakati”. In a statement the next day, Merseyside Police confirmed an incorrect name was being posted online for the suspect.

Ms Spofforth would later be arrested and released without charge. She has always denied any wrongdoing, insisting she only copied and pasted the information before deleting it and apologising. She told the BBC previously that she got the name from another post that has since been deleted.

At 17:09, Laurence Fox, the actor and head of the right-wing Reclaim Party, reposted Ms Spofforth’s post alongside the Eddie Murray screenshot and wrote: “Close the borders.”

This single post was viewed 500,000 times.

In total, a screenshot of Eddie Murray’s original LinkedIn post was viewed more than three million times on X, according to BBC Verify analysis. However, it is clear he would have had no idea of how it would spread online.

We can also reveal more from Mr Murray’s other deleted LinkedIn posts, made on the day of the Southport attack.

This one repeats the Al-Shakati name:

“BBC news are lying. The Child murderer was from Africa. He was on MI6 watch. His name is Ali Al Shakati.”

Another reads:

“I see people stil [sic] believe what the left wing media say because it suits their own left wing woke agenda. It’s because of these sort of people the reason why this has happened in the first place.”

Mr Murray appeared to have become a credible source on social media for many. One woman on Facebook posted in support of him, asking others “You believe media/news over the people who was the witness…[?]”

Another person tweeted: “That post by Eddie Murray has been fact checked, it is on his LinkedIn and is true.”

We approached Mr Murray for a comment, first through LinkedIn, where he told us he did not regret his original post.

We later approached him in person. He said he had only posted what he had been told, genuinely believing his posts were correct.

When we asked Mr Murray why he had posted that the suspect’s name was Al-Shakati, he replied that he was just posting what others had been saying online.

At no point after 29 July did he correct any of his posts.

At 17:25 the police said they had arrested a 17-year-old from Banks in Lancashire. Nearly two hours later, they clarified that he had been born in Cardiff.

But by this point, the relentless waves of misinformation were already propelling the town towards a riot, putting more lives at risk.

A key instigator was a group on the Telegram messaging app, set up about six hours after the stabbings. Called Southport Wake Up, the BBC has previously tracked down and confronted an administrator of the group. The account encouraged others to protest on St Luke’s Road at 20:00 on Tuesday 30 July, with online posters from the account also being shared on X, TikTok and Facebook.

That protest later turned into a riot. A BBC crew at the scene heard shouts of “You’re fake left-wing news”.

Misinformation was also amplified that evening by far-right activists for their own agendas. The BBC filmed David Miles, an activist for the white nationalist group Patriotic Alternative – one of the largest far-right movements in the UK. He was seen filming and talking to protesters near the police cordon for more than 30 minutes as officers were attacked and fires took hold.

Mr Miles also staged photos at the scene, wearing a “Free Sam Melia” T-shirt. Melia, a prominent regional organiser for Patriotic Alternative, was jailed earlier this year for inciting racial hatred. He was once in the neo-Nazi group National Action – since banned as a terrorist organisation.

Earlier that day, Mr Miles’s Telegram account shared a poster advertising the time and place for the protest. He later reposted dozens of locations for protests across the country.

As the riot took hold, a post on Mr Miles’s Telegram channel said, “what did they expect a garden party”.

When approached by the BBC, Mr Miles denied exploiting the deaths of children. He said he was not violent and described the riots as “awful”.

In response to the Southport stabbings, and the lack of information given by police about the suspect in the face of false claims, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, said that the law, as it currently stands, “stokes the risk of online disinformation” (the deliberate spreading of false information).

He also stated the false claims that circulated on social media about the identity and asylum status of the suspect were “plausibly connected to some of the violence that followed”.

Mr Hall has written to the Law Commission suggesting legal reforms which would allow names, nationality, and ages of individuals to be reported where there is no substantial risk of prejudice.

Many of the misleading posts we have analysed are still on X and Facebook, and David Miles is still posting on Telegram.

The government asked Ofcom to consider how illegal content, particularly disinformation, spread during the unrest.

The media regulator concluded that there was a “clear connection” between the violent disorder in England and Northern Ireland in the summer and posts on social media and messaging apps.

In an open letter setting out its findings, Ofcom boss Dame Melanie Dawes said such content spread “widely and quickly” online following the stabbings in Southport.

Meanwhile, the government has told the BBC it is working at pace to implement the Online Safety Act, which requires social media platforms to remove illegal content and prevent the deliberate spread of false information.

The act was passed into law in October 2023, but its protections have yet to come into effect.

We approached X for a comment, but have not received a reply.

Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected a visit to Ukraine by UN Secretary General António Guterres over his trip to Russia, a source in the presidential office has told the BBC.

After attending a Brics summit in the Russian city of Kazan this week, Guterres had wanted to visit Kyiv, the BBC understands.

“The president did not confirm his visit,” the source told the BBC. “After Kazan and after he shook hands with the war’s instigator and spent UN Day on the territory of the aggressor country, it would be somehow strange to host him here.”

Guterres’ visit to Russia – who launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – was met with dismay across Ukraine.

During his visit, Guterres called for a “just peace” in Ukraine and reiterated his position to Putin that Russia’s invasion of the country was in “violation of the United Nations Charter and international law”.

In a statement ahead of Guterres’ visit to Kazan, the Ukrainian foreign ministry said: “This is a wrong choice that does not advance the cause of peace. It only damages the UN’s reputation.”

“The UN secretary general declined Ukraine’s invitation to the first Global Peace Summit in Switzerland. He did, however, accept the invitation to Kazan from war criminal Putin,” the statement added.

Held at Ukraine’s initiative, the June summit in Switzerland was attended by more than 90 nations. It condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, offering a peace proposal on how to end the war.

Moscow – who was not invited – dismissed the gathering as meaningless.

In 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

Russia does not recognise the ICC, which co-operates closely with the UN.

During the Brics summit in Kazan, Guterres issued a statement that said: “We need peace in Ukraine. A just peace in line with the UN Charter, international law and General Assembly resolutions.”

Guterres’ office justified his participation in the summit, referring to Brics’ role “in boosting global co-operation”.

Set up in 2006 by Brazil, Russia, India and China, Brics was later joined by South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates.

A number of analysts say that some Brics heavyweights, like Russia and China, have been seeking to challenge the G7 group of the world’s seven largest economies.

The current G7 members are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US.

US President Joe Biden has formally apologised to the Native American community for a 150-year-old Indian boarding school policy that aimed to culturally assimilate indigenous children, calling it a “sin on our soul”.

He said apologising for the “blot on American history” was one of the most consequential things he has done as president.

The federal government established Indian boarding schools from 1819 until the 1970s that forcibly removed children from their homes and families.

Ten days before the general election, Biden’s apology at an event in Arizona also gave him a chance to show support for tribal nations in a swing state that the Democratic White House ticket won just by 10,000 votes in 2020.

“I formally apologise as president of the United States for what we did, ” Biden said while visiting the tribally controlled Gila Crossing Community School outside of Phoenix. “It’s long overdue.”

The Biden administration says it has provided billions of dollars to support indigenous Americans, though communities affected say the president could do more.

The boarding schools stripped indigenous children of their heritage and tried to assimilate Alaska Native, American Indian and Native Hawaiian children into white American culture.

There were more than 523 government-funded Indian boarding schools throughout the US in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Many of these schools were run by churches.

Tens of thousands of children were forcibly abducted by the government and sent to schools far from their homes. Indigenous children often faced emotional and physical abuse, including being beaten and starved when speaking their native languages. In some cases, children died.

Under the Biden administration, the US Department of Interior launched its first-ever federal investigation of the Indian boarding school system to address its history.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, went on a tour last year to speak with indigenous survivors.

The Department of Interior also launched an oral history project to document the experience of survivors.

In Canada, which had a similar policy, the prime minister apologised in 2008 for forcing about 150,000 indigenous children to attend state-funded Christian boarding schools.

The government also launched a truth and reconciliation commission that documented the history of the country’s residential school system.

Ivana’s family was about to flee their home in southern Lebanon. An Israeli missile got there first. Now the two-year-old has third-degree burns on almost half her body. Her head and arms are encased in bandages.

Ivana looks lost lying a full-size bed in the burns unit of Geitaoui Hospital in Beirut. She is tiny and doll-like, but her cries are all too real. As she winces in pain, her father Mohammed Skayki fans her face, trying to distract her.

He recounts how his daughter’s skin and flesh was melted away.

It was noon, on 23 September – the day Israel began a massive bombardment of southern Lebanon, paving the way for its invasion a week later. There was no specific evacuation order for his area from the Israeli army, but the explosions were getting closer.

“We were ready to move, we had our stuff packed,” says Mohammed.

“The strike was close, around 10 metres from our house, right by the front door. The house shook. My daughters were playing on the balcony. I saw the little one – she was all black because of the missile dust. I carried her, something was exploding in the house and the ceiling was falling.”

In an instant the family was ripped from its roots in the town of Deir Qanoun En Nahr. “We left our house and only took the phones, and fifty dollars,” he says.

Rescuers rushed Ivana to hospital, with her older sister Rahaf. The seven-year-old’s injuries were less severe. She has already been discharged and is sheltering with relatives.

Mohammed shows me a photo of Ivana before the strike – her brown eyes open wide, a pink soother in her mouth, her face framed by brown curls. What’s left of her hair is now invisible beneath the bandages. Her scars may be with her for life.

But she is making a good recovery according to Dr Ziad Sleiman, one of two plastic surgeons on the unit.

And Ivana has brought some healing to the healers.

“She’s so kind. She’s so cute, so calm,” he says, smiling warmly. “Even when we change the dressings, she does not shout and cry. She is staring at everything around her. So, she sees everybody, and I think she knows everything. Really, she’s a special, special baby. She’s so brave, so strong.”

She is being closely monitored by the staff on the burns unit. It’s arranged in a circle – with nurses in the centre, so they can see directly into each of the eight rooms. There’s a queue of patients waiting for admission.

“Every day we are receiving phone calls to transfer patients,” says Dr Sleiman. “We cannot take everybody. We try to take the babies, the ladies, the heavily burned and traumatized patients, to give them the best chance to be treated.”

Most patients come with third-degree burns. For fourth-degree burns he says “you will see a black limb, like a piece of wood” and there is no treatment, only amputation.

Lebanon’s health system is itself a casualty of war, under attack by Israel. The UN’s World Health Organisation has verified 23 attacks on health care in the past month, leading to 72 deaths.

The Lebanese health ministry has recorded “55 enemy attacks on hospitals and 201 on emergency medical technicians”. It says Israeli attacks on healthcare workers, facilities, and institutions are “a flagrant violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and the Geneva Conventions.”

In recent days we reported from the scene of an Israeli air strike just across the road from Lebanon’s biggest public hospital, Rafik Hariri, in Beirut. A few residential buildings were flattened, and 18 people were killed, four of them children. No warning was given.

