Israel’s parliament has voted to pass legislation banning the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa) from operating within Israel and Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, within three months.

Contact between Unrwa employees and Israeli officials will also be banned, severely limiting the agency’s ability to operate in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Co-operation with the Israeli military – which controls all crossings into Gaza – is essential for Unrwa to transfer aid into the war-torn territory. It is the main UN organisation working on the ground there.

Unrwa staff will no longer have legal immunity within Israel, and the agency’s headquarters in East Jerusalem will be closed.

UN Secretary General António Guterres said implementing the laws “would be detrimental for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for peace and security in the region as a whole”, while Unrwa’s chief Philippe Lazzarini said it “will only deepen the suffering of Palestinians”.

A number of countries, including the US, the UK and Germany, have expressed serious concern about the move.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy called it “totally wrong”, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the laws risk making Unrwa’s “essential work for Palestinians impossible, jeopardising the entire international humanitarian response in Gaza”.

The US State Department said Unrwa played a “critical” role in distributing humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip. Almost all of the enclave’s population of more than two million people are dependent on aid and services from the agency.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “Unrwa workers involved in terrorist activities against Israel must be held accountable”, but added that “sustained humanitarian aid must remain available in Gaza”.

“We stand ready to work with our international partners to ensure Israel continues to facilitate humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza in a way that does not threaten Israel’s security,” he said on X.

Israel has objected to Unrwa for decades, although this opposition has intensified in recent years.

Israel says Unrwa staff have colluded with Hamas in Gaza, and claimed 19 Unrwa workers took part in the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023.

The UN investigated Israel’s claim and fired nine of those accused, but it said Israel had not provided evidence for broader allegations. Unrwa insists that dealings with Hamas are purely to enable the agency to do its job.

Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, approved the two bills by an overwhelming majority on Monday evening.

Presenting the legislation, Yuli Edelstein, the chairman of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and security committee, accused Unrwa of being used as a “cover for terrorist actions”.

“There is a deep connection between the terrorist organisation (Hamas) and Unrwa, and Israel cannot put up with it,” he said in parliament.

Unrwa – the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees – has for decades provided a range of services and support including healthcare and education to millions of Palestinians in Gaza.

Since the war broke out last year, the agency’s presence on the ground has made it a crucial part of efforts to get humanitarian supplies to civilians, almost all of whom are dependent on aid for survival.

Unrwa Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini condemned the ban as “unprecedented”, and said it “opposes the UN Charter and violates the State of Israel’s obligations under international law”.

He said people in Gaza had already endured “sheer hell”, adding: “It ⁠will deprive over 650,000 girls and boys there from education, putting at risk an entire generation of children.”

About two-and-half million Palestinians are registered with Unrwa in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

In northern Gaza, where Israeli troops are conducting military operations against Hamas fighters, hundreds of thousands of people are living in increasingly desperate conditions.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk said on Friday that “the Israeli military is subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and risk of starvation”.

Many Palestinians believe the Israeli military is implementing a “surrender or starve” plan in Gaza’s 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 says it is making sure that civilians get out of harm’s way.

Israel launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to its 7 October attack on Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

More than 42,710 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Super-strength drugs linked to hundreds of deaths have been found in samples of fake medicines bought across the UK, the BBC can reveal.

We found more than 100 examples of people trying to buy prescription medicines such as diazepam – commonly used to treat anxiety, muscle spasms and seizures – and instead receiving products containing nitazenes.

The synthetic opioid drugs have been connected to 278 deaths across the country in a year, according to the National Crime Agency (NCA). Nitazenes can be stronger than both heroin and fentanyl, a prolific killer in the US.

Martin Raithelhuber, an illicit synthetic drug expert from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said the BBC’s findings were a “very worrying development”.

A government spokesperson said it was “securing our borders from the threat” through “world-leading intelligence, dedicated cross-government taskforce and extensive international networks”.

The contaminated substances were identified in anonymous samples submitted to WEDINOS, the only national drug-checking service in the UK.

It said the fake medicines looked like “the same kind of packet you might get from your chemist on the high street” but were “most likely purchased from illicit online pharmacies”.

Anne Jacques had never heard of nitazenes when a police officer knocked at her door in the early hours of 17 July 2023 and said her son had been found dead at his student flat.

Alex Harpum, 23, had been preparing for a career as an opera singer and had been accepted for a two-year masters course.

“Watching him sing was one of the biggest joys in my life ever,” Ms Jacques said.

It was initially suspected the cause of his death was sudden adult death syndrome, but eight months later Alex’s family learned he had taken a substance contaminated with a nitazene.

Phone records suggested he had tried to buy tablets usually sold as Xanax, which are only available with a private prescription in the UK.

Ms Jacques believes Alex was doing so because he often struggled with sleeping while taking medication for his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The traces of nitazenes were only detected after she queried with police why earlier tests had not looked for them.

Ms Jacques said she remained in “disbelief” at the lack of testing, adding: “If I hadn’t pushed for better answers in the middle of massive grief, then to this day I would have no idea how he actually died.

“Unless we’re testing for them, how is anyone going to be aware and informed [of the dangers]?”

A Scotland Yard spokesperson said there had been “delays beyond the control of the Met” relating to the need for, and timing of, specialist testing in this case.

The North London Coroner Service said it remained in contact with the family regarding their concerns.

The BBC analysed sample results published by WEDINOS, a Public Health Wales service which shares information about the UK’s illegal drugs market. It records what the person submitting each sample said they had intended to buy.

In the year to September 2024, there were 130 instances of someone trying to buy medicines illegal to posses without a prescription and instead receiving substances contaminated with nitazenes.

Many were purporting to be benzodiazepines, such as diazepam, and insomnia treatments including temazepam and zolpidem.

Nitazenes were also found in substances masquerading as promethazine, an allergy medication.

Professor Rick Lines, from WEDINOS, said: “Perhaps people have found that they weren’t able to continue on a legitimate prescription and decided to go through what they think is an alternative legitimate route, but is in fact not.”

The government plans to make all types of nitazenes Class A drugs. Fifteen synthetic opioids were reclassified in March.

Under the Misuse of Drugs Act, those caught in their supply and production could face up to life in prison while those in possession could face up to seven years.

Mr Raithelhuber said there was a “lesson to learn… from North America”, where people became addicted to prescription painkillers before the use of fake medicines containing fentanyl became widespread.

“So here in Europe, we are not yet in that situation, but this could be the early signs of traffickers trying to expand,” he said.

“I think it’s a warning call, maybe for all other countries in Europe… that nitazenes are probably here to stay for the time being, and that their potential negative impact on the health of users is huge.”

He said because both benzodiazepines and nitazenes were depressants, “their combined effect increases the risk of overdose significantly”.

Synthetic opioid effects

Signs that someone may have taken one of these drugs:

• Small, narrowed pupils
• Reduced or loss of consciousness
• Dizziness or drowsiness
• Difficulty breathing
• Nausea or vomiting
• Cold or clammy skin
• Blue or grey lips and fingernails
• Low blood pressure or decreased heart rate

Anyone who has consumed synthetic opioids and experiences the symptoms described should seek urgent medical treatment.

The groups of people most at risk were “those who have always been at the highest risk of all drug-related harm,” said Harry Sumnall, a professor in substance use at Liverpool John Moores University.

He said this included people with drug use problems and those “using drugs to help manage their life circumstances”.

The NCA believes nitazenes are being produced in Chinese labs and brought into the UK through the Royal Mail and other parcel operators.

Dark web marketplaces seen by the BBC suggest some of the same online sellers in China are advertising nitazenes in bulk as well as adulterated benzodiazepines.

The Border Force only examines post for drugs if there is a known risk or intelligence. It says dogs trained to detect nitazenes and other synthetic opioids are “due to enter service shortly”.

Its teams seized new synthetic opioids nine times in the past financial year, according to a response under the Freedom of Information Act.

Those seizures ranged in size from 1g to 1.32kg, which experts said could equate to tens of thousands of doses.

The government said it would also test for the presence of the new drugs in wastewater from sewage treatment plants to anticipate the threat of a spike in overdoses.

It has, however, admitted such testing is currently “experimental”. The process took around two months at the only laboratory known to have successfully confirmed samples.

Experts previously told the BBC the last government had been too slow to recognise the scale of the problem.

NCA deputy director Charles Yates said it took the threat from nitazenes “seriously” and was taking a “zero-tolerance approach”.

There are an average of 49 drug poisoning deaths weekly involving opiates – such as heroin, oxycodone, fentanyl and including synthetic opioids – across England and Wales, the latest official figures suggest.

The Vietnamese people smuggler emerged, briefly and hesitantly, from the shadows of a scraggly forest close to the northern French coastline.

“Move away from the others. Come this way, fast,” he said, gesturing across a disused railway line to a member of our team, who had spent weeks posing undercover as a potential customer.

Moments later, the smuggler – a tall figure with bright dyed blonde hair – turned away sharply, like a startled fox, and vanished down a narrow path into the woods.

Earlier this year, Vietnam emerged – abruptly – as the biggest single source of new migrants seeking to cross the Channel to the UK illegally in small boats. Arrivals surged from 1,306 in the whole of 2023, to 2,248 in the first half of 2024.

Our investigation – including interviews with Vietnamese smugglers and clients, French police, prosecutors and charities – reveals how Vietnamese migrants are paying double the usual rate for an “elite” small boat smuggling experience that is faster and more streamlined. As the death toll in the Channel hits a record level this year, there are some indications that it might be safer too.

As part of our work to penetrate the Vietnamese operations, we met an experienced smuggler who is operating in the UK and forging documents for migrants seeking to reach Europe. Separately, our undercover reporter – posing as a Vietnamese migrant – arranged, by phone and text, to meet a smuggling gang operating in the woods near Dunkirk in order to find out how the process works.

“A small boat service is £2,600. Payment to be made after you arrive in the UK,” the smuggler, who called himself Bac, texted back. We heard similar figures from other sources. We believe Bac may be a senior figure in a UK-based gang and the boss of Tony, the blonde man in the woods.

He had given us instructions about the journey from Europe to the UK, explaining how many migrants first flew from Vietnam to Hungary – where we understand it is currently relatively easy for them to get a legitimate work visa, often obtained using forged documents. Bac said that the migrants then travelled on to Paris and then to Dunkirk.

“Tony can pick you up at the [Dunkirk] station,” he offered, in a later text.

Vietnamese migrants are widely considered to be vulnerable to networks of trafficking groups. These groups may seek to trap them in debt and force them to pay off those debts by working in cannabis farms or other businesses in the UK.

It is clear, from several recent visits to the camps around Dunkirk and Calais, that the Vietnamese gangs and their clients operate separately from other groups.

“They keep to themselves and are much more discreet than the others. We see them very little,” says Claire Millot, a volunteer for Salam, an NGO that supports migrants in Dunkirk.

A volunteer with another charity tells us of recently catching a rare glimpse of roughly 30 Vietnamese buying life jackets at a Dunkirk branch of the sports gear chain Decathlon.

As well as keeping their distance, the streamlined service offered by the Vietnamese gangs involves far less waiting around in the camps. Many African and Middle Eastern migrants spend weeks, even months, in grim conditions on the French coast. Some don’t have enough cash to pay for a place on a small boat, and try to earn their fare by working for the smuggling gangs. Many are intercepted on the beaches by French police and have to make several attempts before they successfully cross the Channel.

On a recent visit we saw dozens of tired families – from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Eritrea and elsewhere – gathering in the drizzle at a muddy spot where humanitarian groups provide daily meals and medical assistance. A group of children played Connect 4 at a picnic table, while a man sought treatment for a wound to his arm. Several parents told us that they had heard about a four-month-old Kurdish boy who had drowned the previous night after the boat he was travelling in capsized during an attempted Channel crossing. None of them said the death would discourage them from making their own attempt.

There were no Vietnamese in sight. It seems clear that Vietnamese smugglers tend to bring their clients to the camps in northern France when the weather is already looking promising and a crossing is imminent.

We had first encountered the new influx of Vietnamese migrants earlier this year, stumbling on one of their camps near Dunkirk. It appeared to be significantly neater and more organised than other migrant camps, with matching tents pitched in straight lines and a group cooking a tantalising and elaborate meal involving fried garlic, onions and Vietnamese spices.

“They’re very organised and united and stay together in the camps. They’re quite something. When they arrive at the coast, we know that a crossing will be done very quickly. These are most likely people with more money than others,” says Mathilde Potel, the French police chief heading the fight against illegal migration in the region.

The Vietnamese do not control the small boat crossings themselves, which are largely overseen by a handful of Iraqi Kurdish gangs. Instead they negotiate access and timings.

“The Vietnamese are not allowed to touch that part of the process [the crossing]. We just deliver clients to [the Kurdish gangs],” says another Vietnamese smuggler, who we are calling Thanh, currently living in the UK. He tells us the extra cash secures priority access to the small boats for their Vietnamese clients.

While the relative costs are clear, the issue of safety is murkier. It is a fact – and perhaps a telling one – that during the first nine months of 2024, not a single Vietnamese was among the dozens of migrants confirmed to have died while trying to cross the Channel. But in October, a Vietnamese migrant did die in one incident, in what has now become the deadliest year on record for small boat crossings.

It is possible that by paying extra, the Vietnamese are able to secure access to less crowded boats, which are therefore less likely to sink. But we’ve not been able to confirm this.

What does seem clearer is that the Vietnamese smugglers are cautious about sending their clients out on boats in bad weather. Texts from Bac to our undercover reporter included specific suggestions regarding travel to the camp, and the best day to arrive.

“Running a small boat service depends on the weather. You need small waves. And it must be safe… We had good weather earlier this week and lots of boats left… It would be good if you can be here [in Dunkirk] tomorrow. I’m planning a [cross-Channel] move on Thursday morning,” Bac texted.

Sitting outside their tents in two separate camps in the woods near Dunkirk earlier this month, two young men told us almost identical stories about the events which had prompted them to leave Vietnam in order to seek new lives. How they had borrowed money to start small businesses in Vietnam, how those businesses had failed, and how they had then borrowed more money from relatives and loan sharks, to pay smugglers to bring them to the UK.

“Life in Vietnam is difficult. I couldn’t find a proper job. I tried to open a shop, but it failed. I was unable to pay back the loan, so I must find a way to earn money. I know this [is illegal] but I have no other option. I owe [the Vietnamese equivalent of] £50,000. I sold my house, but it wasn’t enough to pay off the debt,” said Tu, 26, reaching down to stroke a kitten that strolled past.

Two chickens emerged from behind another tent. A mirror hung from a nearby tree. Plug sockets were available under a separate awning for charging phones.

The second migrant, aged 27, described how he had reached Europe via China, sometimes on foot or in trucks.

“I heard from my friends in the UK that life is much better there, and I can find a way to make some money,” said the man, who did not want to give his name.

Are these people victims of human trafficking? It is unclear. All the Vietnamese migrants we spoke to said they were in debt. If they ended up working for the smuggling gangs in the UK in order to pay for their journey and to pay off their debts then they would, indeed, have been trafficked.

We had sought to draw the blonde Vietnamese smuggler, Tony, out of a nearby forest and onto more neutral territory, where his gang – possibly armed, as other gangs certainly are – might pose less of a threat to us. We intended to confront him about his involvement in a lucrative and often deadly criminal industry. But Tony remained wary of leaving his own “turf” and grew impatient and angry when our colleague, still posing as a potential migrant, declined to follow him into the forest.

“Why are you staying there? Follow that path. Move quickly! Now,” Tony ordered.

There was a brief pause. The sound of birdsong drifted across the clearing.

“What an idiot… Do you just want to stand there and get caught by the police?” the smuggler asked, with rising exasperation.

Then he turned away and retreated into the woods.

Had our colleague been a genuine migrant, she would probably have followed Tony. We were told by other sources that once in the camps, migrants were not allowed to leave unless they paid hundreds of dollars to the smugglers.

The Vietnamese gangs may be promising a quick, safe, “elite” route to the UK, but the reality is much darker – a criminal industry, backed by threats, involving deadly risks and no guarantee of success.

US banking giant JP Morgan Chase, is suing customers who allegedly took advantage of a glitch by illegally withdrawing thousands of dollars from its ATMs.

The “infinite money glitch”, as it became known on TikTok, allowed the bank’s customers to write a large cheque to themselves, deposit it and then withdraw the funds before the cheque bounced.

Two individuals and two businesses are facing lawsuits in courts in Houston, Miami and Los Angeles.

