Just before noon one day Serhiy Dobrovolsky, a hardware trader, returned to his home in Kherson in southern Ukraine. He stepped into his yard, lit a cigarette and chatted with his next-door neighbour. Suddenly, they heard the sound of a drone buzzing overhead.

Angela, Serhiy’s wife of 32 years, says she saw her husband run and take cover as the drone dropped a grenade. “He died before the ambulance arrived. I was told he was very unlucky, because a piece of shrapnel pierced his heart,” she says, breaking down.

Serhiy is one of 30 civilians killed in a sudden surge in Russian drone attacks in Kherson since 1 July, the city’s military administration told the BBC. They have recorded more than 5,000 drone attacks over the same period, with more than 400 civilians injured.

Drones have changed warfare in Ukraine, with both Ukraine and Russia using them against military targets.

But the BBC has heard eyewitness testimony and seen credible evidence that suggest Russia is using drones also against civilians in the frontline city of Kherson.

“They can see who they are killing,” says Angela. “Is this how they want to fight, by just bombing people walking in the streets?”

If Russia is found to be intentionally targeting civilians, it would be a war crime.

The Russian military did not respond to the BBC’s questions about the allegations. Since its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia has consistently denied deliberately targeting civilians.

Evidence of apparent drone attacks on civilians can be seen in numerous videos shared on Ukrainian and Russian social media, six of which were examined by BBC Verify.

In each video, we see through the remote operator’s camera as they track the movements of a pedestrian or motorist in civilian clothing, often dropping grenades which sometimes appear to seriously injure or kill their target.

BBC Verify was also able to identify a Telegram channel which has the earliest public copies yet seen of five of the six videos analysed.

They were each posted with goading and threats to the Ukrainian public, including claims that all vehicles were legitimate targets and that people should minimise their public movement. The injured people were also insulted, called “pigs” or in one case mocked for being a woman.

The account posting some of these drone videos also posted images of boxed and unboxed drones, and other images of equipment, thanking people for their donations.

Kherson’s military administration told the BBC that Russia has changed the type of drone it is using and the city’s electronic systems can no longer intercept a majority of them.

“You feel like you’re constantly being hunted, like someone is always looking at you, and can drop explosives at any moment. It’s the worst thing,” says Kristina Synia, who works at an aid centre just 1km (0.6 mile) from the Dnipro river.

To get to the centre without being followed by drones, we drive at a high speed, take the cover of trees while parking, and then head indoors quickly.

On a shelf behind Kristina, a small device confirms the threat outside – buzzing each time it detects a drone. It buzzed every few minutes while we were there – often detecting the presence of at least four drones.

Trauma is visible on the faces of the residents we meet, who have braved stepping out of their homes only to stock up on food. Valentyna Mykolaivna wipes her eyes, “We are in a horrible situation. When we come out, we move from one tree to another, taking cover. Every day they attack public buses, every day they drop bombs on us using drones,” she says.

Olena Kryvchun says she was narrowly missed by a drone strike on her car. Minutes before she was due to get back in her car after visiting a friend, a bomb fell through the roof above the driver’s seat, ripping through one side of the vehicle and leaving it a mangled mess of metal, plastic and glass.

“If I’d been in my car, I would have died. Do I look like a military person, does my car look like a military car?” she says. She works as a cleaner and the car was essential to her work. She doesn’t have the money to fix it.

Olena says drones are more terrifying than shelling. “When we hear a shell launch from the other side of the river, we have time to react. With drones, you can easily miss their sound. They are quick, they see you and strike.”

Ben Dusing, who runs the aid centre, says drones spread even more fear than shelling, immobilising the population. “If a drone locks on you, the truth is it’s probably ‘game over’ at that point. There’s no defence against it,” he says.

In the last few months, says Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, spokesman for Kherson’s military administration, the Russian military has also begun to use drones to remotely drop mines along pedestrian, car and bus routes.

He said explosions had been caused by butterfly mines – small, anti-personnel mines which can glide to the ground and detonate later on contact – which are coated with leaves to camouflage them.

The BBC has not been able to verify the use of drones to distribute mines in Kherson.

Olena says that as winter approaches, the fear of drones will get worse. “When the leaves fall from the trees, there will be many more victims. Because if you are in the street, there’s nowhere to hide.”

We were able to locate the six videos we analysed, which were all filmed in the eastern side of Kherson, by identifying distinctive features in the city streets. In one case – where a drone dropped an explosive on two pedestrians, injuring one of them so badly he could not walk – this was a curve at a T-junction, which pointed to the Dniprovs’kyi district or the nearby suburb of Antonivka, rather than Kherson city centre.