The Israeli Defense Forces told the BBC that they are “targeting Hezbollah, a terrorist organisation” which, they claim, “exploits ambulances and other medical infrastructure.” They deny targeting medical personnel.

So far, the more than 30 staff in the burns unit are still getting to work every day. None of them have been displaced, but there is a new normal in Beirut – traffic jams by day, bombs by night. That’s taking a toll.

“Honestly, it’s very hard to deal with patients having traumas and burns due to war,” says Dr Sleiman. “We do not have soldiers here; all the victims are civilians. We have ladies, we have girls, we have babies. It’s not their affair, their war. We, as doctors, must stay strong. But we have hearts. We have kids.”

Before leaving I asked Ivana’s father if he had anything to say to those responsible for maiming his little girl. He thought for an instant before replying in a measured and weary voice.

“I am not happy. A soldier for a soldier, not a civilian. These are children, a baby”, he said, referring to Ivana. “I am not happy but what can I do? I don’t want to be a murderer like them.”

Ivana has already had a skin graft – from her lower limbs – and is due to be discharged in about 10 days’ time. Her family are still displaced. They cannot return home to the south, which is under heavy Israeli bombardment.

Dr Sleiman fears there will be many more Ivanas.

He can’t see an end to the war. If it comes, he believes there will be no victory. For anyone.

“There’s no war that ends with a winner,” he says. “Every war ends with so many losers. Everybody will lose.”

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 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 says it targeted a Hezbollah structure, but is reviewing the incident.

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.

In a statement hours after the incident, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they had struck a Hezbollah military structure in Hasbaya from where “terrorists were operating”.

The incident showed that proximity to “terrorist infrastructure poses a danger”, the force said.

It added: “Several hours after the strike, reports were received that journalists had been hit during the strike. The incident is under review.”

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.”

• ‘Whole neighbourhood wiped out’ in air strike
• Satellite imagery reveals intensity of bombing in Lebanon
• The suburbs bearing the brunt of Beirut strikes

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.

Two people were killed on Friday in a Hezbollah rocket attack on Majd al-Krum, a town near Karmiel in Israel’s north, according to a statement from the country’s foreign ministry.

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.

The UN human rights chief has said the Gaza war’s “darkest moment” is unfolding in the north of the territory, where Israel has said it is carrying out a ground offensive to stop Hamas fighters from regrouping.

“As we speak, the Israeli military is subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and risk of starvation,” Volker Türk said.

He called on world leaders to act, saying states had a duty under the Geneva Conventions to ensure respect for international humanitarian law.

There was no immediate response from the Israeli military, but it has said its troops have killed “hundreds of terrorists” and evacuated 45,000 civilians in Jabalia since going back into the area on 6 October.

It comes as the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said he was deeply disturbed by reports that Israeli troops had raided one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the WHO had lost contact with Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia, which was overflowing with almost 200 patients amid the offensive in nearby Jabalia.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said Israeli troops had detained patients, staff and displaced people, while Israel’s military said its forces were operating “in the area” based on intelligence “regarding the presence of terrorists”.

Hundreds of Palestinians have reportedly been killed and tens of thousands displaced since Israeli forces went back into Jabalia.

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 human rights chief warned on Friday that the entire population of northern Gaza was being subjected to “non-stop” bombing, with hundreds of thousands ordered to move with no guarantees of return.

“Unimaginably, the situation is getting worse by the day,” Türk said.

“The Israeli government’s policies and practices in northern Gaza risk emptying the area of all Palestinians. We are facing what could amount to atrocity crimes, including potentially extending to crimes against humanity.”

He also said it was totally unacceptable that Palestinian armed groups were reportedly operating among civilians, including inside shelters for the displaced, and putting them in harm’s way.

Türk said countries around the world – all of them parties to the Geneva conventions – had to act now to uphold them.

“These are universally accepted and binding norms developed to preserve the very bare minimum of humanity. I implore you to put the protection of civilians and human rights first and not to abandon that minimum of humanity,” he said.

Significantly, Türk added that where there was a risk of genocide, all states were legally bound to prevent it. Until now, senior UN figures have mostly avoided the word genocide in relation to Gaza.

Israel has long accused the UN of bias and rejected accusations that its forces have committed war crimes. It has also vehemently denied that they are committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

On Friday morning, Gaza’s health ministry said in a statement Israeli forces had “stormed” Kamal Adwan hospital and were detaining hundreds of patients, medical staff and displaced people inside.

In the afternoon, the ministry said displaced men had been forced to take off their clothes and that some had been arrested.

A number of medical staff, including the director of the hospital Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, had also not been heard from since they were summoned to see Israeli forces stationed in the courtyard, it added.

A video posted on social media late on Thursday showed Dr Abu Safiya speaking on the telephone while walking through a busy ward with what appeared to be a shatter window and a damaged ceiling.

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

Eid Sabbah, the director of nursing, said in a voice note to Reuters news agency early Friday: “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.”

He said the Israeli forces retreated when a delegation from the WHO arrived with an ambulance and evacuated some 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.

The ministry said two children had died in the intensive care unit after the hospital’s generators stopped and the oxygen station was hit, but there were no similar reports from medics or the WHO.

The Israeli military said it was not aware of a tank firing at the hospital.

Dr Tedros confirmed that a WHO team had reached the hospital 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.

But he added that the UN agency had lost touch with staff at the hospital since the reports of the raid emerged.

“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 warned.

“We call for an immediate ceasefire; and protection of hospitals, patients, health professionals and humanitarians.”

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.

On Friday, the Israeli military’s chief of staff also visited Jabalia and told troops they were beating Hamas.

General Herzi Halevi said: “Because we are better, we are more justified and also because we are stronger – another achievement Jabalia is falling.”

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 the north.

“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 that it is making sure that civilians get out of harm’s way.

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 met with 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 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.

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.

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.

Alan Hartley was never supposed to open a fruit and veg shop.

A career in engineering was on the cards for the-then 19-year-old, but Alan’s eyes and heart were set on running his own mobile store.

He spoke to mum Janet and dad Albert and had a chat with the council about his options.

In November 1960, while still a teenager, he took control of an empty unit at what would become known as the Gaunt Shopping Centre – it wasn’t on wheels, but it was his.

On Friday, 64 years later, Alan pulled down the shutter for the final time on local retail institution AE Hartley & Son.

When we meet him, Alan, now 83, surveys the scene around the shop, including new buildings and the empty neighbouring stores in which the tills went quiet a long time ago.

“We’d be looking at a field now,” he says, gazing across the concrete precinct.

“Not a big brick wall at the back of a chemist. The view was definitely better then.”

Three generations of the Hartley family, wearing the matching blue fleeces introduced by the business 15 years ago, are stood inside the shop.

They are happily reminiscing about the memories that have been created over butter, potatoes, toothpaste and toilet cleaner during the years they have worked there.

A steady stream of customers comes through the door to offer well wishes. Some leave cards. Many are emotional.

“We’ve had tears from several customers. I’m saving mine for a bit,” says Janet, Alan’s 89-year-old sister who has been at his side since the start.

She left a job in insurance, deciding that working with family in the shop suited her better.

“We’re a big family. That’s our strength. When it’s backs to the wall. We present a united front,” she adds.

For the first few years the shop, named after Alan’s father Albert Edward Hartley, simply sold fruit and veg.

Fresh produce was lined up and displayed in boxes outside the front of the store on a well-swept pavement in the Gleadless area, about three miles south east of Sheffield city centre.

Potatoes would arrive in huge wooden crates and have to be lugged up from the cellar.

Alan’s eldest son Lee, now 51, remembers watching on a child as his father and grandfather struggled with the “back-breaking work” of moving huge quantities of potatoes around.

“In the early 60s people weren’t eating rice and pasta so we sold tonnes and tonnes of spuds.

“After a couple of years Dad realised the heavy lifting would kill him so he invested in a conveyer belt,” he says.

The original 1960s conveyer belt is still in operation today.

Lee proudly fires it up to demonstrate its deafening whirl.

The family are now looking into transferring it to a local museum.

Looking out across the shop from a stool perched behind the counter, Janet reflects on the current dwindling stock, deliberately run down before closure.

In the far corner is a tall glass-fronted fridge, it is half-empty and contains energy drinks.

“I remember when they wheeled that in.

“We didn’t know where to put it. It seemed so big,” she says.

“We used to sell old glass bottles of Tizer and Dandelion and Burdock.

“People used to have it with their Sunday dinner,” she recollects with a smile.

A chest freezer followed. It’s currently stocked with frozen pizzas and sausages.

“People purchase food differently. They just don’t shop local anymore,” she explains.

Lee ended up taking over the day-to-day running in the 1990s and despite only being in charge for a mere 30 years or so, he is clear on what has kept the business alive while others around have floundered and fallen.

“Adapt or die,” he tells me, stood near a shelf where birthday candles and soap jostle for the pre-eminent position.

“When the supermarkets became more and more popular, all the shops around us started closing; the newsagent and bakers.

“We realised that we had to diversify and start stocking those products for our customers.”

Now behind the counter where there used to be a vat of loose dirty potatoes sits a neat row of greeting cards, wrapping paper and helium balloons.

Time and the march of purchasing progress has not swept all before it in the shop just yet, though.

Eggs can still be bought individually from a huge pile behind the counter.

Customers know to return their old egg boxes to be re-used.

Sue Denton, 63, has been coming to the store for 40 years.

She’s brought flowers for the family and is buying some sharon fruit – something the shop didn’t stock when it opened for the first time.

“It’s near on, they sell everything. It’s like a family for me.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” she says.

Mick Pearson, 68 comes in every day.

Today he’s buying a tin of corned beef.

He jokes: “I come in to be abused. I’m going to starve when they close.”

According to the youngest generation of the Hartley clan, Jamie, 19, and Amy ,18, the “legendary” pick-n-mix sweet boxes have also stayed the same over the years since their grandfather first opened up.

Amy, talking about a bag containing a mix of cheaper sweets, insists: “It’s the only place round here you can get a proper good mix up.”

The teenage pair tease each other about child labour and who started working at the shop first.

“Put it this way, there’s a photo of me as a baby in the sweetie weighing scales,” laughs Jamie.

Over the years the shop’s nostalgic vibe has also caught the attention of TV producers.

The exterior was used for the 1980s-set ITV underwear drama Brief Encounter, while in 2022 the Disney TV series of Sheffield-based The Full Monty used the store as a newsagents.

Getting ready for the shop to close for the last time, Lee, who is moving into catering and currently converting a horse box for a new coffee business, admitted it would be a very difficult day: “I’m very sad. I grew up with these people that come in, sad times are coming.”

Alan’s hands-off approach has allowed him to see more than his shop counter for the past few years.

He and wife Pat have enjoyed cruises to as far afield as Australia and China – and hope to explore further in their proper retirement.

“I’ve mixed feelings,” he said.

“I’m ready for a rest but I’ll miss the customers so much. They’re more like friends.”