They are being asked to return the money with interest, pay related overdraft fees and cover legal expenses as well as other costs suffered by the bank.

“Chase takes its responsibility to combat fraud seriously and prioritises protecting the firm and its customers to make the banking system safer,” the bank said in the court filings.

“Part of that responsibility is to hold people accountable when they commit fraud against Chase and its customers. Simply put, engaging in bank fraud is a crime.”

In one of the cases, a court filing described how on 29 August, a masked man deposited a cheque in the defendant’s Chase bank account for $335,000 (£258,300).

The court papers said the defendant then started to withdraw the money.

The cheque was eventually returned as counterfeit but the defendant still owed the bank more than $290,000, the filing added.

The amount of money kept by the defendants in the four lawsuits totalled more than $660,000, according to JP Morgan Chase’s lawyers.

Banks in the US usually allow customers to withdraw only a small fraction of the value of a cheque before it is cleared.

Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that JP Morgan Chase closed the loophole a few days after several videos telling people about the glitch went viral on social media.

The report said the bank was investigating thousands of possible cheque fraud incidents.

A heavy police response has stifled Halloween celebrations in Shanghai, in what many have viewed as an attempt by authorities to crack down on large public gatherings and freedom of expression.

Witnesses have told the BBC they saw police dispersing crowds of costumed revellers on the streets of Shanghai, while photos of apparent arrests have spread on social media.

Authorities have yet to comment. While there has been no official notice prohibiting Halloween celebrations, rumours of a possible crackdown began circulating online earlier this month.

It comes a year after Halloween revellers in Shanghai went viral for donning costumes poking fun at the Chinese government and its policies.

Pictures from last year’s Halloween event showed people dressing up as a giant surveillance camera, Covid testers, and a censored Weibo post.

This year, footage posted to social media showed people dressed in seemingly uncontroversial costumes, including those of comic book characters such as Batman and Deadpool, being escorted into the back of police vans. Some party-goers said online they were forced to remove make-up at a police station.

But it remains unclear what – if any – types of costumes police were targeting, as many other revellers were left alone.

Eyewitnesses have told BBC Chinese that on Friday a large number of police officers and vehicles gathered on Julu Road in downtown Shanghai, and people dressed in costumes were asked to leave the scene.

On Saturday, police were seen dispersing revellers from the city’s Zhongshan Park.

The BBC spoke to a Shanghai resident who was at the park with friends that night. “Every time someone new showed up on the scene, everyone would go, ‘Wow that’s cool’ and laugh. There were policemen on the sidelines, but I felt they also wanted to watch,” the person said.

But the festive mood ended around 22:00 local (14:00 GMT) when a new group of policemen arrived and began cordoning off the park, according to the eyewitness. “As we left the park, we were told to take off all our headgear. We were told everyone leaving from that exit could not be costumed.”

The person added that they saw a man clash with police officers when he tried to enter.

Another Shanghai resident said the number of police officers taking down the details of people dressed in costumes appeared to exceed the number of revellers themselves.

“Shanghai is not supposed to be like this,” the person said. “It has always been very tolerant.”

The BBC has asked the Shanghai police for a response.

Rumours of a crackdown have been circulating in recent days.

Earlier this month, some business owners who run coffeeshops, bookshops and bars in Shanghai received government notices discouraging Halloween events, the BBC understands.

Around the same time, messages from what appeared to be a government work chat group spread online, suggesting there would be a ban on large-scale Halloween activities. The BBC could not verify these messages.

Some universities issued warnings to their students.

One student at the prestigious Fudan University said they were told by school authorities recently not to participate in gatherings. On Sunday evening, the student received a call from a school counsellor.

“They called me to ask if I had gone out, if I had taken part [in activities]. And if I did participate, I could not reveal I was a student [of the university],” the person told the BBC.

The BBC has also seen a notice from another university in Shanghai issued to students in mid-October discouraging them to “reduce participation in big and small gatherings in the near future”.

This is not the first time Chinese authorities have cracked down on fancy dress. In 2014, Beijing police said people wearing Halloween-themed costumes on the city’s metro system could face arrest, claiming costumes could cause crowds to gather and create “trouble”.

But this year comes on the back of the White Paper Protest movement, which began in November 2022 when large groups of people, mostly youths, gathered spontaneously one night on a street in Shanghai to mourn the victims of a fire.

That gathering soon turned into brief – but widespread – demonstrations against the country’s Covid policies, in one of the biggest challenges to the Chinese government’s authority since the Tiananmen protests.

A huge Mayan city has been discovered centuries after it disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico.

Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche.

They found the hidden complex – which they have called Valeriana – using Lidar, a type of radar survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.

They believe it is second in size only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Mayan site in ancient Latin America.

The discovery of the city, which is the size of Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, was made “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet.

“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a radar survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.

It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of radar pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.

But when Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed – a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.

That is more than the number of people who live in the region today, the researchers say.

Mr Auld-Thomas and his colleagues named the city Valeriana after a nearby lagoon.

The find helps change an idea in Western thinking that the Tropics was where “civilisations went to die”, says Professor Marcello Canuto, a co-author in the research.

Instead, this part of the world was home to rich and complex cultures, he explains.

We can’t be sure what led to the demise and eventual abandonment of the city, but the archaeologists say climate change was a major factor.

Valeriana has the “hallmarks of a capital city” and was second only in density of buildings to the spectacular Calakmul site, around 100km away (62 miles).

It is “hidden in plain sight”, the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xhipul where mostly Mayan people now live.

There are no known pictures of the lost city because “no-one has ever been there”, the researchers say, although local people may have suspected there were ruins under the mounds of earth.

The city, which was about 16.6 sq km, had two major centres with large buildings around 2km (1.2 miles) apart, linked by dense houses and causeways.

It has two plazas with temple pyramids, where Mayans would have worshipped, hidden treasures like jade masks and buried their dead.

It also had a court where people would have played an ancient ball game.

There was also evidence of a reservoir, indicating that people used the landscape to support a large population.

In total, Mr Auld-Thomas and Prof Canuto surveyed three different sites in the jungle. They found 6,764 buildings of various sizes.

Professor Elizabeth Graham from University College London, who was not involved in the research, says it supports claims that Mayans lived in complex cities or towns, not in isolated villages.

“The point is that the landscape is definitely settled – that is, settled in the past – and not, as it appears to the naked eye, uninhabited or ‘wild’,” she says.

The research suggests that when Mayan civilisations collapsed from 800AD onwards, it was partly because they were so densely populated and could not survive climate problems.

“It’s suggesting that the landscape was just completely full of people at the onset of drought conditions and it didn’t have a lot of flexibility left. And so maybe the entire system basically unravelled as people moved farther away,” says Mr Auld-Thomas.

Warfare and the conquest of the region by Spanish invaders in the 16th century also contributed to eradication of Mayan city states.

Lidar technology has revolutionised how archaeologists survey areas covered in vegetation, like the Tropics, opening up a world of lost civilisations, explains Prof Canuto.

In the early years of his career, surveys were done by foot and hand, using simple instruments to check the ground inch by inch.

But in the decade since Lidar was used in the Mesoamerican region, he says it’s mapped around 10 times the area that archaeologists managed in about a century of work.

Mr Auld-Thomas says his work suggests there are many sites out there that archaeologists have no idea about.

In fact so many sites have been found that researchers cannot hope to excavate them all.

“I’ve got to go to Valeriana at some point. It’s so close to the road, how could you not? But I can’t say we will do a project there,” says Mr Auld-Thomas.

“One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study,” he adds.

The research is published in the academic journal Antiquity.

Iran has executed German-Iranian dissident Jamshid Sharmahd, following his conviction for “leading terror operations”, state media is reporting.

Sharmahd was sentenced to death last year for “corruption on Earth”, having been accused of leading a US-based pro-monarchist group.

He had denied the charges, with his family maintaining he was only a spokesman.

Germany’s foreign minister said Berlin had repeatedly warned Tehran the execution of a German citizen would “have serious consequences”.

“The killing of Jamshid Sharmahd shows what kind of inhumane regime rules (in Iran),” Annalena Baerbock posted on X.

Human rights organisations have condemned the execution of Sharmahd, who lived in the US.

“The entire process, including his arrest, conviction, and execution, constitutes a serious violation of international law,” said Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights group.

Sharmahd is believed to have been kidnapped by Iranian agents in Dubai in 2020 and then forcibly taken to Iran via Oman.

In August 2020, Iran’s intelligence ministry announced his arrest following a “complex operation”, without providing any details.

Another human rights group, Amnesty International, has claimed Sharmahd was forced to confess and that he had told his family he had been tortured in detention.

It said Sharmahd had created a website to publish statements from the Kingdom Assembly of Iran, including claims of explosions inside Iran.

The little-known US-based group, also known as Tondar (Persian for Thunder), seeks to restore the monarchy overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

However, Iranian authorities said he was Tondar’s leader and had “planned 23 terror attacks”, of which “five were successful”, including the 2008 bombing of a mosque in Shiraz in that killed 14 people.

They published a video in which he appeared blindfolded and confessed to various crimes.

Sharmahd was sentenced to death in February last year.

Sharmahd’s daughter, Gazelle, later called on German prosecutors to investigate the Iranian judiciary’s alleged mistreatment of her father.

“They’re killing him softly in solitary confinement in this death cell,” she told the BBC in July 2023, after he had been allowed to call his family for the first time in two years.

But she added: “They want a public execution for my dad, to send out this message of terror: that anybody who speaks out against the regime, we can do this to you.”

He was executed on Sunday, after approval from the Supreme Court, the Iranian judiciary’s Mizan website said on Monday.

Bolivia’s government has rejected claims by the former president, Evo Morales, that it ordered a targeted attack on him.

Morales says his car came under sustained gunfire on Sunday night in the Cochabamba region, in what he condemned as an attempt on his life.

But Bolivia’s Interior Minister, Eduardo del Castillo, said the former president’s convoy had fled an anti-drugs patrol, during which his security team fired at police and ran over an officer.

Evo Morales is involved in a power struggle with President Luis Arce over who should be the Movement for Socialism (Mas) party’s candidate in next year’s election.

On Sunday, Morales posted a video to social media which appeared to show at least two bullet holes in the windscreen of a car in the front seat of which he was sitting.

In a statement, a pro-Morales faction of the Mas party said men in black had fired on the vehicle when it passed by a military barracks. The faction said it held President Arce’s government responsible.

But on Monday, del Castillo told a news conference an anti-drug trafficking unit was on a standard highway patrol when Morales’ convoy shot at police and ran over an officer.

“Mr Morales, nobody believes the theatre you have staged,” he added.

• Evo Morales says his car was shot at in assassination attempt
• Street battles in Bolivia as Evo Morales leads march to capital

Morales has disputed this account, saying in a post on X that he had been shot at “more than 18 times”. He had shot back after the police opened fire, he said.

Morales, who was president from 2006 to 2019, is facing legal issues including investigations for alleged statutory rape and human trafficking, which he denies.

For weeks, his supporters have blocked key roads around the country and clashed with police.

Morales argues the accusations are part of a right-wing vendetta against him by the interim president who replaced him in office after his resignation in 2019 following allegations of vote-rigging.

Both he and Arce have groups of loyal supporters willing to take to the streets – and in some cases engage in street brawls – to show their backing for their candidate.

Tens of thousands of Georgians, many of them draped in EU and Georgian flags gathered outside parliament in Tbilisi on Monday night, in response to a call from the pro-Western president to press for the annulment of Saturday’s election.

Salome Zourabichivili, who has sided with the opposition, had earlier called for a rally outside parliament, telling the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg that this was a “crucial moment”.

She appealed to the international community to stand behind her country’s population after a disputed election that she says was “totally falsified”.

The ruling Georgian Dream party and the election commission are adamant the result, giving the government almost 54% of the vote, was free and fair.

Zourabichvili said Georgia’s partners needed to see what was happening, adding that the government’s victory was “not the will of the Georgian people” who wanted to keep their European future.

Georgian Dream Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has told the BBC that alleged violations ahead and during the vote were confined to “just a couple” of polling stations.

However, the The European Union, Nato and US have all called for a full investigation into a litany of allegations made by monitoring missions of vote fraud before and on the day of Saturday’s vote.

Thirteen of the EU’s 27 foreign ministers said they stood “at this difficult time at the side of Georgians”, adding “violations of electoral integrity are incompatible with the standards expected from a candidate to the European Union”.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that Georgians had a “right to see that electoral irregularities were investigated swiftly, transparently and independently.” She added that “Georgians, like all Europeans, must be the masters of their own destiny.”

It was not entirely clear what the Georgian president and four opposition groups hoped to achieve by bringing Georgians on to the main avenue in front of the parliament on Monday.

But Salome Zourabichvili made clear the protest would be “very peaceful”, adding that she did not believe Georgia’s authorities wanted confrontation.

Protesters in the crowd on Rustaveli Avenue knew what they wanted.

“The main thing we want here is to get what we deserve – legal elections,” said Lasha, 22. “No-one had any idea this would happen. At first we were frustrated, then we realised what happened and now we’re angry.”

Liza, 20, wanted “another election that isn’t forged” and said she was pleased to hear speakers from the four main opposition parties telling Georgians not to give up.

Another protester, Keta, told the BBC that she felt “cheated and frustrated”. “Me and my friends and my family deserve way better than we have right now… We will fight to the end until we get our justice.”

The president said it was up to the people and the political parties to decide what happened next.

“Maybe we won’t be able to achieve it today or tomorrow,” she said. “There are a number of things that can be done. There can be an international review of some of the elements of the election, there can be a call for new elections. In what period of time I don’t know.”

The call for protest echoes weeks of demonstrations that brought Tbilisi’s central Rustaveli Avenue to a standstill for weeks earlier this year.

Back in May there were clashes with riot police, who responded with water cannon, tear gas and force, as Georgians tried to stop the government pushing through a Russian-style “foreign agents” law targeting media and civil society groups that have foreign funding.

Ultimately the protests failed and the EU froze Georgia’s bid to join the 27-country union, accusing it of democratic backsliding.

The government has clearly prepared for further protests. Last week it emerged that the interior minister had bought new water cannon vehicles and other equipment for riot police, including lethal weapons, for use “when it becomes necessary”.

Speaking to the BBC on Sunday, Georgia’s prime minister said “the general content of the elections was in line with legal principles and the principle of democratic elections.”

But President Zourabichvili said the scale of election fraud was unprecedented: “Everything was used that we’ve ever heard of in this country in a parallel way.”

As an example, she alleged that, before the elections, families who were dependent on state funds had seen their identity cards taken away.

At the time it was difficult to tell why, she said, but it then became clear the identity cards were being used for so-called carousel voting in Georgia’s new electronic voting system – “when one person can vote 10, 15, 17 times with the same ID”.

She has also described the result of the vote as a “Russian special operation”, stopping short of accusing the Kremlin of direct intervention. Instead, she accused the government of using a “very sophisticated” Russian-inspired propaganda strategy as well as “PR people” from Russia.

The government has vehemently denied having anything to do with Russia, pointing out it is the only country in the region not to have diplomatic ties with Moscow.

Russia fought a five-day war with its southern neighbour in 2008 and still occupies 20% of Georgian territory.

The Kremlin has has denied having anything to with the election and has ridiculed Georgia’s pro-EU president, whose term in office comes to an end in December.

A handful of international leaders have congratulated Georgian Dream for securing a fourth term in office in the contested election, including Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban.

Orban arrived in Tbilisi on Monday evening on a two-day visit that has annoyed several of his European partners because of the message it sends the Georgian government.

In their joint statement, 13 EU foreign ministers said Orban “does not represent the EU”.

Orban and Georgian Dream have much in common. Both place a heavy emphasis on socially conservative family values, and both have styled themselves as fighting an opposition that wants war rather than peace.

Although Hungary currently holds the presidency of the EU, foreign policy chief Josep Borrell stressed that “whatever Mr Orban says on his visit to Georgia, he does not represent the European Union”.

Six Russian agencies and individuals accused of being part of a disinformation network face sanctions from the UK government.

The so-called Doppelganger group had been linked earlier this year to spreading false rumours about the Princess of Wales.

The Foreign Office warned of a “vast malign online network” intended to cause disruption and confusion, distributing fake news and undermining democracy.

The Doppelganger group are accused of trying to incite division within countries supporting Ukraine in the war against Russia.

In March this year the group had been claimed as amplifying a wave of rumours and fake claims about Catherine, when she was out of public view with health problems.