Once we identified a possible location, we were able to match visible landmarks in the video to satellite images – in this case the buildings and pylons – confirming where in the city the attack took place.

To try to establish where the videos had first appeared publicly, we ran several frames from each through search engines. Often the earliest result was a particular Telegram channel, pre-dating reposts on sites such as X or Reddit by several hours.

Having the location of each attack, we were able to calculate the time of filming using the shadows and to cross-reference with weather records to find the most likely date.

Four of the videos we examined were posted on the Telegram channel the day after the likely filming, and in one example, it was posted eight hours later the same day.

A man has been cleared of murdering a British woman during a break-in at her home in Australia.

Emma Lovell, 41, was stabbed after confronting two intruders in a suburb north of Brisbane on Boxing Day 2022.

A judge listened to three days of evidence earlier this month – and handed down his not guilty verdict on Thursday.

The other man admitted murder earlier this year, and was jailed for 14 years.

The judge-only trial heard it had been accepted the second defendant, who cannot legally be named as he was 17 at the time of the attack, did not stab anyone himself.

The matter in contention was whether he knew his co-accused – also then aged 17 – was carrying a knife.

He had earlier pleaded not guilty to murder.

Mother-of-two Mrs Lovell emigrated from Ipswich in Suffolk in 2011 with her daughters and her husband Lee, who was also injured in the attack.

The couple had confronted the intruders on the front lawn of their home, after being alerted by the sound of their dogs barking.

The second defendant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had also pleaded not guilty to armed break-in as well as malicious acts and assault occasioning bodily harm on Mr Lovell, who was kicked and then stabbed in the back.

He was convicted of burglary and assault, but cleared of more serious charges including the alternative charge of manslaughter.

The prosecution had argued he was liable for Mrs Lovell’s murder as the pair intended to break into the home while armed and there was the potential they could endanger human life.

But the teenager’s defence team said there was no proof beyond reasonable doubt that he had knowledge of the knife. The judge ultimately agreed.

Speaking outside court, an emotional Lee Lovell described the verdict as “a bit of a joke”.

“I don’t feel justice for Emma one bit. You try to do the best you can for her, and I don’t feel I’ve been able to do that,” he said.

“We’re the ones left with the life sentence.”

The case was heard by a judge alone because the issue of youth crime was a key debate during last weekend’s state government elections – and it was feared this could prejudice a jury.

The Liberal National Party swept to power in Queensland, with a campaign that promised tougher sentences for juveniles under the slogan “adult crime, adult time”.

Justice Michael Copley remanded the man in custody, awaiting a pre-sentence report by early December.

Defence barrister Laura Reece told the court that her client may be eligible for release soon, given he had been on remand since the incident almost two years ago.

Typhoon Kong-rey, the biggest typhoon to directly hit Taiwan in nearly 30 years, has made landfall on the island’s eastern coast.

Schools and workplaces across Taiwan were closed on Thursday and supermarkets were stripped bare, as millions of residents braced for the storm which hit at about 13:40 local time (04:40 GMT).

At one point before it made landfall, Typhoon Kong-rey was packing winds over 200km/h close to its centre, making it the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane.

Hundreds of flights and ferries, along with Taiwan’s stock exchange, have also been suspended.

The typhoon has injured over 70 people and killed at least one person, authorities said on Thursday afternoon. A 56-year-old woman died after a falling tree struck a vehicle she was in.

Authorities say it has weakened to “moderate typhoon” during local evening time.

It has also caused power outages in half a million households, according to electricity supplier Taiwan Power Company.

In the eastern county of Hualien, one employee of the local township administrative office told news agency AFP that they kept receiving reports of disasters from local residents but couldn’t get to them “due to severe wind and rain”.

It is unusual for a typhoon this big to come so late in the year. Taiwan’s typhoon season, according to its weather agency, generally falls between July and September.

For the last eight decades all the strongest typhoons have come within that window. But this year two huge storms have hit Taiwan in October — the other being super typhoon Krathon, which killed four people and left more than 700 injured.

“I’m 70 years old,” one man in Hualien told a TV reporter, “and I have never seen a typhoon hit this late in the year.”

• Watch: Typhoon Kong-rey turns towards Japan after striking Taiwan

Ocean scientists have reported near-record levels of global sea surface temperatures since July, which means there is more heat energy on the ocean surface to feed storm systems.

Beyond the extreme wind speeds of typhoons, one of the biggest threats to life from these storms is often the huge amount of moisture they carry, which can lead to excessive rain, floods and landslides.

The deadliest storm to hit Taiwan in recent decades was Typhoon Morakot in August 2009. The Category 1 storm dumped 2,777 mm of rain over the south of the island, unleashing flash floods and landslides that killed nearly 900 people.