The “most painful aspects of our past continue to resonate”, King Charles III said this week to Commonwealth leaders in Samoa, as arguments about reparations and apologies over the slave trade rumbled once again.

That’s become an occupational hazard for the Royal Family, as it can’t shake off questions about the long shadow of historic links to slavery.

It’s even more pointed in a forum such as the Commonwealth summit, with leaders representing some of the countries most affected by the legacy of colonialism and slavery.

But even if the King had a personal belief that there should be a symbolic apology or a commitment to reparations, he wouldn’t have been able to deliver it.

Monarchs speak on the advice of ministers – and on a question of such political sensitivity, his speeches will have to stay within the boundaries of government policy.

In other words, he has to stick to the script.

A week ago, Downing Street signalled quite clearly that there would not be an apology or a deal on reparations from the UK at the summit in Samoa.

That meant that whatever the King might privately think, anything he said about such historic wrongs would reflect the line set by the government.

“None of us can change the past,” the King said diplomatically, neatly aligning with Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s line that we “can’t change our history”.

That hasn’t stopped the King from going very close to the wire.

In Kenya last year, the King spoke of his “greatest sorrow and regret” at the wrongdoings of the colonial era.

In language stronger than in Samoa, he spoke of the “abhorrent and unjustifiable acts of violence committed against Kenyans” during their struggle for independence.

But in keeping with government policy, there was nothing that could be pinned down as an explicit apology.

The use of “sorrow” carefully avoids saying sorry. It was also used by the then-Prince Charles at the previous Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Rwanda.

Interestingly, it mirrors the closest a UK prime minister has come, when Tony Blair in 2007 formally voiced his “deep sorrow and regret” over Britain’s part in the slave trade.

At the time, there were calls for Blair to go further, but he later said he had said sorry.

Although expressing it as “sorrow” includes the emotion, it avoids the liability and expectation of compensation that might come with “sorry”.

As head of state, the King is the symbolic focus of calls for such redress, whether that’s financial reparations or some other ways addressing of historic wrongs. That’s not going to go away.

That’s awkward but he’ll take that in his stride, as it’s a political decision that he can’t change and reparations for the past seem unlikely when current UK budgets are under intense stress.

But there’s also the more complicated question of how much the monarchy, as both a family and an institution, might have a closer responsibility.

For example, the Royal African Company, founded in the 17th Century under royal patronage, has been claimed as transporting more enslaved people from Africa across the Atlantic than any other company.

But history, like people, can be full of contradictions.

When it came to Britain’s pioneering efforts to abolish slavery, in the early 19th Century, research by historian Prof Suzanne Schwarz found the Royal Family itself was divided.

The nephew of George III, the Duke of Gloucester, was one of the most important campaigners to abolish slavery – a tireless opponent of the cruel trade and a supporter of the Royal Navy’s efforts to intercept slave ships.

But before the royals feel the clouds lifting, George III’s son, the future William IV, was one of the most enthusiastic defenders of slavery.

There’s a sparkling silver service still in the possession of the Royal Collection Trust, known as the “Jamaica Service”, which was given to the future William IV by those in Jamaica who wanted to thank him for his efforts to protect the slave trade.

Before becoming King, William IV was Duke of Clarence – and Clarence House, a royal residence, is named after him.

There have been attempts in other countries to draw a line under the question of slavery.

The Dutch King delivered a formal apology, in a move co-ordinated with the country’s prime minister.

But for King Charles and other senior royals, it’s a question that continues to hang in the background, particularly when they visit a former colony or a place where the slave trade had an impact.

Prince William and Catherine’s trip to the Caribbean in 2022 was dogged by rows over whether their visit had too much of the look and feel of a colonial visit.

Any trip planners must look at traditional dancers and garlands and start having nightmares about how it might come across.

But the King, who has been walking this political tightrope for many decades, steered a careful path in Samoa.

“None of us can change the past. But we can commit, with all our hearts, to learning its lessons and to finding creative ways to right inequalities that endure,” he said.

And in a speech that was widely seen as being about the legacy of slavery – he never once actually referred to slavery at all.

“The reaction was so crazy. I’ve never seen a song reaction like that in the club,” Lethal Bizzle tells the BBC.

Every time the grime artist’s debut single Pow! blasted through speakers in UK nightclubs in the early 2000s, there was chaos on the dancefloor.

Adrenaline-fuelled clubbers pushed and slammed into one another. Drinks flew across packed, sweaty venues, late into the night.

“Basically it was people having fun mosh-pitting – very normal at festivals – but in the club environments that I was used to playing, that never used to happen then,” Bizzle says.

“A lot of the club owners were like: woah, woah, woah, what’s going on here!”

The three-minute barrage of energy, which starts with Bizzle before the microphone is passed between 10 MCs, became so notorious that clubs banned it across the country.

Signs in DJ booths started appearing, reading: “All Lethal B tracks are banned from this venue (including instrumentals).”

In a sign of how repressed it was, it was never actually performed live with all of the MCs together.

That is about to change, two decades after the track’s release, as Bizzle and the entire crew are set to perform Pow! at London’s Roundhouse this December.

It’s a surreal twist for the rapper that would have been unimaginable in 2004, when he crafted the piece.

Pow! was a track born out of frustration with the music industry.

Major labels weren’t investing in grime – despite hopes they would after Dizzee Rascal’s debut record Boy In Da Corner took off the previous year.

“Dizzee was having an amazing time – he won the Mercury [Music Prize] and that gave us a bit of hope. It was like ‘yes, they’re signing artists again’,” says Bizzle.

“Nothing happened. It was only Dizzee. The rest of us were back on pirate radio.”

But London’s pirate radio stations were where Pow! was whipping up a frenzy, even before it was released on iTunes.

And it’s where Bizzle honed his craft, clashing with other MCs on the airwaves.

With Pow! he wanted to “create the vibe of pirate radio on a song”.

“When we’d be in the studio it’d just be constant energy. Everyone is spitting their bars, everyone is just going crazy. I was like: ‘I don’t think that’s happened on a song before.’”

Bizzle started hunting for beats and putting calls into his favourite underground MCs.

He eventually managed to gather 10 of them in a room to record the single including D Double E, Flowdan and Jamakabi.

He played the beat he’d chosen – but most of them weren’t too keen.

“I was like hyping it up, being like ‘bro wait till you hear this beat, it’s gonna blow your mind’.

“I played the beat – no word of a lie – 80% of the MCs were looking like, ’huh? What is this?’”

D Double E remembers that he wasn’t blown away at first. “It weren’t like it was rubbish… I just remember not really feeling the vibe,” he tells the BBC.

After a rallying cry in the studio, which Bizzle likens to Sir Alex Ferguson at half-time in a Champions League final, the other MCs reluctantly agreed to record their verses. When they listened back, their opinion started to shift.

“When I heard the bar I just knew that I’d killed the beat,” says D Double E.

It didn’t take long for Pow! to take off on pirate radio and Channel U, which was dedicated to UK underground urban music. By December, it entered the top 40 at number 11. The following year it won the Mobo award for best single.

The labels started calling and shows started getting booked.

What led to the song being banned in clubs isn’t fully clear – but Bizzle thinks a fight broke out when Pow! was played at one venue, and the news spread. It happened again, and again.

DJs started sending him photos of signs in booths warning them to not play the track.

Then some of his shows even started getting pulled, including one in Leicester after police warned that the club could lose its live licence if it was allowed to go ahead, Bizzle recalls.

“Then I was like this is actually really serious, actually getting out of hand.”

At the time clubs in London were required to fill out a form when hosting events with DJs and MCs. It included the question “is there a particular ethnic group attending?” – which was dogged by accusations of racism.

Police said it curbed gun crime at clubs and played a role in reducing serious violence – but even though the ethnicity clause was removed in 2008, the form targeted a disproportionate number of events by black and Asian artists and was eventually retired.

Bizzle remembers how efforts to suppress his music started falling away after top music magazine NME compared Pow! to Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen.

“Once in a generation, a record comes along that causes people to sit bolt upright, a rallying cry to the masses, a barometer of social discontent that turns venues into mosh-crazed riots,” the review read.

Festivals then started booking Bizzle and he played packed out shows at Reading & Leeds.

Jay-Z rapped over the Pow! instrumental. There were even discussions about the US superstar featuring on an official remix of the song.

Memphis Bleek, a rapper close to Jay-Z, confirmed on a podcast this year that a version was recorded but never released.

By 2010, the song was making waves on the streets of London again.

Tens of thousands of students were protesting against an increase of the cap on tuition fees. On 10 December, just a stone’s throw from Big Ben, a sound system was set up and protesters started playing Pow! The crowd went wild.

Bizzle says he was proud when he saw the footage.

“We had an understanding. I made Pow! because I was almost fighting against what was happening with the police and the industry trying to shut us down,” he says.

“It was a similar message with the students, I was glad to see it used in the way that I made it. That was the perfect backing track for that moment.”

Bizzle says the inspiration behind this December’s show, which will celebrate 20 years of Pow!, came from an unlikely source.

“It’s so random. Last year I was chilling watching Netflix and I saw the Robbie Williams documentary,” Bizzle says.

Inspired by Williams’ reunion with the other members of Take That, Bizzle thought it was time for him to do the same.

“I was sitting there thinking, I do miss the boys man.”

Some of the Pow! MCs have moved on from music, including Napper who is a boxing promoter and manages Chris Eubank Jr, but everyone will be on stage on 1 December alongside special guests, including Roll Deep.

“Everybody drifted off to other walks of life, but the main thing is that everyone is still alive and healthy,” Bizzle says.

“When the show happens it’s gonna be emotional, man – 20 years on and seeing how people respond to the song like it just came out today.

“We’ve got to give the people what they want and what they missed.”

Revealed: The true story behind Jay Z’s guest verse on Pow! by Lethal Bizzle

Over 45 minutes Lethal Bizzle and Radio 1’s Target chatted everything from 90s drum’n’bass, East London, More Fire Crew and meeting the rappers that inspired him.

He also revealed the true story behind Jay Z’s involvement in his iconic (and controversial) track Pow! following a performance at the Royal Albert Hall.

For decades, Canada has cast itself as a country open to newcomers, with immigration policies tailored to boost its population, fill labour gaps and settle refugees fleeing conflict from around the world.

But in recent months, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said he intends to significantly cut the number of immigrants allowed in Canada as public concern grows over inaccessible social services, high costs of living and unaffordable housing.

It is a major shift for both the country and Trudeau, who ran in 2015 on a platform of embracing multiculturalism as a key part of Canadian identity.

His government has relied on ambitious immigration targets to fuel economic growth.

In the face of criticism and plummeting approval ratings, the prime minister now says that his government miscalculated, and that Canada needs to “stabilise” its population growth so that public infrastructure can keep up.

On Thursday, Trudeau and Immigration Minister Marc Miller presented their most stringent immigration cutbacks yet – a 21% reduction of permanent residents accepted into the country in 2025.

The announcement follows other cuts to Canada’s temporary resident programmes, which include temporary foreign workers and international students.