“Putin is so desperate to undermine European support for Ukraine he is now resorting to clumsy, ineffective efforts to try and stoke unrest,” said Foreign Secretary David Lammy.

“Today’s sanctions send a clear message; we will not tolerate your lies and interference, and we are coming after you.”

The sanctions apply to a group of agencies and senior staff which the Foreign Office said were part of the disinformation network “commonly known as Doppelganger”.

This was the Russian operation identified by security experts at Cardiff University as promoting the online rumours about Catherine. That online speculation ended when the princess revealed her cancer diagnosis.

The Doppelganger group was also claimed by the French government as being linked to efforts to undermine support for Ukraine and to disrupt elections.

The UK’s Foreign Office accuses the disinformation group of creating large numbers of false versions of legitimate news websites, tricking social media users into going to sources of fake information, stoking divisions and causing confusion.

This disinformation campaign “plagues social media with fake posts, counterfeit documents and deepfake material”, says the Foreign Office.

The groups and individuals sanctioned by the UK are the Social Design Agency, Structura National Technologies, Ano Dialog and Ilya Andreevich Gambashidze, Nikolay Aleksandrovich Tupikin and Andrey Naumovich Perla.

Russia has rejected accusations of such online interference.

President Putin last week told the BBC’s Russia editor Steve Rosenberg it was “utter rubbish” to claim that Russia was inciting street protests.

“What’s happening on the streets of certain European cities is a result of domestic politics,” he said.

But the US State Department welcomed the UK’s latest announcement on sanctions, saying it addressed a threat in which “Kremlin-produced disinformation was covertly placed in local outlets to appear as genuine news articles”.

Last month the US government claimed Russian disinformation agencies were trying to influence the outcome of the presidential election.

Prof Martin Innes, director of the Security, Crime and Intelligence Innovation Institute at Cardiff University, claims such groups try to achieve their political goals by causing social and cultural disruption.

“Doppelganger’s signature methodology is deploying very large numbers of disposable social media accounts to flood the information space around particular stories,” he told the BBC.

“This can prove especially influential when they are able to amplify narratives that appear less overtly political.

“This is precisely what they did in trying to exploit the rumours and conspiracies about the Princess of Wales.

“In repeating and reheating these, they were able to disperse their anti-Ukrainian messaging, whilst also attacking a key British institution – the Royal Family.”

Researchers at the institute in Cardiff have been analysing the impact of so-called “political technologists” in Russia who are engaged in such online interference.

They say that such disinformation specialists have studied the Brexit referendum in the UK and have been training others ahead of the forthcoming US presidential elections.

The approach is to focus disinformation efforts to increase tension on “wedge issues”, such as immigration and identity politics, they say.

A new study highlights how promoting female entrepreneurship can greatly enhance women’s workforce participation. By creating more opportunities for other women, female-led businesses can drive significant economic growth, it says.

Imagine a world where women, though half the population, own less than a fifth of businesses.

This is the reality the World Bank uncovered in a survey spanning 138 countries from 2006 to 2018.

Even more intriguing is how female-owned businesses empower other women.

In male-owned firms, only 23% of workers were women, but female-owned businesses employ far more women. And while just 6.5% of male-owned businesses have a woman as the top manager, over half of female-owned firms are led by women.

• Why are millions of Indian women dropping out of work?

In India, the situation is even more challenging. Female labour participation and entrepreneurship are low, with the total number of women in the workforce barely changing over the past 30 years.

But the picture looks slightly better when it comes to entrepreneurship.

Women make up about 14% of entrepreneurs and own a significant share of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). They contribute notably to industrial output and employ a substantial portion of the workforce, according to the 2023 State of India’s Livelihoods Report.

Most MSMEs in India are microenterprises, with many women-owned businesses being single-person ventures, according to Niti Aayog, a government think-tank. While some women-owned enterprises employ staff in big numbers, a large majority operate with very few workers.

So Indian women are not really under-represented in entrepreneurship, but they operate much smaller firms than men – especially in the informal sector.

Not surprisingly, women’s contribution to India’s GDP is just 17%, less than half the global average. And India ranks 57th out of 65 countries for women’s entrepreneurship, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report 2021.

A new paper by Gaurav Chiplunkar (University of Virginia) and Pinelopi Goldberg (Yale University) argues that promoting female entrepreneurship could significantly boost women’s workforce participation, as female-led businesses often create more opportunities for other women.

The authors developed a framework to measure the barriers women in India face when entering the labour force and becoming entrepreneurs.

They found substantial obstacles to women’s employment and higher costs for female entrepreneurs when expanding their businesses by hiring workers. Their simulations showed that removing barriers would boost female-owned businesses, increase women’s workforce participation, and drive economic gains through higher wages, profits, and more efficient female-owned firms replacing less productive male-owned ones.

So, policies that support female entrepreneurship are crucial, the authors argue. Policies that boost entrepreneurship and increase labour demand – allowing more women to become entrepreneurs – can be more effective – and quicker – than changing long-standing social norms, says Mr Chiplunkar.

“History tells us that norms are sticky,” says Ashwini Deshpande of Ashoka University.

Women still shoulder most household chores – cooking, cleaning, laundry, childcare, and elder care. There are more barriers, including limited access to safe, efficient transportation and childcare, restricting their ability to work within commuting distance. Even women’s limited ability to travel independently is a key factor restricting their participation in the labour market, as shown in a recent study led by Rolly Kapoor of University of California.

Despite a recent uptick in India’s women’s labour force participation, the picture is not as promising as it seems, as Ms Deshpande notes in a paper.

The increase, she found, reflected an increase in self-employed women, a combination of paid work and disguised unemployment, a situation where more people are employed than actually needed for a task, resulting in low productivity.

“There is an urgent need to increase women’s participation in regular salaried paid work with job contracts and social security benefits. This would be the most important step, albeit not the only one, towards women’s economic empowerment,” says Ms Deshpande.

It’s not going to be easy. For one, many women face obstacles – from families and communities – to working at all, regardless of whether they want to be entrepreneurs. And if more women join the workforce but there aren’t enough jobs – because barriers to starting businesses remain – wages could actually drop.

Research shows that women in India work when opportunities arise, indicating that the declining labour force participation rate is a result of insufficient jobs and reduced demand for women’s labour. A recent Barclays Research report says India can reach 8% GDP growth by ensuring women make up over half of the new workforce by 2030.

Boosting female entrepreneurship could be a way out.

Satellite images analysed by BBC Verify show damage to a number of military sites in Iran from Israeli air strikes on Saturday.

They include sites experts say were used for missile production and air defence, including one previously linked to Iran’s nuclear programme.

Satellite imagery following the Israeli strikes shows damage to buildings at what experts say is a major weapons development and production facility at Parchin, about 30km (18.5 miles) east of Tehran.

The site has been linked to rocket production according to experts from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

Comparing high-resolution satellite imagery taken on 9 September with an image captured on 27 October, it appears that at least four structures have been significantly damaged.

One of these structures, known as Taleghan 2, has been previously linked to Iran’s nuclear programme by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

In 2016 the IAEA found evidence of uranium particles at the site, raising questions about banned nuclear activity there.

Another site apparently targeted in the Israeli air strikes is at Khojir, about 20km north-west of Parchin.

Fabian Hinz of the ISS says “Khojir is known as the area with the highest concentration of ballistic missile-related infrastructure within Iran.”

It was the site of a mysterious large explosion in 2020.

Satellite photos show at least two buildings in the complex appear to have been severely damaged.

A military site at Shahroud, about 350km to the east of Tehran, has also sustained damage, according to satellite imagery taken after the Israeli strikes.

Located in the northern province of Semnan, this area is significant because it’s been involved in the production of long-range missile components, according to Fabian Hinz of the IISS.

Nearby is the Shahroud Space Centre, controlled by the Revolutionary Guards Corps, from which Iran launched a military satellite into space in 2020.

Israel has claimed that it successfully targeted Iran’s aerial defence systems at number of locations but it’s difficult to confirm this with the satellite imagery available.

We have obtained satellite imagery which appears to show damage to a site described by experts as a radar installation.

It’s located on Shah Nakhjir mountain close to the western city of Ilam, and Jeremy Binnie, Middle East specialist at Janes, a defence intelligence company, says this may have been a newly updated radar defence system.

The site itself was established decades ago, but satellite pictures analysed by open source experts show it has undergone major renovation in recent years.

We’ve also identified what appears to be damage to a storage unit at the Abadan Oil Refinery based in the south-western province of Khuzestan.

However, we don’t know what caused it and there is likely to be damage in some areas across Iran caused by debris or misfiring defence systems.

The New York Times cited Israeli officials as saying that the Abadan oil refinery was one of the sites targeted in its air strikes on Saturday morning.

Iranian authorities confirmed on Saturday that Khuzestan province had been targeted by Israel.

Abadan oil refinery is the country’s largest, capable of producing 500,000 barrels a day, according to its chief executive.

Satellite imagery isn’t always conclusive in identifying damaged structures.

For example, a photograph we have verified showing smoke rising near Hazrat Amir Brigade Air Defence base suggested it had been successfully targeted. But satellite imagery of the area captured on Sunday has too many shadows to confirm any damage to the site.

Iran launched a missile attack on Israel at the start of October for the second time this year, after firing 300 missiles and drones in April.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

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.

It’s been 10 months since my family left Gaza but we continue to live with the loss, the pain, the impact of the war in all its excruciating detail.

This month – just before the anniversary of the beginning of the conflict – we saw the most harrowing eight hours we’ve experienced in that time.

We received a video message from my wife’s cousin in Gaza, saying: “The tanks are surrounding us and firing at us. These could be the last moments of our lives.

“Pray for us and do anything to save us.”

My wife collapsed, she even lost consciousness: her uncle, aunts and their families – 26 people in total – were all under attack.

Israeli raids and advances into cities and villages all over Gaza – targeting Hamas – have been common for most of this year now.

We didn’t hear anything from them for several hours. They were under bombardment the whole time. Then, finally, a voice note: “Four people have been injured. Your aunt Wafaa is bleeding, her condition is critical.”

I made countless calls, to the Red Cross, the Palestinian Red Crescent, anyone who could help.

After eight hours, the Israeli army finally allowed them to evacuate and move the wounded on foot.

But it was too late for Wafaa – she succumbed to her injuries shortly after reaching the hospital.

We still have so many relatives in Gaza. My father is there, living in a tent in the southern city of Khan Younis, which was bombed again this week.

I’m often overwhelmed by guilt when I call him from Istanbul, where I’ve fled to with my wife and two children.

There are so many people like me, in Turkey, in Egypt, and further afield around the world – the UK, the US, Europe – where we’ve had to go to find safety.

Not everyone can get out, only those with enough money to pay the high fees for passage elsewhere.

But in Egypt alone, more than 100,000 Gazans have crossed south into the country since November.

They’re not under immediate threat there from Israel’s bombs. But many are struggling to feed their families, provide education for their children, and just re-establish the basics of a normal life.

In an open-air, bustling café in Nasr City in Cairo, dozens of newly arrived refugees huddle in small groups, puffing on hookahs, sharing stories about their homeland.

They’re trying to alleviate the pangs of longing for those not currently with them. They cling to hope that the war will end soon, that they can return. But there’s a constant thrum of anxiety.

A loud traditional Palestinian song plays over the speakers – a hit by Palestinian singer Mohammed Assaf, who won the Arab Idol competition a few years ago.

58-year-old Abu Anas Ayyad is among those sitting there, listening. In his past life he had been known as the “King of Gravel”, a successful businessman who had supplied building materials to constructions sites all over Gaza.

He and his family – including four children – escaped. But: “Every missile that hits a building in Gaza feels like a piece of my heart shattering.

“I still have family and friends there,” he says.

“All of this could have been avoided. But Hamas has a different opinion.”

He rues the Iran-backed group’s attack in Israel on 7 October 2023 and the consequences now.

“Despite my love for Gaza, I will not return if Hamas remains in power,” he says. He doesn’t want his children to be “used as pawns in a dangerous game played by reckless leaders for the sake of Iran.”

Sitting nearby is Mahmoud Al Khozondr, who before the war had run his family’s renowned hummus and falafel shop in Gaza. It’s an institution in the territory – known for its food and celebrity clientele. The late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat had been a frequent patron, often spotted at its tables.

Mahmoud shows me pictures of his former well-appointed family home on his phone. They now live in a cramped two-room apartment. His children can’t go to school.

“It’s a miserable life,” he says. “We lost everything back home. But we must rise again,” he says.

“We need food for our children, and assistance for our people still in Gaza.”

Living in exile in Egypt is not easy. The authorities have allowed Palestinians to stay temporarily, but they don’t grant official residency. They limit access to education and other key services.

Many Gazans try and send money back to support relatives still in Gaza – but remittance fees are steep and war merchants take a 30% cut.

“It’s heart-breaking to see profits being made from our loved ones’ suffering,” Mahmoud Saqr tells me.

He used to own an electronics store in Gaza. These days he has to take a bundle of cash to a shop in Cairo to transfer money to his sister.

“There’s no receipt, no proof—just a message hours later confirming they’ve received the money,” he tells me, describing the process.

“It’s risky, because we don’t know who is involved in this transaction but we have no choice.”

These are desperate times for everyone.

Over the past year in Turkey, I’ve tried in vain to create a peaceful living environment for my family.

But every time we go to a restaurant, my children reminisce about their favourite spots in Gaza, their large home, their games shop, their friends at the horse club, their classmates.

Some of those classmates have been killed in the Israeli air strikes, which continue.

But since October 7, time has stood still for us. We have yet to move on from that day.

We may have escaped physically, but our souls and hearts remained tethered to our loved ones in Gaza.

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

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it targeted military sites in several regions, with subsequent reports suggesting an Iranian missile production site had been hit. One civilian and four soldiers were killed in the attacks, the Iranian military said.

It marks the latest in a series of attacks between the two regional foes that for months have raised fears of an all-out war.

Here’s what we know.

At around 02:15 on Saturday (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.

The IDF’s strikes, which came in several waves over a three-hour period, involved scores of aircraft, including jets and drones.

Targets comprised Iran’s air defences, missile and drone production, and launch facilities. Two researchers, analysing satellite imagery, told Reuters news agency that Israel had struck buildings in Parchin, a military complex near Tehran, and may have “significantly hampered Iran’s ability to mass produce missiles”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who followed the operation from the IDF’s command and control centre in Tel Aviv – said Israel had “severely damaged Iran’s defence capability and its ability to produce missiles”.

“This regime must understand a simple principle: whoever hurts us, we hurt him,” he added.

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.

They also said the attacks did not damage Iranian oil infrastructure or nuclear facilities – targets President Joe Biden had urged Israel not to hit.

Iran has largely played down the impact of the strikes – which hit sites in Tehran, Khuzestan and Ilam provinces – saying most missiles were intercepted and those that were not caused “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.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in a measured response, said the attacks should not be “exaggerated or downplayed”.

“It is up to the authorities to determine how to convey the power and will of the Iranian people to the Israeli regime,” he said on Sunday, “and to take actions that serve the interests of this nation and country.”

Meanwhile, the IDF said it had hit around 20 targets, with Netanyahu describing the attack as “precise and powerful” and having “achieved its goals”.

The Iranian military confirmed that four soldiers had died – and state news agencies reported the death of one civilian.

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 air strike 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 about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, which it said was in response to the deaths of Haniyeh, Nasrallah and Nilforoushan.

This latest attack on Iran is Israel’s response to that.

• Read more: Why did Israel attack Iran?

Netanyahu’s office denied a report by US outlet Axios that prior to the attacks, Israel sent Iran a message revealing certain details about the strikes, and warning Tehran not to respond.

“Israel did not inform Iran before the attack – not about the time, not about the targets, not about the strength of the attack,” the prime minister’s spokesperson said.

Still, the strikes were more limited than some had been expecting.

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

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 over the weekend showed 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, but it later reopened.

There are, however, signs that the Iranian government is 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 over the weekend 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”.

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.’”

Japan’s prime minister Shigeru Ishiba has vowed to continue ruling the country despite a bruising loss suffered by his party at the general election.

The country now faces an uncertain political future as the coalition led by the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has lost its majority in parliament, its worst result in over a decade.

Ishiba was sworn in as prime minister just this month after winning the leadership of his party. He had called a snap election to seal his mandate.

But in a speech on Monday, he admitted the LDP received “severe judgement” from voters, and added his party would “humbly accept” this.

“The Japanese people expressed their strong desire for the LDP to do some reflection and become a party that acts in line with the people’s will,” Ishiba told national broadcaster NHK.