The eastern part of Taiwan, which is set to be hardest hit by Typhoon Kong-rey, may see up to 1,200mm of rainfall between 29 October and 1 November, according to the island’s weather agency forecasters.

Taiwan’s defence ministry put 36,000 soldiers on standby for potential rescue efforts. Around 8,600 people have already been evacuated from high risk areas, authorities said.

Taiwanese president Lai Ching-te, who attended a briefing about the typhoon on Thursday morning, urged people to stay at home and avoid dangerous areas such as going to the beach to watch the waves.

Kong-rey is expected to weaken gradually after making landfall and moving across Taiwan. The storm should leave the island on Friday, the weather agency said.

North Korea has fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, which flew for 86 minutes – the longest flight recorded yet – before falling into waters off its east, South Korea and Japan said.

The ICBM was fired at a sharply-raised angle and reached as high as 7,000km (4,350 miles). This means that it would have covered a further distance if it were launched horizontally.

Thursday’s launch violated UN curbs and came at a time of deteriorating relations between the two Koreas and Pyongyang’s increasingly aggressive rhetoric towards Seoul.

South Korea had also warned on Wednesday that the North was preparing to fire its ICBM close to the US presidential election on 5 November.

Seoul’s defence ministry said the test was intended to develop weapons that “fire farther and higher”.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said in a rare same-day report on state media that the launch shows “our will to respond to our enemies” and described it as “appropriate military action”.

“I affirm that [North Korea] will never change its line of bolstering up its nuclear forces,” Kim said.

The US called Thursday’s launch a “flagrant violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions”.

“It only demonstrates that [North Korea] continues to prioritise its unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programmes over the well-being of its people,” the White House’s National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said in a statement.

South Korea said it would impose fresh sanctions on the North in response to the launch.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also condemned the launch, which he said were “clear violations of relevant Security Council resolutions”, according to his spokesperson.

Earlier, neighbouring China noted it was “concerned”.

Pyongyang last fired an ICBM in December 2023, in defiance of long-standing and crippling UN sanctions. That missile travelled for 73 minutes and covered about 1,000km.

North Korea experts believe the launch was aimed at increasing its missiles’ payload.

Pyongyang has been developing missiles that can “hit the US mainland even if it carries a larger and heavier warhead” or even multiple warheads, said Kim Dong-yup, an assistant professor at the University of North Korean Studies.

Neighbouring Japan said it monitored Thursday’s launch.

South Korean and US officials met after the launch and agreed to “take strong and varied response measures”, the South’s military said in a statement.

“Our military maintains full readiness as we closely share North Korean ballistic information with US and Japanese authorities,” it added.

Thursday’s launch comes after South Korea and US accused North Korea of sending troops to Russia to support Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

The Pentagon estimates that around 10,000 North Korean soldiers have been deployed to train in eastern Russia. A “small number” has been sent to Kursk in Russia’s west, with several thousand more on their way, the US said earlier this week.

The alleged presence of North Korean troops in Russia has added to growing concerns over deepening ties between Putin and Kim.

Pyongyang and Moscow have neither confirmed nor denied these allegations.

Last time Donald Trump was president, Israel’s prime minister was so pleased, he named a community after him.

Trump Heights is an isolated cluster of pre-fabricated houses in the rocky, mine-strewn landscape of the Golan Heights, a soaring eagle-and-menorah statue guarding the entrance gate. Mauve mountain peaks jut into the azure sky at the horizon.

This was Trump’s reward for upending half a century of US policy – and wide international consensus – by recognising Israel’s territorial claims to the Golan, captured from Syria in the 1967 war, and later unilaterally annexed.

The question for residents there – two dozen families and a few billeted soldiers – is what impact Republican candidate Trump or his Democratic rival Kamala Harris might have on Israel’s interests in the region now.

Elik Goldberg and his wife Hodaya moved to Trump Heights with their four children for the security of a small rural community.

Since the 7 October Hamas attacks in southern Israel last year, they’ve watched Israel’s war with Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, escalate along the northern border with Lebanon, 10 miles away from them.

“For the last year, our beautiful green open space has a lot of smoke, and our lovely view is a view of rockets that Hezbollah is sending to us,” said Elik. “This is a war zone and we don’t know when it will end.”

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Elik tells me he wants the new US administration to “do the right thing”. When I ask what that means, he replies, “support Israel”.

“Support the good guys, and have the common sense of right and wrong,” he says.

It’s the kind of language you hear a lot in Israel. It’s also the kind of language Trump understands.

He won favour with Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, during his last stint as US president by scrapping an Iran nuclear deal that Israel opposed, brokering historic normalisation agreements with several Arab countries, and recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – countering decades of US policy.

Mr Netanyahu once called him “the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House”.