Explaining his shift in policy, Trudeau maintained that “Canadians are justifiably proud” of their immigration system.

“It has made our economy the envy of the world,” he said. “It’s how we build strong, diverse communities.”

But Trudeau admitted that his government “didn’t get the balance quite right” when it admitted a record number of temporary residents after the Covid-19 pandemic to ease labour shortages, and that there is now a need to “stabilise” Canada’s immigration system.

His announcement comes at the heels of dwindling public support for immigration in Canada.

• Trudeau announces sharp cuts to Canada’s immigration targets
• Justin Trudeau’s sinking popularity puts him on shaky ground

A September poll by Environics Institute, which has tracked Canadians’ attitudes towards immigration since 1977, revealed that for the first time in a quarter century, a majority now say there is too much immigration.

The institute said these shifting attitudes are primarily driven by concerns over limited housing. But the economy, over-population, and how the immigration system is being managed were also cited as big factors.

In an October newsletter, Abacus Data pollster David Coletto said that the idea that “consensus around immigration is cracking is an understatement”.

“I think that consensus is now broken and expect it to be one of the most salient issues in federal and provincial politics over the next year.”

Canada has been largely welcoming to immigrants. Data shows it is a global leader in refugee resettlement, and the country has built a reputation in the last 50 years as one that values newcomers.

The Canadian Multiculturalism Act, passed in 1988, recognises diversity as an integral part of Canada’s identity. Its multicultural heritage is also protected in the constitution.

“Since the late 1990s or so, Canadian attitudes have been broadly pro-immigration,” Michael Donnelly, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, told the BBC.

In 2019, a Pew Research report indicated that of 10 top migrant destination countries, Canada had the most positive view of immigration.

Professor Donnelly said that immigrants make up a large part of Canada’s electorate, which deters major political parties from adopting an anti-immigration stance.

Canada has also rarely faced troubles experienced elsewhere with uncontrolled migration – a benefit of its geography, being surrounded by three oceans and the US to the south – and its immigration system was seen by the public as open and well-regulated.

But these positive sentiments have changed in the last few years, Professor Donnelly said.

One reason is the unprecedented spike in temporary residents coming to Canada.

The number of international students grew nearly 30% from 2022 to 2023, according to the Canadian Bureau for International Education. Meanwhile, government data shows that the number of temporary foreign workers in Canada has doubled in the last five years.

Another factor is a growing sense that Canada’s immigration system has lost its integrity, Professor Donnelly said, partly due to miscalculations by the Canadian government.

Asylum claims spiked after Canada removed visa requirements for tourists from Mexico in 2016, forcing Canada to reimpose visa restrictions earlier this year.

Canadian media has also reported that some international students were using their temporary visa to claim permanent asylum in the country – a trend that Minister Miller called “alarming”.

Professor Donnelly said these incidents and others “have made people think that the government has lost control of the flow of immigration”.

All of these concerns, he added, are underlined by a housing crisis that has affected Canadians across the country, where a shortage of available homes has driven both rent and home prices up for many.

“People are going to see large numbers of (newcomers) coming in and housing shortages, and conclude that’s directly causal,” he said.

Professor Donnelly noted that while Canada has seen some racist rhetoric around immigration, Canadians’ changing attitudes are not primarily driven by the sentiments seen in European countries or in the neighbouring United States.

Rather, it is fuelled by people’s desire to reign in Canada’s immigration system.

“The Trudeau government is clearly trying to give an image of ‘we have this under control’,” Prof Donnelly said.

One of the world’s biggest web publishing platforms – used by a large chunk of the internet – is locked in a spat which is affecting thousands of businesses worldwide.

While most of the work WordPress is not seen by internet users, it says its behind-the-scenes web-building tools power 40% of the world’s websites.

That means its disagreement with a company called WP Engine is causing disruption to the huge number businesses that rely on the two organisations to keep their websites running.

Tricia Fox, who runs an agency that manages about 70 websites – and is caught up in the row – told the BBC: “I can’t run a business on this level of uncertainty.”

The very wide use of WordPress makes it “crucial to the internet”, according to Daniel Card, fellow of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT.

But that also means “its actions definitely have a big ripple effect online”, he says – a ripple effect firms like Tricia Fox’s are starting to really feel.

The row between the companies begins with the fact that WordPress has two sides: its non-profit organisation, called WordPress.org, and its profit-making arm, called Automattic.

WordPress.org makes its source code open, which mean anyone can use it to create and redistribute their own tools for free.

That’s what WP Engine does to run a web hosting service.

But in return for the source code, WordPress expects those who use it to contribute to its maintenance, for example by fixing bugs and testing new features.

The boss of WordPress accuses WP Engine of failing to do so, going so far as to call it “a cancer to WordPress.”

As a result, in late September, he banned WP Engine from using key parts of WordPress.

WP Engine rejects these claims.

“We are proud of our extensive contributions to the WordPress ecosystem,” WP Engine wrote in a post on X/Twitter.

Caught in the middle of this row are the countless websites and blogs that rely on the two companies services.

People like Tricia Fox, who uses a WP Engine subsidiary to host the websites her company serves.

She now says she is “almost certain” to migrate her websites to a different host – a decision which she says is worth “tens of thousands of pounds” over the next few years.

She wants to move away from WP Engine because the fallout has resulted in dozens of hours of extra work for her staff – increasing costs for her business.

“The team don’t know if it’s going to work today or not,” Ms Fox told the BBC.

But she worries even a costly move away from WP Engine may not solve her problems, as she would still be using another host based on the WordPress code.

“What’s to stop WordPress from doing this again [to another company]?” she asks.

“Right now we are currently focused on resolving our dispute with WP Engine,” WordPress said when the BBC asked if it would go after other companies in a similar manner.

The row also underscores how important the open source principle is to the online economy.

While big tech might attract the headlines, for many people and businesses it is something much less eye-catching that keeps them afloat.

“Open source is all about sharing code and standards so everyone benefits, and it’s a huge part of what makes the internet work,” says Daniel Card.

And with WordPress being such a big player in that world, if it makes changes to its tools, he adds, “it’s felt by users everywhere and often impacts hosting, plugins, and web standards across the internet.”

While much of the spat between the two sides has taken place through official social media accounts and blog posts, it has also entered the courtroom.

WordPress.org cannot force WP Engine to contribute to its open source project – but it does have control over its trademarks.

It argues that WP Engine mentions WordPress in its marketing tools to help sell its product – and therefore should pay to use the trademark.

“Any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks,” Mr Mullenweg wrote in a blog post.

The trademarks do not cover the “WP” abbreviation, but the WordPress Foundation says: “please don’t use it in a way that confuses people”.

WP Engine has meanwhile filed a legal case against Mr Mullenweg and Automattic, with accusations of attempted extortion, libel and a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act among its complaints.

It claims Automattic told WP Engine they would have to pay “tens of millions of dollars” in order to continue using the WordPress trademarks.

WP Engine has since asked for the legal process to be sped up as its businesses are suffering.

Its recent filing claimed the number of cancellation requests it receives have increased by 14% compared to normal trading, as a result of the disruption.

It said it it is also losing out on potential new customers due to uncertainty over its future access to WordPress products.

Automattic has called the lawsuit “baseless” and “flawed, start to finish.”

“We vehemently deny WP Engine’s allegations – which are gross mischaracterizations of reality,” it said in a statement, adding that it would “vigorously litigate against this absurd filing”.

Cuba has endured one of its toughest weeks in years after a nationwide blackout which left around 10 million Cubans without power for several days. Adding to the Caribbean island’s problems, Hurricane Oscar left a trail of destruction along the north-eastern coast, leaving several dead and causing widespread damage. For some communities in Cuba the energy crisis is the new normal.

As Cuba approached its fourth day without power this week, Yusely Perez turned to the only fuel source left available to her: firewood.

Her neighbourhood in Havana hasn’t received its regular deliveries of liquified gas cannisters for two months. So once the island’s entire electrical grid went down, prompting a nationwide blackout, Yusely was forced to take desperate measures.

“Me and my husband went all over the city, but we couldn’t find charcoal anywhere,” she explains.

“We had to collect firewood wherever we found it on the street. Thankfully it was dry enough to cook with.”

Yusely nodded at the yucca chips frying slowly in a pot of lukewarm oil. “We’ve gone two days without eating,” she adds.

Speaking last Sunday, at the height of what was Cuba’s most acute energy crisis in years, the country’s energy and mines minister, Vicente de la O Levy, blamed the problems for the country’s creaking electrical infrastructure on what he called the “brutal” US economic embargo on Cuba.

The embargo, he argued, made it impossible to import new parts to overhaul the grid or bring in enough fuel to run the power stations, even to access credit in the international banking system.

The US State Department retorted that the problems with energy production in Cuba did not lie at Washington’s door – but argued that it was due to the Cuban government’s own mismanagement.

Normal service would be resumed soon, the Cuban minister insisted. But no sooner did he utter those words than there was another total collapse of the grid, the fourth in 48 hours.

At night, the full extent of the blackout became clear.

Havana’s streets were plunged into near total darkness as residents sat on the doorsteps in the stifling heat, their faces lit up by their mobile phones – as long as their batteries lasted.

Some, like restaurant worker Victor, were prepared to openly criticise the authorities.

“The people who run this country are the ones who have all the answers,” he says. “But they’re going to have to explain themselves to the Cuban people.”

Specifically, the state’s decision to invest heavily in tourism, rather than energy infrastructure, frustrated him most during the blackout.

“They’ve built so many hotels in the past few years. Everyone knows that a hotel doesn’t cost a couple of bucks. It costs 300 or 400 million dollars.”

“So why is our energy infrastructure collapsing?” he asks. “Either they’re not investing in it or, if they are, then it’s not been to the benefit of the people.”

Aware of the growing discontentment, President Miguel Diaz-Canel appeared on state TV wearing the traditional olive-green fatigues of the Cuban revolution.

If that message wasn’t clear enough, he directly warned people against protesting over the blackout. The authorities would not “tolerate” vandalism, he said, or any attempt to “disrupt the social order”.

The protests of July 2021, when hundreds were arrested amid widespread demonstrations following a series of blackouts, were fresh in the memory.

On this occasion, there were only a handful of reports of isolated incidents.

Yet the question of where Cuba chooses to direct its scarce resources remains a real point of contention on the island.

“When we talk about energy infrastructure, that refers to both generation and distribution or transmission. In every step, a lot of investment is needed,” says Cuban economist, Ricardo Torres, at the American University in Washington DC.

Electricity generation in Cuba has recently fallen well below what’s required, only supplying some 60-70% of the national demand. The shortfall is a “huge and serious gap” which is now being felt across the island, says Mr Torres.

By the government’s own figures, Cuba’s national electricity generation dropped by around 2.5% in 2023 compared to the previous year, part of a downward trend which has seen a staggering 25% drop in production since 2019.