The LDP and its much smaller coalition partner Komeito, have altogether taken 215 seats, falling short of the 233-seat majority needed to govern.

It is the first time the LDP has lost its parliamentary majority since 2009. The party has ruled Japan almost continuously since 1955.

The result comes after a tumultuous few years for the LDP which saw a cascade of scandals, widespread voter apathy and record-low approval ratings.

The party had seen approval ratings of below 20% earlier in the year, in the wake of a political fundraising corruption scandal.

Ishiba on Monday pledged to “enact fundamental reform regarding the issue of money and politics”.

“We need to answer to the people’s criticism. That is how I will take responsibility for the loss of the election,” he said.

He also promised to revitalise rural Japan and tackle inflation.

Japan’s parliament now has 30 days to convene and choose a prime minister. The chosen PM’s party or coalition, will form the government and can do so even without a majority of seats.

Ishiba said there are no plans to expand his political coalition at this stage. This raises the likely possibility that he will retain his premiership and his coalition will continue to rule Japan without a majority. But it also means they will no longer have the power to pass laws unilaterally.

Another possibility is that the opposition parties unite to form the government – the largest one, the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), won 148 seats up from 98 previously.

But that is a more unlikely scenario as Japan’s opposition parties historically have faced difficulty in uniting or convincing voters they are a viable option to govern.

The CDP had an approval rating of just 6.6% before parliament was dissolved.

Politics in Japan has been moving at a fast pace in recent months.

Ishiba took over as the country’s leader early this month following party elections held after his predecessor Fumio Kishida – who had been in the role since 2021 – made a surprise decision to step down in August.

The move to call the election came at a time when the LDP is desperate to restore its tarnished image among the public.

Chief among the series of scandals that have dogged the LDP is its relationship with the controversial Unification Church, described by critics as a “cult”, and the level of influence it had on lawmakers.

Then came the revelations of the slush funds scandal, with dozens of LDP lawmakers accused of pocketing proceeds from political fundraising events.

Those allegations, running into the millions of dollars, has led to the dissolution of powerful factions.

Georgia’s prime minister has hailed a “landslide” election result, rejecting allegations of vote-rigging and violence.

“Irregularities happen everywhere, in every country,” Irakli Kobakhidze of the Georgian Dream party told the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg in an exclusive interview.

Official preliminary results from Georgia’s election commission gave the ruling Georgian Dream an outright majority of 54%, despite exit polls for opposition TV channels suggesting four opposition parties had won.

Georgia’s pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, has condemned the “total falsification” of the vote and called for opposition supporters to rally outside parliament on Monday.

Election observers in this South Caucasus state bordering Russia have complained of an “uneven playing field” in the election, suggesting the scale of vote violations may have affected the result.

The US and European Union have backed the monitors’ calls for an independent investigation. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Georgia’s leaders to “respect the rule of law, repeal legislation that undermines fundamental freedoms, and address deficiencies in the electoral process together”.

However, the prime minister insisted that out of 3,111 polling stations, there had been incidents in “just a couple of precincts” but that in all the others “the environment was completely peaceful”.

Georgian Dream, known as GD, has become increasingly authoritarian, recently passing Russian-style laws targeting media and non-government groups who receive foreign funding, and the LGBT community.

The European Union has responded by freezing Georgia’s bid to join the EU, accusing it of “democratic backsliding”. Tbilisi was awarded candidate status only last December and an estimated 80% of Georgians want to be part of the 27-country union.

Even before the results came out, one EU leader, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, congratulated Georgian Dream on securing a fourth term and is due to travel to Georgia on Monday.

The ruling party says it is keen to kickstart talks on reviving its EU bid, but the sight of Orban arriving in Tbilisi two days after a contested election is unlikely to go down well in Brussels. Orban is seen as Russia’s closest ally in the EU, and the European Parliament has denounced his government as a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”.

GD sees itself as closely aligned to Orban’s style of social conservatism. The party’s EU integration committee head, Maka Bochorishvili, has told the BBC: “Being conservative is not forbidden, family values are part of European values as well.”

Responding to widespread reports of vote fraud in the election, the head of the member states’ European Council, Charles Michel, said “alleged irregularities must be seriously clarified and addressed”.

“Of course we have to address these irregularities happening on the day of the election or before,” the Georgian prime minister told the BBC. “But the general content of the elections was in line with legal principles and the principle of democratic elections.”

The four opposition groups have refused to recognise the election result, condemning it as falsified, and they have accused the ruling Georgian Dream party of stealing the vote.

Surrounded by leaders of the opposition, Salome Zourabichvili said the vote could not be recognised and called on the people to gather in Rustaveli Street, the big avenue that runs past parliament, to “defend our constitutional right”.

She also accused Russia of interfering in the vote without giving details, although Nika Gvaramia of opposition alliance Coalition for Change has made allegations of an “openly planned special operation by Russian intelligence services”.

Coalition for Change and another opposition group, United National Movement, have said they will boycott parliament.

The opposition will now hold 61 seats in the 150-seat parliament, while Georgian Dream will have 89 – a majority but not big enough to enact the kind of constitutional change it wanted, to carry out its threat to ban opposition parties.

Two exit polls carried by Western pollsters for opposition TV channels suggested that the opposition had won, and that GD had secured a maximum of 42%, not 54%.

In his BBC interview, Kobakhidze accused the opposition of lying, arguing that they had also said the vote had been falsified in 2016, 2020 and 2021.

“Of course they have now no other way, so they have to tell their supporters that either they were lying or the government rigged the elections.”

An electronic vote-counting system was used for the first time on Saturday, and the prime minister said that made the election impossible to rig: “There is zero space for manipulation.”

The chairman of Georgia’s election commission who oversaw the new system hailed the vote as largely peaceful and free, but a very different picture has emerged from monitoring groups that have presented their initial findings.

Georgia’s Isfed group reported a litany of violations, including bribery, intimidation and ballot-stuffing, and said the result “cannot be seen as truly reflecting the preferences of Georgian voters”.

Per Eklund, a former EU ambassador who was part of the National Democratic Institute delegation, said it was clear the pre-election period in particular had failed to meet democratic standards.

“Voter intimidation… up to and on election day severely undermined the process,” he said.

Georgian Dream’s billionaire founder, Bidzina Ivanishvili, has in recent months stoked up anti-Western rhetoric, accusing an unidentified “global war party” of aiming to drag his country into the war in Ukraine.

His unfounded claims have led to fears that his party is adopting Russian-style laws and returning to Russia’s sphere of influence, 16 years after a five-day war in which Russian troops invaded Georgia.

Russian commentators have widely welcomed Georgian Dream’s victory as an indication that Georgia will begin to pivot back to Moscow.

And Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, criticised the Georgian president’s comments rejecting the election result and casting doubt on Georgia’s joining of the EU.

“To think the EU can still offer anyone a ‘European future’ is simply stupid,” she said on social media.

In his BBC interview, Irakli Kobakhidze denied the opposition’s accusation that the government was pro-Russian and “pro-Putinist”. He said they had been trying to damage the government’s reputation with Georgia’s 3.7 million population.

The prime minister said that Georgia was the only country in its region with no diplomatic relations with Russia, because of Russia’s occupation of 20% of Georgian territory since the 2008 war.

When an Aboriginal Australian senator 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 the protest, something else became clear: a split within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community itself.

In the wake of an unsuccessful referendum on their constitutional recognition – which left many feeling silenced – the question Australia’s first inhabitants are now grappling with is how to achieve 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.

For more than 200 years though – 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 action 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, agrees.

“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.”

Others see it differently though: 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, leaving 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?”

Menka Gomis was born in France but has decided his future lies in Senegal, where his parents were born.

The 39-year-old is part of an increasing number of French Africans who are leaving France, blaming the rise in racism, discrimination and nationalism.

BBC Africa Eye has investigated this phenomenon – being referred to as a “silent exodus” – to find out why people like Mr Gomis are disillusioned with life in France.

The Parisian set up a small travel agency that offers packages, mainly to Africa, aimed at those wanting to reconnect with their ancestral roots, and now has an office in Senegal.

“I was born in France. I grew up in France, and we know certain realities. There’s been a lot of racism. I was six and I was called the N-word at school. Every day,” Mr Gomis, who went to school in the southern port city of Marseille, tells the BBC World Service.

“I may be French, but I also come from elsewhere.”

Mr Gomis’s mother moved to France when she was just a baby and cannot understand his motivation for leaving family and friends to go to Senegal.

“I’m not just leaving for this African dream,” he explains, adding it is a mixture of responsibility he feels towards his parents’ homeland and also opportunity.

“Africa is like the Americas at the time of… the gold rush. I think it’s the continent of the future. It’s where there’s everything left to build, everything left to develop.”

The links between France and Senegal – a mainly Muslim country and former French colony, which was once a key hub in the transatlantic slave trade – are long and complex.

A recent BBC Africa Eye investigation met migrants in Senegal willing to risk their lives in dangerous sea crossings to reach Europe.

Many of them end up in France where, according to the French Office for the Protection of Refugee and Stateless Persons (OFPRA), a record number sought asylum last year.

Around 142,500 people applied in total, and about a third of all requests for protection were accepted.

It is not clear how many are choosing to do the reverse journey to Africa as French law prohibits gathering data on race, religion and ethnicity.

But research suggests that highly qualified French citizens from Muslim backgrounds, often the children of immigrants, are quietly emigrating.

Those we met told us attitudes towards immigration were hardening in France, with right-wing parties wielding more influence.

Since their appointment last month, Prime Minister Michel Barnier and Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau have pledged to crack down on immigration, both legal and illegal, by pushing for changes to the law domestically and at the European level.

Fanta Guirassy has lived in France all her life and runs her own nursing practice in Villemomble – an outer-suburb of Paris – but she is also planning a move to Senegal, the birthplace of her mother.

“Unfortunately, for quite a few years now in France, we’ve been feeling less and less safe. It’s a shame to say it, but that’s the reality,” the 34-year-old tells the BBC.

“Being a single mother and having a 15-year-old teenager means you always have this little knot in your stomach. You’re always afraid.”

Her wake-up call came when her son was recently stopped and searched by the police as he was chatting to his friends on the street.

“As a mother it’s quite traumatic. You see what happens on TV and you see it happen to others.”

In June last year, riots erupted across France following the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk – a French national of Algerian descent who was shot by police.

The case is still being investigated, but the riots shook the nation and reflected an undercurrent of anger that had been building for years over the way ethnic minorities are treated in France.

Homecoming – BBC Africa Eye investigates the “silent exodus” of French Africans leaving France for good to reconnect with their roots.

Find it on iPlayer (UK only) or on the BBC Africa YouTube channel (outside the UK)

A recent survey of black people in France suggested 91% of those questioned had been victims of racial discrimination.

In the wake of the riots, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) called on France to address “issues of racial discrimination within its law enforcement agencies”.

The French foreign ministry dismissed the criticism, saying: “Any accusation of systemic racism or discrimination by the police in France is totally groundless. France and its police fight resolutely against racism and all forms of discrimination.”

However, according to French interior ministry statistics, racist crimes rose by a third last year, with more than 15,000 recorded incidents based on race, religion or ethnicity.

For schoolteacher Audrey Monzemba, who is of Congolese descent, such societal changes have “become very anxiety-provoking”.

Early one morning, we join her on her commute through a multicultural and working-class community on the outskirts of Paris.

With her young daughter, she makes her way by bus and train, but as she approaches the school where she works, she discreetly removes her headscarf under the hood of her coat.

In secular France, wearing a hijab has become hugely controversial and 20 years ago they were banned in all state schools – it is part of the reason Ms Monzemba wants to leave France looking to move to Senegal where she has connections.

“I’m not saying that France isn’t for me. I’m just saying that what I want is to be able to thrive in an environment that respects my faith and my values. I want to go to work without having to remove my veil,” the 35-year-old says.

A recent survey of more than 1,000 French Muslims who have left France to settle abroad suggests it is a growing trend.

It follows a peak in Islamophobia in the wake of the 2015 attacks when Islamist gunmen killed 130 people in various locations across Paris.

Moral panics around secularism and job discrimination “are at the heart of this silent flight”, Olivier Esteves, one of the authors of the report France, You Love It But You Leave It, tells the BBC.

“Ultimately, this emigration from France constitutes a real brain-drain, as it is primarily highly educated French Muslims who decide to leave,” he says.

Take Fatoumata Sylla, 34, whose parents are from Senegal, as an example.

“When my father left Africa to come here, he was looking for a better quality of life for his family in Africa. He would always tell us: ‘Don’t forget where you come from.'”

The tourism software developer, who is moving to Senegal next moth, says by going to set up a business in West Africa, she is showing she has not forgotten her heritage – though her brother Abdoul, who like her was born in Paris, is not convinced.

“I’m worried about her. I hope she’ll do OK, but I don’t feel the need to reconnect with anything,” he tells the BBC.

“My culture and my family is here. Africa is the continent of our ancestors. But it’s not really ours because we weren’t there.

“I don’t think you’re going to find some ancestral culture, or an imaginary Wakanda,” he says, referring to the technologically advanced society featured in the Black Panther movies and comic books.

In Dakar, we met Salamata Konte, who founded the travel agency with Mr Gomis, to find out what awaits French Africans like her who are choosing to settle in Senegal.

Ms Konte swapped a high-paying banking job in Paris for the Senegalese capital.

“When I arrived in Senegal three years ago I was shocked to hear them call me ‘Frenchie’,” the 35-year-old says.

“I said to myself: ‘OK, yes, indeed, I was born in France, but I’m Senegalese like you.’ So at first, we have this feeling where we say to ourselves: ‘Damn, I was rejected in France, and now I’m coming here and I’m also rejected here.'”

But her advice is: “You have to come here with humility and that’s what I did.”

As for her experience as a businesswoman, she says it has been “really difficult”.

“I often tell people that Senegalese men are misogynistic. They don’t like to hear that, but I think it’s true.

“They have a hard time accepting that a woman can be a CEO of a company, that a woman can sometimes give ‘orders’ to certain people, that I, as a woman, can tell a driver who was late: ‘No, it’s not normal that you’re late.’

“I think we have to prove ourselves a little more.”

Nonetheless, Mr Gomis is excited as he awaits his Senegalese citizenship.

The travel agency is going well and he says he is already working on his next venture – a dating app for Senegal.

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This month, two states ruled by India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) announced plans to impose hefty fines and imprisonment for contaminating food with spit, urine and dirt.

The northern state of Uttarakhand will fine offenders up to 100,000 rupees ($1,190; £920), while neighbouring Uttar Pradesh is set to introduce stringent laws to address the issue.

The government directives followed the circulation of unverified videos on social media showing vendors spitting on food at local stalls and restaurants – and one video depicting a house-help mixing urine into food she was preparing.

While the videos sparked outrage among users, with many expressing concern about food safety in these states, some of the videos also became the subject of blame campaigns targeting Muslims, which were later debunked by fact-checking websites.

They pointed out that many on social media had alleged that the woman adding urine to food was Muslim, but police later identified her as a Hindu.

Officials say strict laws are necessary and are aimed at deterring people from indulging in unhygienic practices around food, but opposition leaders and legal experts have questioned the efficacy of these laws and allege that they could also be misused to vilify a specific community.

The Indian Express newspaper criticised the ordinances proposed by Uttar Pradesh state, saying that they “act as a communal [sectarian] dog whistle that preys on the majority’s notions of purity and pollution and targets an already insecure minority”.

Food and food habits are sensitive subjects in culturally-diverse India as they are deeply intertwined with religion and the country’s hierarchical caste system. Norms and taboos around food sometimes lead to clashes between communities, sparking feelings of distrust. Consequently, the notion of “food safety” has also become entangled with religion, which is sometimes used to ascribe motive to alleged incidents of contamination.

Food safety is also a major concern in India, with the Food Safety and Standards Authority (FSSAI) estimating that unsafe food causes around 600 million infections and 400,000 deaths annually.

Experts cite various reasons for poor food safety in India, including inadequate enforcement of food safety laws and a lack of awareness. Cramped kitchens, dirty utensils, contaminated water, and improper transport and storage practices further compromise food safety.

So, when videos of vendors spitting in food came out, people were shocked and outraged. Soon after, Uttarakhand announced hefty fines on offenders and made it mandatory for police to verify hotel staff and for CCTVs to be installed in kitchens.

In Uttar Pradesh, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said to stop such incidents, police should verify every employee. The state also plans to make it mandatory for food centres to display the names of their owners, for cooks and waiters to wear masks and gloves and for CCTVs to be installed in hotels and restaurants.

According to reports, Adityanath is planning to bring in two ordinances that will penalise spitting in food with imprisonment up to 10 years.

In July, India’s Supreme Court had stayed directives issued by the Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh governments asking people running food stalls along the route of Kanwar yatra – an annual Hindu pilgrimage – to prominently display the names and other identity details of their owners. Petitioners told the top court that the directives unfairly targeted Muslims and would negatively impact their businesses.

On Wednesday, police in the state’s Barakanki town arrested restaurant owner Mohammad Irshad for allegedly spitting on a roti (flat bread) while preparing it. Mr Irshad was charged with disturbing peace and religious harmony, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported.

Earlier this month, police in Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, arrested two men – Naushad Ali and Hasan Ali – for allegedly spitting in a saucepan while making tea, and accused them of causing public outrage and jeopardising health, reported The Hindu.

The videos of the men spitting, which found their way onto social media days before they were arrested, were given a religious spin after many Hindu nationalist accounts began calling them incidents of “thook-jihad” or “spit-jihad”.

The term is a spin on “love-jihad” which has been coined by radical Hindu groups, who use it to accuse Muslim men of converting Hindu women by marriage. By extension, “thook-jihad” accuses Muslims of trying to defile Hindus by spitting in their food.

This is not the first time that the Muslim community has become targets of spitting accusations. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a series of fake videos showing Muslims spitting, sneezing or licking objects to infect people with the virus went viral on social media. The videos heightened religious polarisation, with Hindu hardline accounts posting anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Opposition leaders in the two BJP-ruled states have criticised the new directives, saying they could be used to target Muslims and that the government was using such orders as a smokescreen to divert attention from other key problems like unemployment and sky-rocketing inflation.

But Manish Sayana, a food safety officer in Uttarakhand, says the government’s orders are solely aimed at making food safe for consumption. He told the BBC that the food safety officers and the police have started conducting surprise checks at eateries and that they “urge people to wear masks and gloves and install CCTVs” wherever they go for checks.

Legal expert and journalist V Venkatesan says there is a need for new ordinances and laws around food safety to be properly debated on the assembly floor.

“According to me, the existing laws [under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006] are sufficient to take care of any offences connected to food safety. So, one needs to ask why the need for these new laws and directives?” he asks.

“Governments seem to think that laws prescribing harsh punishments will deter people from committing crimes, but research has shown that it is the proper implementation of laws that deter people from committing crimes. So, have the existing laws not been properly implemented in these states yet?”

For almost 35 years, Wyoming entrepreneur Alan Chadwick has run his business importing clothing from China and selling the Western-style gear to stores serving “working cowboys” in the US.

Now, as former President Donald Trump campaigns on a pledge to hit all goods coming into the country with a 10%-20% tariff, or border tax, which would rise to 60% for goods from China, Chadwick is having to drastically rethink his strategy.

The 66-year-old has been exploring moving manufacturing of his products, like wool shirts with snaps and canvas jackets, to India or Pakistan – or perhaps closing his Wyoming Traders business, which employs 16 people, and retiring altogether.

Chadwick said tariffs were a “tax on the American people” and warned that the expense for a company like his of opening a factory in the US was unrealistic.

But as he prepares to cast his ballot, he expects to swallow his qualms about tariffs in favour of other priorities, such as illegal immigration and opposition to abortion.

“I will vote for Trump even though he’s going to hurt our company if he does what he says he’s going to do,” he said.

Chadwick’s readiness to look past Trump’s views on tariffs is a sign of the contradictory impulses shaping American politics.

The Republican’s platform has shifted America – once a global champion of free trade – towards an embrace of policies that are designed to protect US companies and jobs from foreign competition, despite the potential economic drawbacks.

During his first term, Trump hit thousands of items from China with tariffs – measures that President Joe Biden, despite criticising them before entering the White House, kept in place.

This year, the Republican has put plans for sweeping tariffs at the centre of his presidential campaign, calling such duties “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”.

He argues his plans – which analysts say could return the average charge on imports to the highest level in at least 50 years – will spur job creation, reinvigorate US manufacturing, drive up wages and raise billions of dollars from other countries.

“We’re going to be a tariff nation. It’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country,” he has said on the trail.

His claims are rejected by most traditional economists, who say the policy would do little to expand employment in the US, while raising costs for everyday Americans and slowing growth around the world.

In the US, the Tax Foundation predicts the tariffs would reduce overall employment by 684,000 and shrink GDP by 0.8% – and that’s without taking into account the almost certain retaliation from other countries.

For a typical US household, costs would rise by at least $1,700, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, one of the lower estimates out there.

“It’s absurd,” economist Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said of Trump’s promises. “This is not the panacea that people are hoping for.”

Despite the warnings, some surveys indicate that Trump’s ideas are resonating: a September poll by Reuters/Ipsos found that 56% of likely voters favoured the Republican’s tariff plans.

Kyle Plesa, a 39-year-old Trump voter in Miami, Florida, said he did not think tariffs would have precisely the impact the candidate has promised, but the Republican’s focus on the pitfalls of globalisation had touched a nerve.

“People are upset about it and I think Trump is at least addressing it,” he said.

“I would probably prefer protecting business and paying a little bit more due to tariffs than I would dealing with the current state of inflation and raising taxes from the left,” he added.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has attacked Trump’s tariff expansion plans as a “national sales tax”, pledging a more targeted approach.

But Trump has said money brought in from tariffs could allow for big tax cuts – sometimes floating the idea of eliminating income tax altogether.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s decision to maintain Trump’s China tariffs – and expand them on items such as electric vehicles – has also allowed the Republican to claim a policy victory.

Biden has also signed off other protectionist policies, such as on historic government spending to boost manufacturing in sectors such as semiconductors and green energy.

He and Harris, like Trump, have opposed the takeover of US Steel by a Japanese company on national security grounds, raising chills in the business world about foreign investment.

Michael Froman, who served as the US trade representative under former President Barack Obama, said Washington’s turn to tools like tariffs and restrictions on foreign investment was “probably here to stay”.

“There certainly is less enthusiasm around pursuing what we might call an affirmative trade agenda in terms of liberalisation, openness, reduction of barriers,” he said. “We just have to recognise that none of these policies are actually free. They all impose some kind of trade-off.”

Jason Trice, the co-chief executive of Jasco, an Oklahoma-based lighting and electronics company that sells to major retailers such as Walmart, said the experience of his firm shows the damage tariffs can do.

Since 2019, it has paid hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tariffs while transforming its supply chain, moving the bulk of its manufacturing from China to places such as Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines.

He said the changes have made his firm less efficient and raised costs by about 10%-15%, which he has passed on to retailers, ultimately raising prices and contributing to inflation.

It has all taken a toll on his business, which has seen revenue fall 25% since 2020 and its staff numbers drop, via attrition, from 500 to 350.

“In 50 years in business, the Chinese government has… never done anything nearly as damaging to our business as what the Trump administration has done,” Trice said. “Tariffs have not helped bring jobs back to America. Tariffs have hurt American businesses and reduced employment opportunities.”

Lucerne International, a car parts supplier based in Michigan that has manufactured in China for decades, has also spent the last few years adjusting to the new climate.

With help from government incentives, the company is now working to open its first factory in its home state in 2026, plans expected to create more than 300 jobs over four years.

But though the project might sound like the kind of successful “reshoring” politicians in both parties want to see, chief executive Mary Buchzeiger, a long-time Republican, said it was a mistake for the US to try to “build walls” against its rivals.

“I don’t think tariffs are a long-term solution,” she said.

“All we’re going to do is continue to make ourselves uncompetitive on a global scale.”

• 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
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

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.

“To everyone’s astonishment, the vulgar insurgent has won!”

So wrote a British foreign minister in his diaries on 9 November 2016 after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to the White House.

“This looked remarkably like an abuse of power.”

So wrote the then-prime minister in her memoirs after waking up to realise that a Trump-led Washington had said US troops would be pulled out of the fight against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria “without any reference to the UK and other nations whose troops were operating alongside them”.

Sir Alan Duncan and Theresa May are the authors of these remarks, which the present prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, would do well to note as he ponders what difference a Trump or Kamala Harris presidency could make to the so-called special relationship between the UK and the US.

“Dealing with Donald Trump and his administration was like dealing with no other world leader,” writes the now Lady May in a book reflecting on her career.

“He was an American president like no other.”

There will be challenges, too, if the Democratic vice-president wins. She has yet to meet Sir Keir and has shown limited affinity for Europe – but she will be a vastly more conventional president than her rival.

On the off-chance that Sir Keir thought things might be different this time if Trump wins next week, the last few days showed him otherwise.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump winning?

The accusation of election interference made by the Trump campaign – courtesy of an, at best, foolishly written LinkedIn post – blew up into a transatlantic spat.

“This needs to be seen for what it is. It’s happened every election, every political party does it,” Sir Keir told me, in reference to people volunteering to work for one side or the other in American elections.

But the difference was obvious. On previous occasions it hasn’t caused an almighty row.

It was a reminder that Team Trump can be brash, unpredictable and have a long memory for perceived slights – and don’t appear to really give a stuff about its relationship with the British government.

What on earth might happen to the UK’s most cherished overseas partnership if Trump wins?

Until the row in the past week, things had, on the face of it, been going well for the new prime minister and US relations.

A few weeks ago, Sir Keir and Foreign Secretary David Lammy were in New York to meet the former president, with me accompanying them.

Teetering on a pavement on Fifth Avenue with the 58-storey Trump Tower behind me, we were trying to perfect the angle for broadcast so the garish gold lettering spelling out “TRUMP TOWER” was visible to viewers, even if a giant lorry barrelled down the road as I started talking.

I think we managed it. But a similar balancing act faced the two men. They were in New York for the United Nations General Assembly – but much of the chat on the trip was not about them meeting one of the world leaders present, but whether they could get time with a candidate hoping to become one: Donald Trump.

And they did get that meeting – which tells you rather a lot about the work British diplomats in America and London have been putting in, and the determination of Sir Keir and Mr Lammy to build bridges with the man who may be president again before long.

The prime minister later told me on BBC’s Newscast that “we both wanted to ensure we have a good relationship”. He added: “It’s up to me as prime minister to make sure I have a good relationship with whoever the president is.”

“I believe strongly in personal relations. Have the ability to, as necessary, pick up the phone to them to sort out issues or talk about issues. So it was a good dinner and I’m really glad that we managed to do it.”

Glad, no doubt, in part because of the buckets full of disobliging quotes there are about Trump, not least from David Lammy, who once described his host as a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” and a “tyrant in a toupee”.

There are no shortage of verbal skeletons in Labour’s cupboard about the man who could soon be back in the Oval Office.

In policy terms, a Trump presidency would likely bring rapid change – on climate change, on international trade (whacking up import taxes, tariffs) and on Ukraine.

Unlike a Harris administration, they would likely offer the UK a free trade deal, but it seems unlikely the terms of it would tempt London to sign up.

So what of Trump’s Democratic rival, the vice-president Kamala Harris?

Diplomatic niceties suggest if you meet one candidate in a foreign election contest, you meet the other one too.

But that isn’t likely to happen with Harris, despite Sir Keir visiting America three times since July.

No 10 blames the pressures on the vice-president’s diary in an election campaign.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: When will we know who’s won?
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• POLLS: Is Harris or Trump winning?
• ANALYSIS: What’s really behind America’s men v women election
• ON THE GROUND: ‘It’s rough out here’: Why Trump and Harris should listen to this mum of seven

It is worth stating the obvious too – while Sir Keir and Harris have never met, she is a vastly more known quantity and far more likely to be conventional in her approach to high office than her rival.

And Sir Keir has gone out of his way to spend a lot of time with President Biden in the last four months, including two trips to the White House and a recent meeting in Berlin.

An imperfect way of getting a sense of how his vice-president might govern – and with no opportunity to build a personal relationship – but not entirely useless at getting something of a handle on it.

Oh and it is worth making a very big picture point too – whoever wins. Increasingly, America’s focus is on the rise of the east and in particular China. Europe matters less to Washington than it did and that holds true whatever the result.

And so Westminster and the world awaits.

Whatever happens, expect the conversation to quickly turn to if and when the prime minister gets an early invite to Washington in the new year.

There will be a queue of leaders heading to the White House.

And what about a state visit to the UK – as Donald Trump revelled in, in 2019 – for a returning president like no other or for America’s first woman president?

Let’s see.

• Harris or Trump? What Chinese people want
• What the world thought of Harris-Trump debate
• Moscow had high hopes for Trump in 2016. It’s more cautious this time

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”.

He 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 the Republican nominee.

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.

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

Two new lawsuits have been filed against Sean “Diddy” Combs accusing the music mogul of sexual assault.

Both lawsuits, which were filed in New York, include accusations by men who were underage at the time of the alleged assaults.

In one, the alleged victim was 10 at the time. The second alleges Mr Combs assaulted a teenage boy who was auditioning for the popular MTV reality show “Making the Band”, which the rapper produced.

In a statement to the BBC, representatives for Mr Combs said he “never sexually assaulted or trafficked anyone – man or woman, adult or minor”.

More than two dozen lawsuits have been filed against Mr Combs in recent months with allegations that include rape, people being drugged, underage assaults, intimidation and sexual extortion.

The rapper is also facing federal criminal charges in an alleged sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges.

The two lawsuits filed on Monday were brought by attorney Tony Buzbee, who has said he represents more than 100 alleged victims and plans to file dozens of lawsuits against Mr Combs in the coming weeks.

In the first lawsuit, which was filed anonymously, the plaintiff alleges that Mr Combs assaulted him in 2005 when he was 10 years old and an aspiring actor and rapper.

To support their son’s ambitions in entertainment, the boy’s parents enlisted the help of an industry consultant who suggested they travel to New York for meetings with music professionals.

During the trip, the consultant set up an “audition” with Mr Combs, who requested a private meeting with the boy, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit claims the consultant escorted the boy to Mr Combs’ hotel room, where he was left alone. The boy performed several rap songs for Mr Combs, who told him he had the potential to become a star.

Read more on the allegations against Diddy:

• ‘He thought of himself as a king’: The parties that led to Diddy’s downfall
• The charges against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs explained
• ‘Chaos reigns’ – the notorious jail holding Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs
• When is Diddy’s trial starting? What to know about his legal trouble

According to the complaint, Mr Combs asked the boy how committed he was to pursuing his dream and the boy replied that he would “do anything”.

During the meeting, a third person gave the boy a soda that made him feel “funny”, but at the time, the plaintiff thought the feelings were from happiness over the meeting, the lawsuit states.

The rapper is then accused of disrobing and ordering the boy to perform a sex act.

When the boy resisted, Mr Combs allegedly assaulted him. The plaintiff says in the complaint that he lost consciousness and woke up in pain with his pants undone.

Mr Combs told him if he told anyone he would hurt his parents, according to the lawsuit.

In the second lawsuit, an unnamed male alleges he was sexually assaulted by Mr Combs in 2008.

The plaintiff was 17 when he was auditioning for the MTV reality competition Mr Combs produced.

During various rounds of the audition process, Mr Combs allegedly asked the plaintiff how he would handle situations involving sexual pressure.

He and his bodyguard went on to force the teen into sexual acts, the lawsuit states.

Mr Combs is currently being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York following his September arrest on federal charges.

He was denied bail and will remain in custody until his trial in May.

He has denied all the allegations against him.

“Mr Combs and his legal team have full confidence in the facts and the integrity of the judicial process,” his representatives said.

If convicted of racketeering, he could face life in prison.

The most senior prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, has denied allegations of sexual misconduct and asked for an immediate investigation.

In a statement, he announced that he had asked the ICC’s watchdog, the Independent Oversight Mechanism (IOM), to conduct the investigation.

He also said he had requested an inquiry into what he termed apparent “disinformation” related to the case.

This move follows recent media reports which cited a document outlining accusations against Mr Khan. They are understood to include unwanted sexual touching and “abuse”.

This is denied by Mr Khan, who has said he will co-operate fully with the inquiry.

The ICC has been under intense scrutiny following the prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants linked to the conflict in Gaza.

This development comes after the president of the ICC’s Assembly of States Parties (ASP), the court’s management oversight and legislative body, revealed last week that the IOM had been in contact with the alleged victim, but said it was not in a position to proceed with an investigation at that stage.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the female lawyer who was subjected to unwanted sexual advances by Mr Khan, over an extended period of time and in various locations, had concerns about the IOM’s competence and was not given adequate opportunity to have the matter investigated by an external body.