“It’s important to understand that last week’s problem in the energy grid isn’t something that happens overnight,” says Mr Torres.

Few know that better than Marbeyis Aguilera. The 28-year-old mother-of-three is getting used to living without electricity.

For Marbeyis, even “normal service” being restored still means most of the day without power.

In fact, what the residents of Havana endured for a few days is what daily life is like in her village of Aguacate in the province of Artemisa, outside Havana.

“We’ve had no power for six days”, she says, brewing coffee on a makeshift charcoal stove inside her breeze-block, tin-roofed shack.

“It came on for a couple of hours last night and then went out again. We have no choice but to cook like this or use firewood to provide something warm for the children,” she adds.

Her two gas hobs and one electric ring sit idle on the kitchen top, the room filling with smoke. The community is in dire need of state assistance, she says, listing their most urgent priorities.

“First, electricity. Secondly, we need water. Food is running out. People with dollars, sent from abroad, can buy food. But we don’t have any so we can’t buy anything.”

Marbeyis says some of the main problems in Aguacate – food insecurity and water distribution – have been exacerbated by the power cuts.

Her husband’s manual labour also requires electricity and he’s stuck at home waiting for the instruction to come to work. The Cuban Government was due to recall state workers by Thursday – but to avoid another collapse in the grid, all non-essential work and schools have now been suspended until next week.

“It’s especially hard on the children”, Marbeyis adds, her eyes tearing up, “because when they say I want this or that, we have nothing to give them.”

Living without a reliable energy source is the new normal in places like Aguacate. Many have been struggling with power shortages since around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, which coincided with a sharp economic downturn on the island.

Perhaps the biggest problem for the Cuban State is that the sight of people cooking with firewood and charcoal in the 21st Century is reminiscent of the poverty under dictator Fulgencio Bastista, who the revolutionaries ousted six-and-half decades ago.

Amid it all, on the north-eastern coast, the situation got even worse. As people were still coping with the blackout, Hurricane Oscar made landfall, bringing high winds, flash flooding and ripping roofs from homes.

The storm may have passed. But Cubans know that such is the precarious state of the island’s energy infrastructure that the next nationwide blackout could come at any time.

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

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, Nevada and North Carolina, the lead has changed hands a few times since the start of August but Trump has a small lead in all of them at the moment.

In the three other states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – Harris had led 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

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.

“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.

As people across the UK roll their clocks back to GMT on Sunday, there’s one well-loved Scottish clock that will remain at the wrong time.

Ever since the Balmoral Hotel clock tower was built in Edinburgh 122 years ago, its time has deliberately been set fast.

The peculiar tradition began after intervention by railway officials at Edinburgh Waverley Station, below the clock tower.

In the era before mobile phones, when watches were expensive, the clock was well-used by train passengers to watch their time.

Officials thought three extra minutes would give travellers more time to collect their tickets, reach their carriages and unload their luggage before the whistle blew.

It has been set three minutes fast ever since.

Brian Duncan, chief engineer of the Balmoral Hotel, said the tradition would endure.

At 02:00 the clock will be stopped for an hour, and set running again the usual three minutes ahead of time.

“Passersby don’t seem to notice as we’ve never had a complaint about the time being wrong during that hour,” he told BBC Scotland.

“I think it’s because it’s happening in the middle of the night.”

The Scottish Baronial-style clock tower was manually changed for daylight savings before it was automated in 2014 – just a few months after Brian took the job of looking after the clock.

The change was prompted after it stopped three times over a six week period.

Brian said one of the hundreds of cogs inside the original mechanism was slipping.

“I had to make a very big decision – do we continue with the clock being faulty or do we go for a small gear box controlled by a computer,” he said.

“We now have a very small gear box compared to the original mechanism and a computer controls it.”

So Brian will be sleeping in his bed when the clocks change.

The hands on the four faces of the clock tower cannot be wound, so instead the clock is stopped for one hour in autumn and for 11 hours when the clocks go forward in the spring.

“It’s always a Saturday night, so people on Princes Street at that time have usually had a few drinks so no-one really notices,” he said.

The only day the clock tells the true time is during the countdown to the midnight bells during Edinburgh’s big Hogmanay celebrations on 31 December.

The hotel pays for specialists from Smith of Derby to change the time for just one day to see in the New Year. Then it is set three minutes fast again.

The 62-year-old also explained how the clock keeps its time during the year despite the forces of gravity on the minute hand.

“I was told the weight of gravity makes it faster for the first 30 seconds but then gravity makes it slower on the way back up so it equals out,” he said.

The last time the clock broke down was for more than a month in the summer of 2020 during the Covid lockdown.

He now always looks up at it in the morning from his tram journey to work to make sure it is still working.

The clock tower, which was designed by William Hamilton Beattie, rises 190ft (58m) into the capital’s skyline.

The original mechanism, although not used any more, is still in the clock tower.

Brian said he hopes one day to have it moved into a more public area of the hotel so visitors can see it.

“It’s a massive operation to take it out of the clock tower due to its sheer weight. It’s made of steel and weighs at least half a ton.”

The Balmoral is the second most famous clock in the UK after Big Ben.

“I love the clock and I’m very proud to be in charge of looking after it,” said Brian.

“It’s quite an achievement to be the chief engineer of such a clock.

“And it gives me a wee bit of excitement when I look up at it, it’s beautiful.”

The Balmoral Hotel is itself a landmark in Edinburgh. It opened originally as the North British Station Hotel.

It was re-named the Balmoral – a name derived from Gaelic which means “majestic dwelling” – in June 1991, in a ceremony led by actor Sir Sean Connery.

Since then it has hosted many celebrities, including JK Rowling, who finished the last book in her Harry Potter series in one of the hotel’s suites.

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?

Phil Lesh, bassist and co-founder of the US rock group The Grateful Dead, has died aged 84.

The musician’s official Instagram account said he “passed peacefully this morning”. He was surrounded by his family.

The psychedelic band, which formed in California in 1965, split 30 years later following the death of frontman Jerry Garcia.

Lesh was with them from the beginning – and also joined the group’s other surviving members for reunion US tour in 2003 and a final series of concerts in 2015.

Lesh’s Instagram account said that he “brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.”

With a distinctive trippy blend of rock, folk, and jazz, The Grateful Dead are arguably one of the most influential bands in American history, and wrote the soundtrack for the countercultural generation of the sixties.

Lesh was born in Berkeley, California, in 1940. He started out as a violin player before switching to trumpet, and later to bass guitar when he joined The Grateful Dead in 1965.

For the next three decades his improvisational skills complemented the melodies of lead guitarist Jerry Garcia and bandmates Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzman and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan.

He was best known for the song Unbroken Chain, about the band’s connection with its audience.

Lesh also sang the wistful Box Of Rain, which he wrote while his father was dying.

Loyal fans, known as “Deadheads”, would often follow the band from city to city across the US to hear them play at packed-out concerts.

The band always made it easy for its fans to record its concerts and distribute tapes to their peers around the world.

Despite their massive following, they notched up only one top 10 hit in the US with Touch of Grey in 1987.

Although the cause of Lesh’s death is unknown, he had a series of health issues over the years.

In 2015, he announced he was being treated for bladder cancer in the US. Nine years before that he had surgery for prostate cancer and made a full recovery.

He also underwent a liver transplant in 1998, becoming a passionate advocate of organ donations.

Lesh is survived by his wife, Jill, and their two sons.

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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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

A selection of striking news photographs taken around the world this week.

Israel’s attack on Iran deepens the war in the Middle East. Avoiding, or risking, an even worse escalation is at the heart of decisions being taken by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his key advisors.

They must decide on the least bad of a series of difficult choices. At one end of the spectrum is hitting back with another wave of ballistic missiles. Israel has already threatened to retaliate again if that happens.

At the other is deciding to draw a line under the destructive exchanges of direct strikes on their respective territories. The risk for Iran if it holds its fire is that looks weak, intimidated and deterred by Israel’s military power and political determination, backed up by the United States.

In the end, the supreme leader and his advisers are likely to take the decision that, in their view, does least harm to the survival of Iran’s Islamic regime.

Iran’s official media in the hours before and after Israel’s attacks carried defiant statements that, at face value, suggest the decision to respond had already been taken. Its language resembles Israel’s, citing its right to defend itself against attack. But the stakes are so high that Iran might decide to walk its threats back.

That is the hope of Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who fell in behind America’s insistence that Israel has acted in self-defence.

“I am clear that Israel has the right to defend itself against Iranian aggression,” he said. “I’m equally clear that we need to avoid further regional escalation and urge all sides to show restraint. Iran should not respond.”

Iran’s own statements have been consistent since its ballistic missile on Israel on 1 October. A week ago, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Turkey’s NTV network that “any attack on Iran will be considered crossing a red line for us. Such an attack will not go unanswered.”

Hours before the Israeli strikes, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baqai said: “Any aggression by the Israeli regime against Iran will be met with full force.” It was, he said, “highly misleading and baseless” to suggest that Iran would not respond to a limited Israeli attack.

As the Israeli aircraft were heading back to base Iran’s foreign ministry invoked its right to self defence “as enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter”. A statement said Iran believed it was both entitled and obligated to respond to foreign acts of aggression.

Israel has set the pace of escalation since the spring. It sees Iran as the crucial backer of the Hamas attacks that killed about 1,200 people – Israelis and more than 70 foreign nationals – on 7 October last year. Fearing that Israel was looking for a chance to strike, Iran signalled repeatedly that it did not want a full-on war with Israel.

That did not mean it was prepared to stop its constant, often deadly, but lower-level pressure on Israel and its allies.

The men in Tehran thought they had a better idea than all-out war. Instead, Iran used the allies and proxies in its so-called “axis of resistance” to attack Israel. The Houthis in Yemen blocked and destroyed shipping in the Red Sea. Hezbollah rocket fire from Lebanon forced at least 60,000 Israelis from their homes.

Six months into the war, Israel’s retaliation forced perhaps twice as many Lebanese from their homes in the south, but Israel was prepared to do much more. It warned that if Hezbollah did not hold its fire into Israel and move back from the border it would take action.

When that did not happen, Israel decided to break out of a battlefield that had been shaped by Iran’s limited, but attritional war. It landed a series of powerful blows that threw the Islamic regime in Tehran off balance and left its strategy in tatters. That is why, after the latest Israeli strikes, Iranian leaders have only hard choices.

Israel interpreted Iran’s reluctance to fight an all-out war as weakness, and upped the pressure both on Iran and its axis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s commanders could afford to take risks. They had President Joe Biden’s unequivocal support, a safety net that came not just in the shape of massive deliveries of munitions, but with his decision to send significant American sea and air reinforcements to the Middle East to back up the US commitment to defend Israel.

On 1 April an Israeli airstrike destroyed part of Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus, the Syrian capital. It killed a top Iranian commander, Brig Gen Mohammed Reza Zahedi, along with other senior officers from the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The Americans were furious that they had not been warned and given time to put their own forces on alert. But Joe Biden’s support did not waver as Israel faced the consequences of its actions. On 13 April Iran attacked with drones, cruise and ballistic missiles. Most were shot down by Israel’s defences, with considerable help from armed forces of the US, UK, France and Jordan.

Biden apparently asked Israel to “take the win” hoping that might stop what had become the most dangerous moment in the widening Middle East war. When Israel confined its response to a strike on an air defence site, Biden’s plan seemed to be working.

But since the summer, Israel has repeatedly escalated the war with Iran and its axis of allies and proxies. The biggest blows were landed in a major offensive against Iran’s most important ally, Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran had spent years building up Hezbollah’s arsenal of weapons as a key part of its forward defence. The idea was an Israeli attack on Iran would be deterred by the knowledge that Hezbollah would hammer Israel from just over the border in Lebanon.

But Israel moved first, implementing plans it had developed since Hezbollah fought it to a standstill in the 2006 war. It blew up booby trapped pagers and walkie talkies it had deceived Hezbollah into buying, invaded south Lebanon and killed Hezbollah’s leader Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah, a man who had been a symbol of defiant resistance to Israel for decades. The authorities in Beirut say that Israel’s offensive in Lebanon has so far killed more than 2,500 people, displaced more than 1.2 million and caused enormous damage to a country already on its knees after its economy largely collapsed.

Hezbollah is still fighting and killing Israeli soldiers inside Lebanon and firing large numbers of rockets. But it is reeling after losing its leader and much of its arsenal.

Faced with the near collapse of its strategy, Iran concluded it had to hit back. Allowing its allies to fight and die without responding would destroy its position as the leader of the anti-Israeli and anti-western forces in the region. Its answer was a much bigger ballistic missile attack on Israel on 1 October.

The airstrikes on Friday 25 October were Israel’s response. They took longer to come than many expected. Leaks of Israeli plans could have been a factor.

Israel is also carrying out a major offensive in northern Gaza. The UN human rights chief Volker Turk has called it the darkest moment of Gaza’s war, with the Israeli military subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and the risk of starvation.

It’s impossible for an outsider to know whether the timing of Israel’s attacks on Iran was designed to draw international attention away from northern Gaza. But it might have been part of the calculation.

It is hard to stop successive rounds of strikes and counter strikes when the countries concerned believe they will be seen as weak, and deterred, if they don’t respond. That is how wars spin out of control.

The question now is whether Iran is prepared to give Israel the last word, at least on this stage of the war. President Biden backed Israel’s decision to retaliate after 1 October. But once again he tried to head off an even deadlier escalation, telling Israel publicly not to bomb Iran’s most important assets, its nuclear, oil and gas installations. He augmented Israel’s defences by deploying the THAAD anti-missile system to Israel, and prime minister Netanyahu agreed to take his advice.

The American elections on 5 November are part of both Israel and Iran’s calculations about what happens next. If Donald Trump gets his second term, he might be less concerned than Biden about answering Iranian retaliation, if it happens, with strikes on nuclear, oil and gas facilities.

Once again, the Middle East is waiting. Israel’s decision not to hit Iran’s most valuable assets might, perhaps, give Tehran the chance to postpone a response, at least long enough for diplomats to do their work. At the UN General Assembly last month, the Iranians were suggesting that they were open to a new round of nuclear negotiations.

All this should matter greatly to the world outside the Middle East. Iran has always denied it wants a nuclear bomb. But its nuclear expertise and enrichment of uranium have put a weapon within its reach. Its leaders must be looking for a new way to deter their enemies. Developing a nuclear warhead for their ballistic missiles might be on their agenda.

Israel has carried out what it described as “precise and targeted” airstrikes on Iran in retaliation for the barrage of missile strikes launched by Tehran against Israel earlier this month.

It is the latest in a series of exchanges between the two countries that for months have sparked fears of an all-out regional war.

But while Iran says Saturday’s strikes against military sites killed two soldiers, early indications suggest the attacks were more limited than had been feared.

Here’s what we know.

Around 02:15 local time (22:45 GMT on Friday), Iranian media reported explosions in and around the capital, Tehran.

Video uploaded to social media and verified by the BBC showed projectiles in the sky over the city, while residents in some areas reported hearing loud booms.

Shortly after, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed it was carrying out “precise” strikes on “military targets” in Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant followed the operation from the IDF’s command and control centre in Tel Aviv.

Just after 06:00 (03:00 GMT), the IDF said the strikes had concluded.

The White House described the strikes as an “exercise of self-defence”. A senior administration official said the US had worked with Israel to encourage a “targeted and proportional” response.

The extent of the attacks – and the damage caused – remains unclear at this stage.

The IDF said it hit around 20 targets, including missile manufacturing facilities, surface-to-air-missiles and other military sites.

The Iranian military confirmed that two soldiers had died “while battling projectiles”.

Iranian authorities said sites in Tehran, Khuzestan and Ilam provinces were targeted. The country’s air defence said it had “successfully intercepted” the attacks, but that “some areas sustained limited damage”.

BBC Verify has identified damage at a defence ministry base to the east of Tehran, and at an air defence base to the south.

A senior US administration official said the attacks did not damage Iranian oil infrastructure or nuclear facilities, targets President Joe Biden had urged Israel not to hit.

Syrian state media also reported strikes on military sites in central and southern Syria, though Israel has not confirmed striking the country.

Iran is the primary backer of a range of groups across the Middle East – often described as proxy groups – that are hostile to Israel, including Hamas and Hezbollah, which Israel is currently at war with.

In April, Iran launched its first direct attack on Israel, with about 300 missiles and drones, in retaliation for an Israeli air strike on an Iranian embassy compound in Syria that killed several top commanders from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Israel responded with a “limited” strike on a missile defence system in the Iranian region of Isfahan, which Iran chose not to respond to.

Later, in July, Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander in an airstrike on Beirut. The next day, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an explosion in Tehran. Iran blamed Israel, though Israel did not comment.

In late September, Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Brig-Gen Abbas Nilforoushan, a high-ranking Iranian official, in Beirut.

On October 1, Iran launched 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, which it said was in response to the deaths of Haniyeh, Nasrallah and Nilforoushan.

• Read more: Why did Israel attack Iran?

Early signs indicate this attack was not as serious as some had feared.

US outlet Axios reported that prior to the attacks, Israel sent Iran a message revealing certain details about the strikes, and warning Tehran not to respond.

That could be a sign Israel does not want to escalate the situation further – at least for now.

“We are focused on our war objectives in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. It is Iran that continues to push for a wider regional escalation,” the IDF said in a statement.

A senior US official said “this should be the end of this direct exchange of fire between Israel and Iran”.

Iran’s foreign ministry said it was “entitled and obligated to defend itself” and described the attack as a violation of international law.

But it also said that Tehran recognises its “responsibilities towards regional peace and security”.

Images published by Iranian state media show life continuing in relative normality – with busy streets, people exercising in parks, and fruit and vegetable markets open as usual.

Iran closed its airspace for a few hours overnight, but it later reopened and there are several commercial flights in the air across the country.

But there are signs the Iranian government are keen to play down the impact of the attacks.

The IRGC has announced that it is a criminal offense to send “images or news” related to the attack to outlets that it deems “Israel-affiliated” or “hostile”. Usually, Iran refers to Western media as hostile.

Iranian media reported today that Tehran’s Prosecutor Office has filed charges against an unnamed website for “covering issues counter to national security”.

US National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said Israel’s response “avoided populated areas and focused solely on military targets, contrary to Iran’s attack against Israel that targeted Israel’s most populous city”.

But Washington’s aim, he added, is “to accelerate diplomacy and de-escalate tensions in the Middle East region”.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said Israel had the right to defend itself, but urged all sides to “show restraint” and called for Iran not to respond.

Saudi Arabia condemned the attack, and warned against any action that “threatens the security and the stability” of the region.

Egypt’s foreign ministry echoed those concerns, saying it was “gravely concerned” by the strikes.

Hamas described them as “a flagrant violation of Iranian sovereignty, and an escalation that targets the security of the region and the safety of its peoples”.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump‘s three-hour interview with America’s number one podcaster, Joe Rogan, has been released.

In the wide-ranging sit-down, the former president discusses everything from the “biggest mistake” of his White House tenure, what he told North Korea’s leader and whether extraterrestrial life exists.

Two years ago Rogan described Trump as “an existential threat to democracy” and refused to have him on his show. But the pair seemed friendly on Friday as they chatted about their shared interest in Ultimate Fighting Championship and mutual friends like Elon Musk.

The Republican’s campaign hopes the interview will consolidate his influence with male voters, who make up the core of listeners to the Joe Rogan Experience, which has 14.5 million Spotify followers and 17.5 million YouTube subscribers.

Trump took a major detour to visit Rogan in Austin, Texas, causing him to show up almost three hours late to a rally in Traverse City, Michigan, a crucial swing state where both he and his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, have been campaigning hard.

Trump told Rogan the “biggest mistake” of his 2017-21 presidency was “I picked a few people I shouldn’t have picked”.

“Neocons or bad people or disloyal people,” he told Rogan, referring to neoconservatives, policy-makers who champion an interventionist US foreign policy.

“A guy like Kelly, who was a bully but a weak person,” Trump added, mentioning his former White House chief-of-staff John Kelly, who told the New York Times this week that he thought his former boss had “fascist” tendencies.

Trump also described his former US National Security Adviser John Bolton as “an idiot”, but useful at times.

“He was good in a certain way,” said Trump. “He’s a nutjob.

“And everytime I had to deal with a country when they saw this whack job standing behind me they said: ‘Oh man, Trump’s going to go to war with us.’ He was with Bush when they went stupidly into the Middle East.”

Trump said he got to know North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “very well” despite some nuclear sabre-rattling between the two initially when Trump said he told him: “Little Rocket Man, you’re going to burn in hell.”

“By the time I finished we had no problem with North Korea,” Trump said.

Trump said he urged Kim to stop building up his “substantial” weapons stockpile.

“I said: ‘Do you ever do anything else? Why don’t you go take it easy? Go to the beach, relax.

“I said: ‘You’re always building nuclear, you don’t have to do it. Relax!’ I said: ‘Let’s build some condos on your shore.’”

Trump also argued that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he had been president.

“I said, ‘Vladimir, you’re not going in,’” he told Rogan, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I used to talk to him all the time.

“I can’t tell you what I told him, because I think it would be inappropriate, but someday he’ll tell you, but he would have never gone in.”

Trump said Putin invaded Ukraine because “number one, he doesn’t respect Biden at all”. The White House has previously accused Trump of cozying up to foreign autocrats.

Asked for proof to back up his false claims that the 2020 presidential was stolen from him by mass voter fraud, Trump told Rogan: “We’ll do it another time.

“I would bring in papers that you would not believe, so many different papers. That election was so crooked, it was the most crooked.”

Rogan pressed him for evidence.

Trump alleged irregularities with the ballots in Wisconsin and that Democrats “used Covid to cheat”.