ASP President Paivi Kaukoranta referenced the IOM’s 2023-2024 annual report, which states that, “following the conversation with the alleged victim, the IOM was not in a position to proceed with an investigation at that stage. Measures to safeguard everyone’s rights were recommended.”

In an earlier statement, Mr Khan did not explicitly blame Israel, but did juxtapose the sexual misconduct allegations and efforts to undermine his position when he described this as “a moment in which myself and the International Criminal Court are subject to a wide range of attacks and threat”.

But the sexual misconduct allegations are understood to pre-date his request for arrest warrants linked to the conflict in Gaza.

A panel of three ICC judges is currently considering requests by Mr Khan to issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders – including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza.

The court of last resort was set up to deal with the most heinous crimes of an international nature when countries are unable or unwilling to prosecute high ranking individuals accused of atrocities.

Mr Khan said he learnt that the accusations were to be “aired publicly” with “deep sadness”, and that there was “no truth to suggestions of such misconduct”.

The serious allegations have reached the public domain at a sensitive moment for the ICC.

Based in The Hague, in the Netherlands, the ICC now faces an unrivalled crisis, with intensifying internal wranglings over the handling of the allegations, and apparent efforts by the court’s critics to politicise them.

Kaukoranta said the ICC had a “zero-tolerance policy” towards prohibited conduct, such as harassment, including sexual harassment, discrimination and abuse of authority, and that she remained “in contact with all individuals concerned to ensure that everyone’s rights continue to be safeguarded”.

A console used to record the Beatles’ Abbey Road album and found discarded in a skip is due to be auctioned off after a four-year restoration project.

Malcolm Jackson and his son Hamish Jackson, who are both from Hertfordshire, have worked within a wider group to restore the one-of-a-kind EMI TG12345 console.

It was used to record the Beatles’ hit album in the north London studios, which was released on 26 September 1969. It was later donated to a school that discarded it in a skip.

It was subsequently found but left unused for years before the project was started, and will now be auctioned by online music marketplace, Reverb, on 29 October.

Mr Jackson Snr and Jnr run their own company, Malcolm Jackson Quipment, from Rickmansworth, where they specialise in selling studio equipment and helping to sell studio space.

For the past four years, they were part of the team restoring the console under the guidance of former EMI engineer and Beatles collaborator Brian Gibson, who had used it in the 1960s.

It was the first of just 17 consoles worldwide made by EMI, and it helped record the Beatles last album in the late 1960s before they split up in 1970.

The console was eventually donated to a London school, but a few years later it was dumped in a skip when staff reportedly did not know how to use it.

However, a musician walking by one day was quick to notice it.

“It was the switches that someone noticed; they liked the look of the knobs and so pulled it out of the skip,” Mr Jackson Jnr explained.

“The skip was outside a school in St John’s Wood.”

Mr Jackson Snr added: “He was a guitarist and saw the switches and thought, ‘It’ll look great on my guitar’.”

According to Mr Jackson Snr, 31 British companies helped the team restore parts of the console during the project.

Asked why the console was so unique, he explained: “The sound is so great; it’s special.

“Anybody who has this console will have the best studio in the world.”

His son added that the quality of the sound was “something you couldn’t describe”.

“You really appreciate it when you’re actually recording with it.

“You understand, ‘Wow, that sounds really different’.”

Mr Jackson Jnr said the restored console was “definitely” a piece of equipment that could be used to make music again, but equally could be a collector’s item.

“You’re buying into the story – it’s that lovely combination of being the perfect engineering quality as well as having all this very significant history,” he added.

The FBI is investigating after two ballot drop boxes went up in flames in the Portland, Oregon, area early on Monday.

Hundreds of ballots were burned in Vancouver, a small city in Washington state less than 10 miles (16km) from Portland, with local media reporting that a device was stuck to the outside of a ballot drop box.

Meanwhile in the south-east part of Portland itself an incendiary device was placed inside a drop box, causing a small fire that damaged three ballots, according to officials.

Police said during a news conference on Monday that the two incidents were connected, and are “very similar” to an unsuccessful attempt to light another Vancouver ballot drop box on fire on 8 October.

Dedicated ballot drop boxes are used in a number of US states and cities to allow voters to submit their ballots early without having to wait in a queue on Election Day.

In September, the US Department of Homeland Security warned that some social media users have been promoting the destruction and sabotage of the boxes ahead of the election.

Ballots were last picked up from the Vancouver box on Saturday morning, and local officials said those who had deposited ballots since then should contact the local elections office.

Greg Kimsey, the local official overseeing elections, said the damaged box has been replaced, and officials are attempting to identify as many ballots as possible that were damaged in the fire.

Local police will increase their patrols around ballot drop boxes, he told the BBC.

“We hope these are isolated incidents that don’t occur again,” Kimsey said.

Authorities in Portland said they were attempting to contact the voters who cast the three ballots damaged in that incident so that they can be issued replacements.

Police also released photos of a car they said was linked to the incidents, which they described as a dark-coloured Volvo.

Oregon and Washington are safe Democratic states in the presidential race, but the contest for a congressional seat is close in Vancouver – not to be confused with the much larger Canadian city.

Washington’s 3rd District includes Vancouver and a huge and largely rural section of the southern part of the state.

The seat is currently held by Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez , who eked out a victory over Republican Joe Kent by less than 1% of the vote in 2022

Gluesenkamp Perez and Kent are headed to a rematch in next week’s election.

There was no word from police on who might have planted the devices that caused the ballot-box fires. The BBC has contacted authorities in both cities for comment.

The chief elections official in Washington, Secretary of State Steven Hobbs, said in a statement: “We take the safety of our election workers seriously and will not tolerate threats or acts of violence that seek to undermine the democratic process.”

Last week a man in Phoenix, Arizona, was charged with setting a US post box on fire that contained around 20 ballots, court records show.

The man told police his actions were not politically motivated, and that he was homeless and intended to commit a minor crime so that he would be sent to jail.

The Phoenix box was for general post, while the boxes set alight in Portland and Vancouver were only used for ballots.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• ECONOMY: Harris and Trump should listen to this mum of seven
• KATTY KAY: What’s really behind this men v women election
• CONGRESS: Democrats bet big on Texas and target Ted Cruz
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

Air quality in India’s capital Delhi has deteriorated to severe and extremely poor levels in the past few days, data shows.

Pollution levels crossed 25-30 times the World Health Organization (WHO)’s recommended safe limit at several locations in the city last week.

Experts have warned that the situation will worsen in the coming days due to weather conditions, use of firecrackers during the festival of Diwali on Thursday and burning of crop remains in neighbouring states.

Delhi and several northern Indian cities report extreme levels of air pollution between October and January every year, causing disruption to businesses, shutting down of schools and offices.

The levels of tiny particulate matter (known as PM 2.5), which can enter deep into the lungs and cause a host of diseases, reached as high as 350 micrograms per cubic metre in some areas on Monday, data from government-run Safar website shows.

According to the website, air quality is categorised as very poor when PM 2.5 levels reach 300 to 400, and it’s termed severe when the limit reaches 400-500.

Delhi gets enveloped in a thick blanket of smog every winter due to smoke, dust, low wind speed, vehicular emissions and crop stubble burning.

In November and December, farmers in the neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana burn crop stubble to clear their fields.

Farming groups say they need financial and technical help to find alternative ways of clearing crop remains but government schemes have so far not been effective.

The smoke from firecrackers set off during Diwali adds to the problem.

Like every year, the Delhi government has announced a complete ban on the manufacturing, storage and sale of fireworks ahead of the festival, which falls later this week.

But such bans have not been completely effective in the past as people source fireworks from other states.

The Delhi government has also enacted its Graded Response Action Plan, known as GRAP, to tackle pollution.

It bans all activities which involve the use of coal and firewood, as well as diesel generator use for non-emergency services.

Authorities in Delhi have warned residents to stay indoors as much as possible and have curbed construction activity in the city.

They have also urged people to use public transport to cut vehicular emissions.

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After a long wait, Apple has finally released its artificial intelligence (AI) tools for iPhone – to a select few.

Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI tools announced in June, became available to owners of some iPhones around the world on Monday.

The new features include notification summaries, tools to assist users in writing messages, and a glowing new interface for virtual assistant Siri.

But they will only be available to people with the latest devices – including all iPhone 16 models, and the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.

Apple Intelligence is also available on Mac computers and iPad tablets that are powered by its latest chips.

But some of the tools made available on Monday have arrived later than equivalent features on other popular devices.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook said the public release of its AI tools introduced “a new era” for its products.

It comes after the company said on Friday it would reward ethical hackers who could demonstrate vulnerabilities in its AI software with a bounty of up to $1m (£770,000).

• What is AI and how does it work?
• What’s the point of buying the latest smartphone?

The bundle of features released on Monday in its iOS 18.1 update are the first wave of AI tools previously shown off at Apple’s summer developer conference.

More features expected later this year include generating images and emoji from text prompts.

Google and Samsung have already introduced AI features to their devices.

These include allowing users to translate conversations in real-time, automatically organise notes, and search for something online by drawing a circle around it.

While initially making its Galaxy AI features available on its latest handsets, Samsung widened it to include S22 devices released in 2022.

The South Korean tech giant said in February it planned to introduce Galaxy AI for more than 100 million users within 2024.

Apple’s new Clean Up tool, allowing people to remove unwanted objects or people from an image, also follows Google’s previous release of a similar tool called Magic Eraser.

Mr Cook told the Wall Street Journal in October that the company was “perfectly fine with not being first”, adding it “takes a while to get it really great”.

A man has died while in detention at the Brook House migrant removal centre in West Sussex, the company that runs the centre has confirmed.

Security firm Serco said a 26-year-old man died at the facility, which is located next to Gatwick Airport, on Sunday.

The Home Office said its condolences were with the man’s family and friends.

Migrant removal centres house a range of detainees, including asylum seekers, people who have been refused the right to remain in the UK, or people awaiting deportation after completing a criminal sentence.

There is currently no maximum period for which detainees can be held.

A public inquiry into the centre last year described a toxic culture in which migrants were subjected to degrading treatment and the inappropriate use of force.

The public inquiry was launched following an investigation by BBC Panorama in 2017 prompted by a whistleblower who worked as a custody officer at the centre.

The final report identified 19 incidents of mistreatment against detainees over a five-month period in 2017.

They included unnecessary pain inflicted on four detainees, dangerous restraint techniques, and the forcible moving of detainees while they were naked or near naked.

The report also said detainees had been the targets of racist, homophobic, and humiliating language.

The centre itself was found to be overcrowded, dirty, and noise from aircraft at Gatwick, while there was also widespread use of the so-called zombie drug Spice.

In August, a further report by the Gatwick Independent Monitoring Board, which monitors the centre, found “continuing failings”, and last month Kate Eves, who chaired the public inquiry, said the government had agreed to implement only one of her 33 recommendations.

The Home Office has previously said it is “committed” to improving immigration detention facilities.

In a statement, charity Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group compared Brook House to a prison and said “no-one should take their last breath there”.

“We mourn that a young man died before he could be free,” it said.

Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights director, Steve Valdez-Symonds, called the death a “tragedy”.

“Brook House has gained notoriety for violence, racism and abuse,” he said.

“What part this may have in this man’s death we do not yet know, but these degradations derive from a wider failure to make a system respect human dignity and rights.

“Tragic incidents such as this emphasise why the government must bring humanity to the immigration system as much as any other policy area – people’s lives depend on it.”

Satellite images analysed by BBC Verify show damage to a number of military sites in Iran from Israeli air strikes on Saturday.

They include sites experts say were used for missile production and air defence, including one previously linked to Iran’s nuclear programme.

Satellite imagery following the Israeli strikes shows damage to buildings at what experts say is a major weapons development and production facility at Parchin, about 30km (18.5 miles) east of Tehran.

The site has been linked to rocket production according to experts from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

Comparing high-resolution satellite imagery taken on 9 September with an image captured on 27 October, it appears that at least four structures have been significantly damaged.

One of these structures, known as Taleghan 2, has been previously linked to Iran’s nuclear programme by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

In 2016 the IAEA found evidence of uranium particles at the site, raising questions about banned nuclear activity there.

Another site apparently targeted in the Israeli air strikes is at Khojir, about 20km north-west of Parchin.

Fabian Hinz of the ISS says “Khojir is known as the area with the highest concentration of ballistic missile-related infrastructure within Iran.”

It was the site of a mysterious large explosion in 2020.

Satellite photos show at least two buildings in the complex appear to have been severely damaged.

A military site at Shahroud, about 350km to the east of Tehran, has also sustained damage, according to satellite imagery taken after the Israeli strikes.

Located in the northern province of Semnan, this area is significant because it’s been involved in the production of long-range missile components, according to Fabian Hinz of the IISS.

Nearby is the Shahroud Space Centre, controlled by the Revolutionary Guards Corps, from which Iran launched a military satellite into space in 2020.

Israel has claimed that it successfully targeted Iran’s aerial defence systems at number of locations but it’s difficult to confirm this with the satellite imagery available.

We have obtained satellite imagery which appears to show damage to a site described by experts as a radar installation.

It’s located on Shah Nakhjir mountain close to the western city of Ilam, and Jeremy Binnie, Middle East specialist at Janes, a defence intelligence company, says this may have been a newly updated radar defence system.

The site itself was established decades ago, but satellite pictures analysed by open source experts show it has undergone major renovation in recent years.

We’ve also identified what appears to be damage to a storage unit at the Abadan Oil Refinery based in the south-western province of Khuzestan.

However, we don’t know what caused it and there is likely to be damage in some areas across Iran caused by debris or misfiring defence systems.

The New York Times cited Israeli officials as saying that the Abadan oil refinery was one of the sites targeted in its air strikes on Saturday morning.

Iranian authorities confirmed on Saturday that Khuzestan province had been targeted by Israel.

Abadan oil refinery is the country’s largest, capable of producing 500,000 barrels a day, according to its chief executive.

Satellite imagery isn’t always conclusive in identifying damaged structures.

For example, a photograph we have verified showing smoke rising near Hazrat Amir Brigade Air Defence base suggested it had been successfully targeted. But satellite imagery of the area captured on Sunday has too many shadows to confirm any damage to the site.

Iran launched a missile attack on Israel at the start of October for the second time this year, after firing 300 missiles and drones in April.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

A huge Mayan city has been discovered centuries after it disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico.

Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche.

They found the hidden complex – which they have called Valeriana – using Lidar, a type of radar survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.

They believe it is second in size only to Calakmul, thought to be the largest Mayan site in ancient Latin America.

The discovery of the city, which is the size of Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, was made “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet.

“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a radar survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.

It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of radar pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.

But when Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed – a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.

That is more than the number of people who live in the region today, the researchers say.

Mr Auld-Thomas and his colleagues named the city Valeriana after a nearby lagoon.

The find helps change an idea in Western thinking that the Tropics was where “civilisations went to die”, says Professor Marcello Canuto, a co-author in the research.

Instead, this part of the world was home to rich and complex cultures, he explains.

We can’t be sure what led to the demise and eventual abandonment of the city, but the archaeologists say climate change was a major factor.

Valeriana has the “hallmarks of a capital city” and was second only in density of buildings to the spectacular Calakmul site, around 100km away (62 miles).

It is “hidden in plain sight”, the archaeologists say, as it is just 15 minutes hike from a major road near Xhipul where mostly Mayan people now live.

There are no known pictures of the lost city because “no-one has ever been there”, the researchers say, although local people may have suspected there were ruins under the mounds of earth.

The city, which was about 16.6 sq km, had two major centres with large buildings around 2km (1.2 miles) apart, linked by dense houses and causeways.

It has two plazas with temple pyramids, where Mayans would have worshipped, hidden treasures like jade masks and buried their dead.

It also had a court where people would have played an ancient ball game.

There was also evidence of a reservoir, indicating that people used the landscape to support a large population.

In total, Mr Auld-Thomas and Prof Canuto surveyed three different sites in the jungle. They found 6,764 buildings of various sizes.

Professor Elizabeth Graham from University College London, who was not involved in the research, says it supports claims that Mayans lived in complex cities or towns, not in isolated villages.

“The point is that the landscape is definitely settled – that is, settled in the past – and not, as it appears to the naked eye, uninhabited or ‘wild’,” she says.

The research suggests that when Mayan civilisations collapsed from 800AD onwards, it was partly because they were so densely populated and could not survive climate problems.