“Are you going to present this [proof] ever?” asked Rogan.

“Uh…,” said Trump before pivoting to talk about how 51 former intelligence agents aligned with Joe Biden had falsely suggested that stories about his son Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation.

“I lost by, like, I didn’t lose,” said Trump, quickly correcting himself.

Trump lashed out at his political opponents and praised his allies, many of whom are likely to appeal to Rogan’s fanbase.

He called his rival, Vice-President Kamala Harris, a “very low IQ person” and described California’s Gavin Newsom as “one of the worst governors in the world”.

Trump said that Elon Musk, who has appeared on Rogan’s podcast in the past, was “the greatest guy”.

Trump also said he is “completely” committed to bringing Robert F Kennedy Jr into a potential new Trump administration.

The former independent presidential candidate, who has a close friendship with Rogan, dropped out in August and endorsed Trump.

Trump said he disagrees with Kennedy on environmental policy so would instead ask the vaccine critic to “focus on health, do whatever you want”.

Trump said that he hadn’t ruled out there being life in space.

“There’s no reason not to think that Mars and all these planets don’t have life,” he said, referring to discussions he’d had with jet pilots who’d seen “very strange” things in the sky.

“Well, Mars – we’ve had probes there, and rovers, and I don’t think there’s any life there,” Rogan said.

“Maybe it’s life that we don’t know about,” said Trump.

Trump said that some senior figures at NBC had tried to talk him out of running for president to keep his show The Apprentice on air.

”They wanted me to stay,” he said. “All the top people came over to see me, try and talk me out of it, because they wanted to have me extend.”

Trump featured in 14 series of The Apprentice from 2004, but NBC cut ties with him after he launched his 2015 bid for the presidency, citing his “derogatory” comments about immigrants.

Trump has been under pressure from Democrats to release his medical records after Harris released hers earlier this month, which concluded she was in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency.

Trump’s team said at the time that his doctor described him as being in “perfect and excellent health”, without sharing his records.

Trump didn’t address the topic directly on Friday’s podcast.

But he told Rogan that during one physical, for which he didn’t give a date, doctors had described his ability to run on a steep treadmill as “unbelievable”.

“I was never one that could, like, run on a treadmill. When passing a physical, they asked me to run on a treadmill and then they make it steeper and steeper and steeper and the doctors said, it was at Walter Reed [hospital], they said: ‘It’s unbelievable!’ I’m telling you, I felt I could have gone all day.”

But he said treadmills are “really boring” so he prefers to stay healthy by playing golf.

SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose

EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election

GLOBAL: The 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

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, Nevada and North Carolina, the lead has changed hands a few times since the start of August but Trump has a small lead in all of them at the moment.

In the three other states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – Harris had led 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
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Israel’s attack on Iran has been anticipated since the latter launched nearly 200 ballistic missiles on Israel almost a month ago.

In a statement announcing that the operation was under way on Saturday, Israel’s military spokesman said Israel had the “right and duty” to respond and that its defensive and offensive capabilities were fully mobilised.

Iranian state media has confirmed that explosions have been heard in the west of Tehran.

But there’s no clarity as yet in precisely what the targets have been and whether they have been successfully hit by Israel.

News sites close to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards says that some military bases in the west and south-west of the Iranian capital have been targeted.

The Syrian state news agency says that Israeli air strikes have also targeted some military sites in central and southern areas of Syria.

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The office of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has released a picture of him in the operations centre of the military headquarters during the attack.

For now, at least, Iranian media is playing down the impact. The true nature of what has happened is only likely to trickle out bit by bit from the Iranian authorities.

Israel may move more quickly to disclose the details of its attack. But that may depend on whether or not it plans to carry out another wave.

The Pentagon has given a briefing that the US was made aware of Israel’s plans beforehand and that there was no US involvement in the operation.

That’s significant in Washington’s efforts to try to prevent the conflict between Israel and Iran escalating into a confrontation that could move ever closer to all-out war.

The US will also be waiting for the dust to settle to see if Israel’s targets were limited to military targets or went beyond that to include facilities linked to Iran’s nuclear programme – which could trigger another major response from Tehran.

For now – on the scant evidence that is available – Israel may have heeded Washington’s warnings and reined in some of its more ambitious plans to cause maximum pain to the Iranian authorities.

It’s now up to the Iranian leadership to decide how to respond.

The semi-official Tasnim news agency has said there’s no doubt Israel will face what it called a “proportional reaction”.

The Israeli military has already said that if Iran were to make what it called the mistake of beginning a new round of escalation, it would be obligated to retaliate.

It’s well past the August holiday peak, but anger against over-tourism in Spain is spilling into the off-season, as holiday-makers continue to seek winter sun.

On Sunday locals in the Basque city of San Sebastian plan to take to the streets under the banner: “We are in danger; degrow tourism!”

And in November anti-tourism protesters will gather in Seville.

Thousands turned out last Sunday in the Canary Islands, so the problem is clearly not going away.

This year appears to have marked a watershed for attitudes to tourism in Spain and many other parts of Europe, as the post-Covid travel boom has seen the industry equal and often surpass records set before the pandemic.

Spain is expected to receive more than 90 million foreign visitors by the end of the year. The consultancy firm Braintrust estimates that the number of arrivals will rise to 115 million by 2040, well ahead of the current world leader, France.

This year’s protests began in April, in the Canary Islands, and included a hunger strike by six protesters in Tenerife in an attempt to halt two major tourism projects on the island.

They continued in many of the country’s most popular tourist destinations, such as the Balearic Islands, the Mediterranean city of Alicante, cities on the southern coast and Barcelona, where some protesters squirted foreign visitors with water pistols and shouted: “Tourists go home!”.

The grievances driving the upcoming protests are similar to those in the summer.

“Tourism, which for a few is the golden goose, is an economic model which is choking the rest of us,” said Bizilagunekin (or “with the neighbours”, in the Basque language), the civic association which is organising Sunday’s demonstration in San Sebastian.

The protest is the culmination of a series of debates, talks and other events in the city called “October against touristification”.

“What we’ve been seeing over the last eight or 10 years has been a huge acceleration of the process of ‘touristification’,” said Asier Basurto, a member of the platform. “All our city’s services have been put at the orders of the tourism industry.”

He insists the numbers of arrivals themselves are not the problem, it is the way the city caters to visitors rather than residents.

Public spaces are adapted for short-term visits and the tourism industry creates precarious jobs, he says.

Mr Basurto believes tourists are pushing up rentals, largely because of short-stay accommodation, sending local residents further and further away from San Sebastian’s historic centre.

“We’ve had a way of living for generations and generations – in which people are connected to each other and those who arrive are integrated,” he added.

“If we have a model whereby people just visit for five days and then leave then it becomes a soulless theme park, without culture, without a community.”

The complaint about tourism’s impact on rental rates is a common theme and feeds into a broader housing crisis across Spain. The country’s central bank has reported that nearly half of families who rent at market prices are at risk of poverty or social exclusion.

However, with tourism representing 13% of Spain’s GDP and directly providing around three million jobs, its supporters insist that the industry is essential to the economy and that it drove the country’s recovery in the wake of the pandemic.

They are particularly concerned by scenes such as that on Playa de las Américas in Tenerife on October 20, where one video showed two tourists sunbathing on the beach while protesters chanted just metres away from them.

There have also been reports in the Spanish media of more hostile behaviour, such as the locks of tourist apartments in Seville being covered in faeces.

Such incidents prompted David Morales, head of tourism for the conservative People’s Party (PP) in the Canary Islands, to insist on “the right of tourists to enjoy their holidays without being the target of interruptions or gestural or verbal attacks, and certainly not physical attacks”.

As the protests continue beyond the summer, there are particular concerns in destinations like the Canary Islands, where the climate means they receive large numbers of visitors during the winter months.

The president of the Circle of Impresarios and Professionals in Southern Tenerife (CEST), Javier Cabrera, warned that “under an umbrella of legitimate grievances, tourism-phobia is being cultivated”.

There has been an attempt to defuse the backlash, with a range of measures being implemented.

Barcelona city hall has announced that short-term tourist apartments will be banned from 2028.

Local authorities in Palma de Mallorca have put a cap on the number of cruise liners which can dock in its port.

In Tenerife, a new limit has been introduced on the number of visitors to some natural parks.

And in Seville, a new charge is planned for those entering the city’s popular Plaza de España square.

Yet Asier Basurto is not convinced and says the protests must continue.

“Those who advocate tourism can no longer say that everything is rosy,” he said.

“Either we change this now or it’s going to be too late.”

Venezuela has criticised Brazil’s decision to veto its admission to the Brics group of emerging economies.

Venezuela’s foreign ministry described the move, which came at the group’s summit in Russia attended by more than 20 heads of state, as an “immoral aggression”.

Relations between the two left-wing governments have worsened since July’s contested presidential election in Venezuela. President Nicolás Maduro said he had secured re-election, despite evidence that the opposition’s Edmundo González won by a landslide.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva initially supported Maduro, but eventually said he would not accept the official results until a breakdown of the vote was released.

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Multiple foreign governments have said they believe the opposition won the election in Venezuela, but stopped short of recognising González as the president.

“The Brazilian foreign ministry has decided to maintain the veto that [former Brazilian president] Jair Bolsonaro has applied against Venezuela for years, reproducing the hatred, exclusion and intolerance promoted from the centres of power in the West,” the Venezuelan foreign ministry said in a statement.

“The Venezuelan people feel indignation and shame at this inexplicable and immoral aggression,” it added.

Venezuela had lobbied hard to join the Brics, with Maduro even making a surprise appearance at the summit in the city of Kazan and declaring that his country was “part of the Brics family”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who hosted the summit, said he agreed with Venezuela’s position, but added that it would only be able to join the Brics if there was a consensus in favour among its members.

“We know Brazil’s position. We don’t agree, Venezuela is fighting for its survival,” Putin said at a news conference on Thursday.

He said he discussed the issue with Lula when they spoke on the phone this week. Lula was scheduled to travel to Russia for the summit, but cancelled the trip after injuring his head in an accident at home on Saturday.

Putin added that he would work to help the two South American neighbours mend relations.

The Brics began as a grouping that unites Brazil with Russia, India, China and South Africa. Last year, however, the original members agreed to admit a number of new joiners, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

Lula is a passionate advocate of the Brics as a means of reforming global governance and giving a greater voice to the developing world.

He has criticised the “paralysis” of global institutions, while praising the expansion of the Brics as strengthening the fight for more diverse perspectives.

But other observers retort that the Brics are themselves paralysed by their own internal contradictions, with Russia at war in Ukraine, while China and India have their own mutual squabbles.

The latest Brics summit in Kazan was seen as an opportunity for President Putin to demonstrate that attempts to isolate Russia over its invasion of Ukraine had failed.

But in his attempts to strengthen the grouping as a counterweight to the Western-led world, he has also exposed other divisions, leaving relations between Brasília and Caracas at their lowest ebb since Lula’s re-election two years ago.