“It’s suggesting that the landscape was just completely full of people at the onset of drought conditions and it didn’t have a lot of flexibility left. And so maybe the entire system basically unravelled as people moved farther away,” says Mr Auld-Thomas.

Warfare and the conquest of the region by Spanish invaders in the 16th century also contributed to eradication of Mayan city states.

Lidar technology has revolutionised how archaeologists survey areas covered in vegetation, like the Tropics, opening up a world of lost civilisations, explains Prof Canuto.

In the early years of his career, surveys were done by foot and hand, using simple instruments to check the ground inch by inch.

But in the decade since Lidar was used in the Mesoamerican region, he says it’s mapped around 10 times the area that archaeologists managed in about a century of work.

Mr Auld-Thomas says his work suggests there are many sites out there that archaeologists have no idea about.

In fact so many sites have been found that researchers cannot hope to excavate them all.

“I’ve got to go to Valeriana at some point. It’s so close to the road, how could you not? But I can’t say we will do a project there,” says Mr Auld-Thomas.

“One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study,” he adds.

The research is published in the academic journal Antiquity.

Israel’s parliament has voted to pass legislation banning the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa) from operating within Israel and Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, within three months.

Contact between Unrwa employees and Israeli officials will also be banned, severely limiting the agency’s ability to operate in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Co-operation with the Israeli military – which controls all crossings into Gaza – is essential for Unrwa to transfer aid into the war-torn territory. It is the main UN organisation working on the ground there.

Unrwa staff will no longer have legal immunity within Israel, and the agency’s headquarters in East Jerusalem will be closed.

UN Secretary General António Guterres said implementing the laws “would be detrimental for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and for peace and security in the region as a whole”, while Unrwa’s chief Philippe Lazzarini said it “will only deepen the suffering of Palestinians”.

A number of countries, including the US, the UK and Germany, have expressed serious concern about the move.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy called it “totally wrong”, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the laws risk making Unrwa’s “essential work for Palestinians impossible, jeopardising the entire international humanitarian response in Gaza”.

The US State Department said Unrwa played a “critical” role in distributing humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip. Almost all of the enclave’s population of more than two million people are dependent on aid and services from the agency.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “Unrwa workers involved in terrorist activities against Israel must be held accountable”, but added that “sustained humanitarian aid must remain available in Gaza”.

“We stand ready to work with our international partners to ensure Israel continues to facilitate humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza in a way that does not threaten Israel’s security,” he said on X.

Israel has objected to Unrwa for decades, although this opposition has intensified in recent years.

Israel says Unrwa staff have colluded with Hamas in Gaza, and claimed 19 Unrwa workers took part in the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023.

The UN investigated Israel’s claim and fired nine of those accused, but it said Israel had not provided evidence for broader allegations. Unrwa insists that dealings with Hamas are purely to enable the agency to do its job.

Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, approved the two bills by an overwhelming majority on Monday evening.

Presenting the legislation, Yuli Edelstein, the chairman of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and security committee, accused Unrwa of being used as a “cover for terrorist actions”.

“There is a deep connection between the terrorist organisation (Hamas) and Unrwa, and Israel cannot put up with it,” he said in parliament.

Unrwa – the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees – has for decades provided a range of services and support including healthcare and education to millions of Palestinians in Gaza.

Since the war broke out last year, the agency’s presence on the ground has made it a crucial part of efforts to get humanitarian supplies to civilians, almost all of whom are dependent on aid for survival.

Unrwa Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini condemned the ban as “unprecedented”, and said it “opposes the UN Charter and violates the State of Israel’s obligations under international law”.

He said people in Gaza had already endured “sheer hell”, adding: “It ⁠will deprive over 650,000 girls and boys there from education, putting at risk an entire generation of children.”

About two-and-half million Palestinians are registered with Unrwa in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

In northern Gaza, where Israeli troops are conducting military operations against Hamas fighters, hundreds of thousands of people are living in increasingly desperate conditions.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk said on Friday that “the Israeli military is subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and risk of starvation”.

Many Palestinians believe the Israeli military is implementing a “surrender or starve” plan in Gaza’s 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 says it is making sure that civilians get out of harm’s way.

Israel launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to its 7 October attack on Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

More than 42,710 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

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

In the North Philadelphia neighbourhood of Fairhill, signs of Puerto Rico are never far off. The US island territory’s red, white and blue flag adorns homes and businesses, and the sounds of salsa and reggaetón boom from passing cars and restaurants selling fried plantains and spit-roasted pork.

The area is the beating heart of Philadelphia’s more than 90,000-strong Puerto Rican population and forms a key part of Pennsylvania’s Latino community, which both the Democrats and Republicans have sought to woo ahead of the 5 November election.

But on Monday morning, many locals were left seething at a joke made at Donald Trump’s rally the night before in New York, in which comic Tony Hinchcliffe described Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage”.

The joke, some said, could come back to haunt the Republicans in a key swing state that Democrats won by a narrow margin of 1.17% – about 82,000 votes – in 2020.

“The campaign just hurt itself, so much. It’s crazy to me,” said Ivonne Torres Miranda, a local resident who said she remains disillusioned by both candidates – Republican Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris – with just eight days to go in the campaign.

“Even if he [Mr Hinchcliffe ] was joking – you don’t joke like that.

“We’re Puerto Ricans. We have dignity, and we have pride,” she told the BBC, speaking in rapid-fire Spanish with a strong Puerto Rican accent.

“You’ve got to think before saying things.”

• US election polls: Who is ahead – Harris or Trump?

In the aftermath, the Trump campaign was quick to distance itself from Mr Hinchcliffe’s joke, with a spokesman saying the remark “does not reflect the views” of Trump or his campaign.

The Harris campaign pounced on the joke, with the vice-president pointing to the comment as a sign that Trump is “fanning the fuel of trying to divide” Americans.

Her views were echoed by Puerto Rican celebrities Bad Bunny and Jennifer Lopez, who both endorsed Harris on Sunday.

A campaign official told CBS, the BBC’s US partner, that the controversy was a political gift to the Democrats.

Some Puerto Rican residents agree with that assessment.

“[The joke] just put it in the bag for us. He literally just gave us the win,” said Jessie Ramos, a Harris supporter. “He has no idea how hard the Latino community is going to come out and support Kamala Harris.”

Residents of Puerto Rico – a US island territory in the Caribbean – are unable to vote in presidential elections, but the large diaspora in the US can.

Across Pennsylvania, about 600,000 eligible voters are Latino.

More than 470,000 of them are Puerto Ricans – one of the largest concentrations in the country and a potential deciding factor in a state where polls show Harris and Trump in an extremely tight race.

North Philadelphia in particular has been a target for Harris, who on Sunday made a campaign stop at Freddy & Tony’s, a Puerto Rican restaurant and community hub in Fairhill.

The same day, Harris unveiled a new policy platform for Puerto Rico, promising economic development and improved disaster relief and accusing Trump of having “abandoned and insulted” the island during Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Whether or not this will sway Puerto Rican voters remains to be seen.

Freddy & Tony’s owner, Dalma Santiago, told the BBC that she is not sure whether the joke will make a difference but that she believed that it was heard “loud and clear” in Fairhill and other Puerto Rican communities.

“Everybody has their own opinion,” she told the BBC. “But nobody will be forgetting that one.”

Similarly, Moses Santana, a 13-year US Army veteran who works at a harm reduction facility in Fairhill, said he is unsure of the joke’s impact.

In an interview with the BBC on a Fairhill street corner, Mr Santana said the area is traditionally weary of politicians of all kinds, with many believing that both parties have failed to address socio-economic issues, crime and drug abuse there.

“Folks around here tend not to get what they ask for,” he added. “Even when they vote.”

On Tuesday, Trump will campaign in Allentown, a town of about 125,000 in central Pennsylvania where about 33,000 people identify as Puerto Rican.

But even among Trump supporters in Pennsylvania’s wider Latino community, the joke was poorly received.

That included Republican voter Jessenia Anderson, a Puerto Rican resident from the town of Johnstown about 240 miles (386 km) west of Philadelphia.

Ms Anderson, a military veteran who was born in New York’s heavily Puerto Rican Lower East Side, is a frequent attendee of Trump rallies in Pennsylvania.

She described the joke as “deeply offensive” and said the routine felt “wildly out of place” – and implored her fellow Republicans to engage in “thoughtful and respectful conversations”.

But Ms Anderson has no plan to switch her vote.

“My belief in the party’s potential to make a positive impact remains strong,” she said.

“I hope they will approach Latino voters with the respect they deserve.”

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know
• EXPLAINER: The seven states that will decide the election
• ECONOMY: Harris and Trump should listen to this mum of seven
• KATTY KAY: What’s really behind this men v women election
• CONGRESS: Democrats bet big on Texas and target Ted Cruz
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

A heavy police response has stifled Halloween celebrations in Shanghai, in what many have viewed as an attempt by authorities to crack down on large public gatherings and freedom of expression.

Witnesses have told the BBC they saw police dispersing crowds of costumed revellers on the streets of Shanghai, while photos of apparent arrests have spread on social media.

Authorities have yet to comment. While there has been no official notice prohibiting Halloween celebrations, rumours of a possible crackdown began circulating online earlier this month.

It comes a year after Halloween revellers in Shanghai went viral for donning costumes poking fun at the Chinese government and its policies.

Pictures from last year’s Halloween event showed people dressing up as a giant surveillance camera, Covid testers, and a censored Weibo post.

This year, footage posted to social media showed people dressed in seemingly uncontroversial costumes, including those of comic book characters such as Batman and Deadpool, being escorted into the back of police vans. Some party-goers said online they were forced to remove make-up at a police station.

But it remains unclear what – if any – types of costumes police were targeting, as many other revellers were left alone.

Eyewitnesses have told BBC Chinese that on Friday a large number of police officers and vehicles gathered on Julu Road in downtown Shanghai, and people dressed in costumes were asked to leave the scene.

On Saturday, police were seen dispersing revellers from the city’s Zhongshan Park.

The BBC spoke to a Shanghai resident who was at the park with friends that night. “Every time someone new showed up on the scene, everyone would go, ‘Wow that’s cool’ and laugh. There were policemen on the sidelines, but I felt they also wanted to watch,” the person said.

But the festive mood ended around 22:00 local (14:00 GMT) when a new group of policemen arrived and began cordoning off the park, according to the eyewitness. “As we left the park, we were told to take off all our headgear. We were told everyone leaving from that exit could not be costumed.”

The person added that they saw a man clash with police officers when he tried to enter.

Another Shanghai resident said the number of police officers taking down the details of people dressed in costumes appeared to exceed the number of revellers themselves.

“Shanghai is not supposed to be like this,” the person said. “It has always been very tolerant.”

The BBC has asked the Shanghai police for a response.

Rumours of a crackdown have been circulating in recent days.

Earlier this month, some business owners who run coffeeshops, bookshops and bars in Shanghai received government notices discouraging Halloween events, the BBC understands.

Around the same time, messages from what appeared to be a government work chat group spread online, suggesting there would be a ban on large-scale Halloween activities. The BBC could not verify these messages.

Some universities issued warnings to their students.

One student at the prestigious Fudan University said they were told by school authorities recently not to participate in gatherings. On Sunday evening, the student received a call from a school counsellor.

“They called me to ask if I had gone out, if I had taken part [in activities]. And if I did participate, I could not reveal I was a student [of the university],” the person told the BBC.

The BBC has also seen a notice from another university in Shanghai issued to students in mid-October discouraging them to “reduce participation in big and small gatherings in the near future”.

This is not the first time Chinese authorities have cracked down on fancy dress. In 2014, Beijing police said people wearing Halloween-themed costumes on the city’s metro system could face arrest, claiming costumes could cause crowds to gather and create “trouble”.

But this year comes on the back of the White Paper Protest movement, which began in November 2022 when large groups of people, mostly youths, gathered spontaneously one night on a street in Shanghai to mourn the victims of a fire.

That gathering soon turned into brief – but widespread – demonstrations against the country’s Covid policies, in one of the biggest challenges to the Chinese government’s authority since the Tiananmen protests.

A woman missing for six days in Australia’s Snowy Mountains has been found “dazed and injured” by emergency services after a massive search and rescue operation.

New South Wales (NSW) Police said Lovisa Sjoberg was located on Sunday afternoon local time, suffering from a suspected snake bite, dehydration and a rolled ankle.

The avid photographer was treated for her injuries at the scene, before being rushed to hospital, where she is in a stable condition.

Sjoberg, 48, is a regular visitor to the remote Kosciuszko National Park, where she often documents wild horses living in the mountains.

Fears grew for her safety after a hire car company reported that her car had not been returned and she could not be contacted. Her car was later found unlocked and abandoned.

NSW Police launched an appeal on 21 October to the public to help find her and began a widescale search using sniffer dogs, firefighters, park rangers and a helicopter with infra-red capabilities.

Concerns increased after rescue teams failed to find her after several days and temperatures in the area surrounding Kosciuszko National Park dropped as low as zero degrees at night.

Sjoberg was found on Sunday afternoon local time by a National Parks and Wildlife Service officer on the Nungar Creek Trail at Kiandra.

Supt Toby Lindsay told media that Sjoberg had been “wandering [for] days” through “tough” bushland, and told rescuers she believed she had been bitten by a copperhead snake four days earlier.

The species tends to be shy rather than aggressive, but their venom is a powerful neurotoxin and can be fatal without medical intervention.

“She’s in fact very fortunate to be alive… she obviously went through a tough time,” Supt Lindsay said.

He added that she was now in a “reasonable condition” and is ” happy to be alive”.

The Vietnamese people smuggler emerged, briefly and hesitantly, from the shadows of a scraggly forest close to the northern French coastline.

“Move away from the others. Come this way, fast,” he said, gesturing across a disused railway line to a member of our team, who had spent weeks posing undercover as a potential customer.

Moments later, the smuggler – a tall figure with bright dyed blonde hair – turned away sharply, like a startled fox, and vanished down a narrow path into the woods.

Earlier this year, Vietnam emerged – abruptly – as the biggest single source of new migrants seeking to cross the Channel to the UK illegally in small boats. Arrivals surged from 1,306 in the whole of 2023, to 2,248 in the first half of 2024.

Our investigation – including interviews with Vietnamese smugglers and clients, French police, prosecutors and charities – reveals how Vietnamese migrants are paying double the usual rate for an “elite” small boat smuggling experience that is faster and more streamlined. As the death toll in the Channel hits a record level this year, there are some indications that it might be safer too.

As part of our work to penetrate the Vietnamese operations, we met an experienced smuggler who is operating in the UK and forging documents for migrants seeking to reach Europe. Separately, our undercover reporter – posing as a Vietnamese migrant – arranged, by phone and text, to meet a smuggling gang operating in the woods near Dunkirk in order to find out how the process works.

“A small boat service is £2,600. Payment to be made after you arrive in the UK,” the smuggler, who called himself Bac, texted back. We heard similar figures from other sources. We believe Bac may be a senior figure in a UK-based gang and the boss of Tony, the blonde man in the woods.

He had given us instructions about the journey from Europe to the UK, explaining how many migrants first flew from Vietnam to Hungary – where we understand it is currently relatively easy for them to get a legitimate work visa, often obtained using forged documents. Bac said that the migrants then travelled on to Paris and then to Dunkirk.

“Tony can pick you up at the [Dunkirk] station,” he offered, in a later text.

Vietnamese migrants are widely considered to be vulnerable to networks of trafficking groups. These groups may seek to trap them in debt and force them to pay off those debts by working in cannabis farms or other businesses in the UK.

It is clear, from several recent visits to the camps around Dunkirk and Calais, that the Vietnamese gangs and their clients operate separately from other groups.

“They keep to themselves and are much more discreet than the others. We see them very little,” says Claire Millot, a volunteer for Salam, an NGO that supports migrants in Dunkirk.

A volunteer with another charity tells us of recently catching a rare glimpse of roughly 30 Vietnamese buying life jackets at a Dunkirk branch of the sports gear chain Decathlon.

As well as keeping their distance, the streamlined service offered by the Vietnamese gangs involves far less waiting around in the camps. Many African and Middle Eastern migrants spend weeks, even months, in grim conditions on the French coast. Some don’t have enough cash to pay for a place on a small boat, and try to earn their fare by working for the smuggling gangs. Many are intercepted on the beaches by French police and have to make several attempts before they successfully cross the Channel.

On a recent visit we saw dozens of tired families – from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Eritrea and elsewhere – gathering in the drizzle at a muddy spot where humanitarian groups provide daily meals and medical assistance. A group of children played Connect 4 at a picnic table, while a man sought treatment for a wound to his arm. Several parents told us that they had heard about a four-month-old Kurdish boy who had drowned the previous night after the boat he was travelling in capsized during an attempted Channel crossing. None of them said the death would discourage them from making their own attempt.

There were no Vietnamese in sight. It seems clear that Vietnamese smugglers tend to bring their clients to the camps in northern France when the weather is already looking promising and a crossing is imminent.

We had first encountered the new influx of Vietnamese migrants earlier this year, stumbling on one of their camps near Dunkirk. It appeared to be significantly neater and more organised than other migrant camps, with matching tents pitched in straight lines and a group cooking a tantalising and elaborate meal involving fried garlic, onions and Vietnamese spices.

“They’re very organised and united and stay together in the camps. They’re quite something. When they arrive at the coast, we know that a crossing will be done very quickly. These are most likely people with more money than others,” says Mathilde Potel, the French police chief heading the fight against illegal migration in the region.

The Vietnamese do not control the small boat crossings themselves, which are largely overseen by a handful of Iraqi Kurdish gangs. Instead they negotiate access and timings.

“The Vietnamese are not allowed to touch that part of the process [the crossing]. We just deliver clients to [the Kurdish gangs],” says another Vietnamese smuggler, who we are calling Thanh, currently living in the UK. He tells us the extra cash secures priority access to the small boats for their Vietnamese clients.

While the relative costs are clear, the issue of safety is murkier. It is a fact – and perhaps a telling one – that during the first nine months of 2024, not a single Vietnamese was among the dozens of migrants confirmed to have died while trying to cross the Channel. But in October, a Vietnamese migrant did die in one incident, in what has now become the deadliest year on record for small boat crossings.

It is possible that by paying extra, the Vietnamese are able to secure access to less crowded boats, which are therefore less likely to sink. But we’ve not been able to confirm this.

What does seem clearer is that the Vietnamese smugglers are cautious about sending their clients out on boats in bad weather. Texts from Bac to our undercover reporter included specific suggestions regarding travel to the camp, and the best day to arrive.

“Running a small boat service depends on the weather. You need small waves. And it must be safe… We had good weather earlier this week and lots of boats left… It would be good if you can be here [in Dunkirk] tomorrow. I’m planning a [cross-Channel] move on Thursday morning,” Bac texted.

Sitting outside their tents in two separate camps in the woods near Dunkirk earlier this month, two young men told us almost identical stories about the events which had prompted them to leave Vietnam in order to seek new lives. How they had borrowed money to start small businesses in Vietnam, how those businesses had failed, and how they had then borrowed more money from relatives and loan sharks, to pay smugglers to bring them to the UK.

“Life in Vietnam is difficult. I couldn’t find a proper job. I tried to open a shop, but it failed. I was unable to pay back the loan, so I must find a way to earn money. I know this [is illegal] but I have no other option. I owe [the Vietnamese equivalent of] £50,000. I sold my house, but it wasn’t enough to pay off the debt,” said Tu, 26, reaching down to stroke a kitten that strolled past.

Two chickens emerged from behind another tent. A mirror hung from a nearby tree. Plug sockets were available under a separate awning for charging phones.

The second migrant, aged 27, described how he had reached Europe via China, sometimes on foot or in trucks.

“I heard from my friends in the UK that life is much better there, and I can find a way to make some money,” said the man, who did not want to give his name.

Are these people victims of human trafficking? It is unclear. All the Vietnamese migrants we spoke to said they were in debt. If they ended up working for the smuggling gangs in the UK in order to pay for their journey and to pay off their debts then they would, indeed, have been trafficked.

We had sought to draw the blonde Vietnamese smuggler, Tony, out of a nearby forest and onto more neutral territory, where his gang – possibly armed, as other gangs certainly are – might pose less of a threat to us. We intended to confront him about his involvement in a lucrative and often deadly criminal industry. But Tony remained wary of leaving his own “turf” and grew impatient and angry when our colleague, still posing as a potential migrant, declined to follow him into the forest.

“Why are you staying there? Follow that path. Move quickly! Now,” Tony ordered.

There was a brief pause. The sound of birdsong drifted across the clearing.

“What an idiot… Do you just want to stand there and get caught by the police?” the smuggler asked, with rising exasperation.

Then he turned away and retreated into the woods.

Had our colleague been a genuine migrant, she would probably have followed Tony. We were told by other sources that once in the camps, migrants were not allowed to leave unless they paid hundreds of dollars to the smugglers.

The Vietnamese gangs may be promising a quick, safe, “elite” route to the UK, but the reality is much darker – a criminal industry, backed by threats, involving deadly risks and no guarantee of success.

The Budget on Wednesday will reveal how much tax each of us will pay and how much the government will choose to spend on services like the NHS, schools and transport.

BBC News has been speaking to people with a range of incomes about what they want from the Budget and, in some cases, how they fear they could be impacted.

If there are issues you would like to see covered, you can get in touch via Your Voice, Your BBC News.

Mum-of-two Hannah Clarke from Rutland in the East Midlands was juggling two part-time jobs but recently started studying full-time for a midwifery degree. She also works six to eight hours a week as a beauty technician.

She takes home about £1,800 a month, mostly via a student loan which she doesn’t pay tax on. She says this just about covers her mortgage payments – which went up by a third earlier this year – bills and fuel.

“I just about make ends meet, but it isn’t easy and I do sometimes have to ask for help,” she says.

She would like free school meals to not be means tested but failing that, says the eligibility threshold should be lowered. She also says if fuel duty goes up then the extra cost per litre of petrol or diesel “should absolutely not be passed on to drivers”.

Luken Coleman works as a Level 3 business administration apprentice for a recruitment agency, earning about £1,500 a month. Previously he worked in shops and in manual labour jobs.

He works full-time Monday to Friday and goes to college one day a month.

Luken lives in Newbury with his parents and pays them £200 a month rent. While he pays all his own bills, he cannot afford to move out and says he would like to see apprentices get paid more.

“The average rent where I live is between £700 to £900 per month. If I did move out, I’d have to move further away, so I’d need a car.”

As someone nearing his mid-20s, he says it can feel like you’re not achieving much when you are still living at home.

“It’s a mental health thing. Money-wise, apprentices are paid less because you are learning on the job, but it can make you feel less about yourself when you are not fully independent.”

Yasmin Taylor from Kent is a tech consultant and single mother of two young children.

Her biggest outgoing is £2,600 per month on childcare. The children’s father also helps with costs.

“I studied and worked hard to get a job that pays a great salary, but I feel like I’m being punished for having children,” she says.

Because of her £150,000 salary, Yasmin does not qualify for Child Benefit payments, or help via tax-free childcare or 30 hours free childcare.

She acknowledges that her income classifies her as a high earner, but says: “You still have to pay the gas and the electric and that’s gone up a lot.”

One of her main concerns is around energy bills this winter.

She is also interested in what the chancellor may do on capital gains tax (CGT). Although she is not subject to CGT now, the next step in her career would be to become a partner at her firm, which would involve her buying shares in the company – which may later be subject to CGT if she were to sell them.

Kirsty Brett works part-time as a cleaner in a care home, earning the minimum wage of £11.44 an hour.

She recently moved in with her sister in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk while she looks for new accommodation, after leaving her old job as a carer in Essex.

Kirsty has osteoporosis, which made her work difficult, and also found it too expensive living in Essex. She receives £550 a month in Personal Independent Payments.

She would like to see a rise in the National Living Wage.

“People should be paid at least £15 an hour. Because the cost of living has gone up. That would help a lot of people.

“The wage they class as minimum wage – I don’t see how it sustains someone.”

She is now looking at “the cheapest options” for somewhere to live. She says she’s found renting a one-bedroom flat costs about £1,300 a month, so Kirsty is instead looking at renting a caravan for around £800 a month.

Nicole Healing rents a one-bed flat in Brighton for £1,250 a month.

Nicole previously worked as a civil servant and in digital marketing, but hasn’t been able to work for the last few years due to several disabilities, including a connective tissue disorder that causes their joints to dislocate.

Nicole, who uses them and they pronoun, said they receive Employment and Support Allowance of £1,042, Personal Independent Payments of £798, and Housing Benefit of £917 per month.

Though they feel in a “fortunate position” currently, Nicole says: “I feel I am at the mercy of the DWP.”

Nicole is “completely freaking out” about possible cuts to benefits in the Budget and what that could mean for them.

“I am fearful about the negative rhetoric in the media about disabled people in receipt of benefits.”

They say their energy bill has gone up significantly in the last few years and they are worried their rent will also increase.

“I am not able to use my PIP for what it’s meant to be used for. Half of the payment goes towards my rent.”

Nicole wants the Budget to clarify what support is planned for disabled people, and is hoping for a cap on energy bills this winter.

Blogger and web developer Andrew Cunningham lives with his husband in Glasgow. He describes the couple as “middle earners but diligent savers” who have been investing in their individual savings accounts (ISAs) and their pensions to fund their retirement.

He is concerned about rumours that there might be a cap on the amount of money you can hold tax-free in an ISA in the Budget. “That would hit us and would be a massive disincentive to save.”

He is also worried that any flat rate introduced on pension tax relief would hit middle earners.

As he is self-employed, Andrew has set up a self-invested personal pension. A single rate tax relief would mean less money going into his pension.

“We are living our lives assuming we won’t get a state pension when we get to pension age, at least not in the form it is now,” he says, pointing out that spending on the state pension has grown over the years as a percentage of the government’s budget.

He thinks in years to come, the government might have to raise the state pension age again, or cut the amount of benefit you get.

Ben Howard and his wife Sarah from Bristol are expecting their first child in February. They have a joint income of £100,000. In September, their mortgage repayments went up by 60% to £1,400.

Ben says they’re “comfortable”, but thinks the government should do more around the cost of childcare, because in some cases, “it’s more efficient for [parents] not to work”.

“But that puts us back in terms of what our career aspirations are.”

Ben is not fully convinced that Labour will keep their promise of not raising taxes on working people. “Am I going to see tax on my pension contributions, any kind of stealth tax?”

He expects to be worse off after Budget day. “They’re going very big on business and growing the economy, and I get that, but nothing’s resonating with me and my pay packet.”

Allana Lamb is an army and navy veteran and a retired social worker. She is a couple of pounds over the threshold for pension credit so she does not get the winter fuel allowance.

“I am very concerned about the government stopping it,” she says. “Yes, [the state pension] is triple locked but it doesn’t cover the cost of living.”

She feels “the rich are going to get richer” from this Budget and that “those at the bottom of the pile or on the cusp of the bottom” will be hit with more taxes.

Allana gets both the full state pension and a small army pension, totalling £1,200 a month. She says her income isn’t enough for all of her outgoings, and expects her mortgage to “virtually double” in the next few years. “That’ll put me in negative monthly outgoings.”

Allana also thinks the threshold for getting some council support to pay for social care costs should be raised. Currently people with assets up to £23,250 qualify. Labour has already scrapped plans to increase this.

Super-strength drugs linked to hundreds of deaths have been found in samples of fake medicines bought across the UK, the BBC can reveal.

We found more than 100 examples of people trying to buy prescription medicines such as diazepam – commonly used to treat anxiety, muscle spasms and seizures – and instead receiving products containing nitazenes.

The synthetic opioid drugs have been connected to 278 deaths across the country in a year, according to the National Crime Agency (NCA). Nitazenes can be stronger than both heroin and fentanyl, a prolific killer in the US.

Martin Raithelhuber, an illicit synthetic drug expert from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said the BBC’s findings were a “very worrying development”.

A government spokesperson said it was “securing our borders from the threat” through “world-leading intelligence, dedicated cross-government taskforce and extensive international networks”.

The contaminated substances were identified in anonymous samples submitted to WEDINOS, the only national drug-checking service in the UK.

It said the fake medicines looked like “the same kind of packet you might get from your chemist on the high street” but were “most likely purchased from illicit online pharmacies”.

Anne Jacques had never heard of nitazenes when a police officer knocked at her door in the early hours of 17 July 2023 and said her son had been found dead at his student flat.

Alex Harpum, 23, had been preparing for a career as an opera singer and had been accepted for a two-year masters course.

“Watching him sing was one of the biggest joys in my life ever,” Ms Jacques said.

It was initially suspected the cause of his death was sudden adult death syndrome, but eight months later Alex’s family learned he had taken a substance contaminated with a nitazene.

Phone records suggested he had tried to buy tablets usually sold as Xanax, which are only available with a private prescription in the UK.

Ms Jacques believes Alex was doing so because he often struggled with sleeping while taking medication for his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The traces of nitazenes were only detected after she queried with police why earlier tests had not looked for them.

Ms Jacques said she remained in “disbelief” at the lack of testing, adding: “If I hadn’t pushed for better answers in the middle of massive grief, then to this day I would have no idea how he actually died.

“Unless we’re testing for them, how is anyone going to be aware and informed [of the dangers]?”

A Scotland Yard spokesperson said there had been “delays beyond the control of the Met” relating to the need for, and timing of, specialist testing in this case.

The North London Coroner Service said it remained in contact with the family regarding their concerns.

The BBC analysed sample results published by WEDINOS, a Public Health Wales service which shares information about the UK’s illegal drugs market. It records what the person submitting each sample said they had intended to buy.

In the year to September 2024, there were 130 instances of someone trying to buy medicines illegal to posses without a prescription and instead receiving substances contaminated with nitazenes.

Many were purporting to be benzodiazepines, such as diazepam, and insomnia treatments including temazepam and zolpidem.

Nitazenes were also found in substances masquerading as promethazine, an allergy medication.

Professor Rick Lines, from WEDINOS, said: “Perhaps people have found that they weren’t able to continue on a legitimate prescription and decided to go through what they think is an alternative legitimate route, but is in fact not.”

The government plans to make all types of nitazenes Class A drugs. Fifteen synthetic opioids were reclassified in March.

Under the Misuse of Drugs Act, those caught in their supply and production could face up to life in prison while those in possession could face up to seven years.

Mr Raithelhuber said there was a “lesson to learn… from North America”, where people became addicted to prescription painkillers before the use of fake medicines containing fentanyl became widespread.

“So here in Europe, we are not yet in that situation, but this could be the early signs of traffickers trying to expand,” he said.

“I think it’s a warning call, maybe for all other countries in Europe… that nitazenes are probably here to stay for the time being, and that their potential negative impact on the health of users is huge.”

He said because both benzodiazepines and nitazenes were depressants, “their combined effect increases the risk of overdose significantly”.

Synthetic opioid effects

Signs that someone may have taken one of these drugs:

• Small, narrowed pupils
• Reduced or loss of consciousness
• Dizziness or drowsiness
• Difficulty breathing
• Nausea or vomiting
• Cold or clammy skin
• Blue or grey lips and fingernails
• Low blood pressure or decreased heart rate

Anyone who has consumed synthetic opioids and experiences the symptoms described should seek urgent medical treatment.

The groups of people most at risk were “those who have always been at the highest risk of all drug-related harm,” said Harry Sumnall, a professor in substance use at Liverpool John Moores University.

He said this included people with drug use problems and those “using drugs to help manage their life circumstances”.

The NCA believes nitazenes are being produced in Chinese labs and brought into the UK through the Royal Mail and other parcel operators.

Dark web marketplaces seen by the BBC suggest some of the same online sellers in China are advertising nitazenes in bulk as well as adulterated benzodiazepines.

The Border Force only examines post for drugs if there is a known risk or intelligence. It says dogs trained to detect nitazenes and other synthetic opioids are “due to enter service shortly”.

Its teams seized new synthetic opioids nine times in the past financial year, according to a response under the Freedom of Information Act.

Those seizures ranged in size from 1g to 1.32kg, which experts said could equate to tens of thousands of doses.

The government said it would also test for the presence of the new drugs in wastewater from sewage treatment plants to anticipate the threat of a spike in overdoses.

It has, however, admitted such testing is currently “experimental”. The process took around two months at the only laboratory known to have successfully confirmed samples.

Experts previously told the BBC the last government had been too slow to recognise the scale of the problem.

NCA deputy director Charles Yates said it took the threat from nitazenes “seriously” and was taking a “zero-tolerance approach”.

There are an average of 49 drug poisoning deaths weekly involving opiates – such as heroin, oxycodone, fentanyl and including synthetic opioids – across England and Wales, the latest official figures suggest.