Commonwealth leaders have agreed the “time has come” for a conversation about reparations for the slave trade, despite the UK’s desire to keep the subject off the agenda at a two-day summit in Samoa.

A document signed by 56 heads of government, including UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, acknowledges calls for “discussions on reparatory justice” for the “abhorrent” transatlantic slave trade.

The statement says it is time for a “meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation”.

Sir Keir said there had been no discussions about money at the meeting, and that the UK is “very clear” in its position that it would not pay reparations.

The UK has faced growing calls from Commonwealth leaders to apologise and pay reparations for the country’s historical role in the slave trade.

Reparations for the benefit of those who suffered as a result of slavery could take many forms, from financial to symbolic.

Ahead of the summit, Downing Street had insisted the issue would not be on the agenda.

Speaking at a press conference on Saturday, Sir Keir said Commonwealth leaders had a “positive two days” in Samoa and downplayed the prominence of reparations at the summit.

“The dominant theme of the two days has been resilience and climate,” he said, adding that the section of the joint statement discussing reparations amounts to “one paragraph in 20-something paragraphs”.

“None of the discussions have been about money. Our position is very, very clear in relation to that,” he said.

Last week, Chancellor Rachel Reeves told the BBC the UK would not pay reparations for slavery.

Before the statement was released, the leaders’ conclave – where commonwealth prime ministers and presidents meet without advisers – went on for about six hours.

The prime minister said it was not the conversation about reparations that had caused it to run on for so long.

One Downing Street source told the BBC: “We’ve been clear on our position and it’s not changing.”

And they have and it hasn’t – in fact the direct nature of their remarks about reparations on the way to the summit irritated some of those countries campaigning on it.

Half of the art of diplomacy is to keep things you want to talk about being talked about – keeping the conversation going, even if the prospect of imminent change is unlikely.

For those who think the time has come for countries like the UK to face up to their pasts, the communique allows them to say the conversation continues.

For the UK and others, they can say their position isn’t changing and also point to a range of other topics – trade, climate change and security for instance – that, they argue, the Commonwealth offers a vital forum for.

However, the prime minister did appear to leave the door open for further discussions about some form of reparatory justice, saying the “next opportunity to look at this” would be at the UK-Caribbean forum.

Frederick Mitchell, the foreign minister of the Bahamas, said leaders hoped to come up with a “comprehensive report” on the issue at that forum, to be held in London next March.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he expected the UK would eventually pay financial reparations to Caribbean countries.

Challenged on whether the wording of the joint statement was too vague, he said: “Behind the language is an attempt to go in a particular direction.”

Diplomats have said they expect reparatory justice to be a central focus of the agenda for the next Commonwealth summit in two years’ time.

Last year, a UN judge said the UK likely owed more than £18tn in reparations for its role in slavery in 14 Caribbean countries.

But reparatory justice could also take the form of a formal apology, educational programmes or public health assistance.

It was a phone call from a 13-year-old girl in Scotland in 2019 that eventually led to the capture of a social media predator described as one of the world’s most prolific child sex abusers.

Alexander McCartney from Northern Ireland pretended to be a teenage girl to befriend, then abuse and blackmail children around the world, often sharing images with other paedophiles.

Some of the children were as young as four. Some had never told anyone what they had been through – until police knocked on their door.

McCartney gradually admitted 185 charges including manslaughter after a 12-year-old girl he was abusing took her own life.

He has been jailed for a minimum of 20 years.

Following contact from police in Scotland, an urgent investigation by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) swung into operation in March 2019.

Detectives identified the home address of Alexander McCartney, arrested and interviewed him.

Sixty-four of McCartney’s devices were seized at his home in the rural Lissummon Road area outside Newry in four separate raids.

Those devices held hundreds of thousands of indecent photos and videos of underage girls performing sexual acts while being blackmailed.

McCartney made and used many fake accounts on online platforms, mainly Snapchat, to entrap and manipulate them.

PSNI Det Ch Supt Eamonn Corrigan said McCartney had been “offending on an industrial scale”.

He groomed victims into thinking they were talking online to a girl of a similar age, before encouraging them to send indecent images or engage in sexual activity via webcam or a mobile phone.

McCartney used the same pattern every time, the detective said, adding: “He threatened to share these images online for the pleasure of other paedophiles and use them to further abuse and harass the already terrified and exploited children.”

In one incident, it took McCartney just nine minutes to groom, sexually abuse and blackmail a girl of only 12 years of age.

As time went on, it became clear that McCartney’s depravity spanned not just across the UK, but across the world. The abuse included involving other people, family pets and objects.

The PSNI worked with colleagues in the United States Department of Homeland Security, the Public Prosecution Service and National Crime Agency, and victims were located in America, New Zealand and at least 28 other countries.

Many of these children were only identified through the evidence detectives located on McCartney’s devices.

According to the police, he “built a paedophile enterprise” and had “stolen childhoods” of his victims.

In the spring of 2019, police called Catherine Kierans, acting head of the Public Prosecution Service’s serious crime unit.

They said something “big was unfolding… it involved catfishing”.

Catfishing is where a person creates a false identity to gain the trust of people and exploit them.

Ms Kierans said little girls “an average age of 10-12 years old [were] being threatened in the most depraved way.”

She said some of the children who had been exploited had previously opened up about their abuse, others had remained silent.

“Some of the children had raised the alarm, which helped police to actually identify him in the first place.

“But some of the children, until police knocked the door, they had never told anyone what they’d been through.”

According to Ms Kierans, McCartney offended “around the clock”.

As the investigation spread across the globe, Ms Kierans said prosecutors realised McCartney had been “very assiduous about saving the images”.

“He would also save the map on Snapchat of where the child was in some cases, and that then enabled police to locate the children.”

His arraignment in 2021 was delayed as police discovered the suicide of a little girl in West Virginia, USA.

“From the beginning, the level of abuse was so horrific that we were fearful that when these children were identified, would they be okay?” Ms Kierans said.

“Unfortunately, our worst fears were realised when we discovered, some way in, that one of the little girls had taken her own life.

“Working closely with the American authorities, we were able to prove that this child took her own life during the abuse, when she was still online with McCartney.

“At that point, the death of the child was so intrinsically linked to the abuse that we felt we had a strong case to say that he killed her.”

That little girl was 12-year-old Cimarron Thomas who, in 2018, shot herself while McCartney was abusing her.

McCartney was charged with her manslaughter.

Ms Kierans said it is believed to be the first time an abuser anywhere in the world has been held accountable for manslaughter where the victim and perpetrator have never met in person.

Such was the magnitude of the case that prosecutors had to be judicious with the charges.

“We couldn’t put 3,000 charges on the indictment,” Ms Kierans said.

“In the end, there were about 200 charges [relating to around 70 victims] which is probably one of the largest indictments that we’ve seen in Northern Ireland.”

McCartney grew up five miles outside of Newry and just off the main road to Armagh city.

It’s about as rural as it gets. Farms, a church and a few businesses.

When he first appeared at Newry Magistrates’ Court in July 2019 he was just 21, with long, fuzzy hair and the wide-eyed look of someone surprised to be sitting where he was.

He has spent more than five years on remand at Maghaberry Prison – leaving only for court appearances and further questioning by the police.

In those hearings, he said little other than to confirm his name and date of birth and to gradually enter softly-spoken guilty pleas.

McCartney attended Newry High School and was into gaming.

One source told BBC News NI: “He was introverted and socially awkward. He didn’t interact with people much outside of his group of friends.

“He was maybe at the edges of things, but he had friends who obviously knew nothing about this.”

He then took a course at the Southern Regional College in Newry where he was described as “quiet and didn’t really get involved with the rest of the class”.

When he was eventually charged in 2019 he was a computer science student at Ulster University.

For those living in and around his home, the case has been harrowing.

“The whole place was stunned,” one resident said.

“It was whispers at the start, then disbelief. I’m sure people talk about it in their own homes but it doesn’t get discussed publicly as people don’t know what to say.”

Another said: “He came across as a pleasant, affable, intelligent young man.

“There is nothing extraordinary about him.”

But what is extraordinary is the enormity of his offending; many of his victims had pleaded for the abuse to stop but prosecutors said he “callously continued, at times forcing the victims to involve younger children, some aged just four”.

According to Catherine Kierans, McCartney’s depravity was such that it was “one of the most distressing and prolific cases of child sexual abuse we have ever seen in the PPS”.

Ms Kierans said some of the victims have still never been identified despite exhaustive efforts by police.

“McCartney’s crimes have harmed thousands of children and left them and their families dealing with the traumatic aftermath,” she said.

“Their courage stands in stark contrast to his cowardice in targeting vulnerable young girls.”

An Indian PhD student says she was “forcibly transferred” to a masters course without her consent by the University of Oxford.

Lakshmi Balakrishnan, from Tamil Nadu in southern India, has two masters degrees and spent nearly £100,000 to study and live at the world-leading university.

Ms Balakrishnan said the university’s English faculty had “not acted in good faith” after her thesis idea had been accepted at the application stage, and in her first year, but was then rejected in the fourth year.

The University of Oxford said all students were made aware that a “successful outcome would depend on their academic progress”.

“They forcibly removed me from the PhD program and moved me to a masters level course without my consent,” Ms Balakrishnan said.

“I feel a sense of betrayal and I feel like I have been let down by an institution that I held in high regard.

“I already have two masters degrees from India and I paid £100,000 at Oxford to get my PhD, not another masters course”

Having lost her mum at a young age she was brought up in South India by her father, before studying for two masters degrees in her home country.

“I am the first person in my family to come abroad for studies and I hail from an underprivileged background, I made immense sacrifices to come and study at Oxford.”

During her fourth year, she had an assessment, in which two different assessors failed her, saying her Shakespeare research did not have scope for PhD level.

She has disputed the English Faculty’s decision and has taken them through an appeals process, but has been unsuccessful.

“I believe that the university’s strategy is to force me to wade through endless appeals and complaints procedures in the hope that I will eventually give up and go.”

The university confirmed the appeals process has concluded.

The Queen’s College, where Ms Balakrishnan studied, wrote to the University to express concern at her treatment.

It pointed out that despite failing her two assessments, no serious concerns were raised about her work in her reports each term.

The college also believed there were errors in the appeal process, in the way the rules have been applied, and it questioned the process which saw Ms Balakrishnan transferred to a Masters course.

Two professors specialising in this area of Shakespeare also said her research had potential and merits a PhD.

But the OIA, the independent adjudicator for higher education, supported the university’s view.

In a statement, the University of Oxford said: “To achieve Confirmation of Status, progress must sufficiently demonstrate a strong likelihood of successful completion of a doctoral thesis. Unfortunately, not all students achieve this.”

“Where a student disagrees with the outcome of an assessment they have the right to appeal under the university’s appeal procedure, which ensures fairness and transparency.”

“There is a further internal route of appeal of that decision and a subsequent right to complain to the OIA.”