As America prepares to vote, the Israeli leader has not hidden his appreciation for the Republican candidate – and polls suggest he’s not alone.

Around two-thirds of Israelis would prefer to see Trump back in the White House, according to recent surveys.

Less than 20% appear to want Kamala Harris to win. According to one poll, that drops to just 1% among Mr Netanyahu’s own supporters.

Gili Shmuelevits, 24, shopping in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market, said Ms Harris “showed her true colours” when she appeared to agree with a protester at a rally who accused Israel of genocide. The vice-president said “what he’s talking about, it’s real”.

She later clarified that she did not believe Israel was committing genocide.

Rivka, shopping nearby, said she was “100% for Donald Trump”.

“He cares more for Israel. He’s stronger against our enemies, and he’s not scared,” she said. “I get that people don’t love him, but I don’t need to love him. I need him to be a good ally for Israel.”

For many people here, good allies never pressure, criticise or constrain. The war in Gaza has helped drive a wedge between Israel and its US ally.

Harris has been more outspoken in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and has put more emphasis on humanitarian issues.

After meeting Netanyahu at the White House in July, she said she would “not be silent” about the situation in Gaza and said she had expressed to him her “serious concern about the scale of human suffering” and the deaths of innocent civilians.

Mr Trump has framed ending the war in terms of Israel’s “victory”, and has opposed an immediate ceasefire in the past, reportedly telling Netanyahu “do what you have to do”.

But many Palestinians see little hope in either candidate.

“The overall estimation is that the Democrats are bad, but if Trump is elected it’ll be even worse,” said Mustafa Barghouti, a respected Palestinian analyst and politician in the occupied West Bank.

“The main difference is that Kamala Harris will be more sensitive to the shift in American public opinion, and that means more in favour of a ceasefire.”

The Gaza War has increased pressure from US allies like Saudi Arabia for progress towards a Palestinian State.

But neither candidate has put the establishment of a Palestinian state at the forefront of their agenda.

When Mr Trump was asked during the presidential debates if he would support it, he replied, “I’d have to see”.

Many Palestinians have given up the promise of a Palestinian state – and on US support more generally.

“The general feeling is that the US has failed drastically in protecting international law, has failed the Palestinians more than once [and] took the side of total bias to Israel,” said Mustafa Barghouti.

“The issue of a Palestinian state is nothing but a slogan.”

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On wider regional issues like Iran, the two candidates have historically had different approaches with Trump recently advising Israel to “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later”.

He was speaking before Israel carried out strikes on Iran in retaliation for an Iranian missile attack earlier this month.

“Maybe Trump would play more hardball, and the Iranians would be more hesitant if he was president,” said former Israeli ambassador to the US, Danny Ayalon, but he says it is easy to overstate the differences between the two candidates.

Both Harris and Trump are now talking about making a new deal to block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon, and both want to expand the normalisation agreements between Israel and neighbouring Arab countries – in particular Saudi Arabia.

What would be different is their approach.

“I think if it’s Kamala Harris [in the White House], the direction will be bottom-up,” said Danny Ayalon, meaning that ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon would come first, before turning to the bigger questions of Iran or new regional alliances.

With Trump, he says, “the direction would be top-down – he will go straight to Tehran and from there, try to sort out all the different prongs and theatres throughout the Middle East”.

Political insiders in both Israel and the US see Kamala Harris as closer to America’s traditional bipartisan positions on foreign policy in the Middle East – and Donald Trump as unpredictable, reluctant to involve America in foreign conflicts, and prone to ad-hoc deal-making.

But Ambassador Ayalon believes it’s not only policy that has an impact on public mood in Israel.

“Biden stood by Israel for the entire year,” he said. “But did not get his recognition [because of] things like not inviting him to the White House – things that are more optics than real issues.”

When it comes to US-Israeli relations, he says, public gestures – and emotions – count.

“A lot is personal. The [shared] interests are a given, but the personalities matter.”

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Senior American officials have returned to the Middle East to try to reach a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as the Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati has expressed cautious optimism about a potential deal.

Brett McGurk, President Biden’s Middle East co-ordinator, and Amos Hochstein, who has led negotiations in the conflict with Hezbollah, are in Israel for talks with the country’s authorities, although it was not clear whether any progress could be made ahead of the US presidential election, next week.

Since the conflict escalated five weeks ago, Israel launched widespread air strikes across Lebanon and a ground invasion of areas near the border.

At least 2,200 people have been killed in the country, according to the Lebanese health ministry, and 1.2 million displaced, mostly Shia Muslims, heightening sectarian tensions and adding pressure on public services that were already struggling after years of a severe economic crisis.

The Israeli government says its goal is to change the security situation along the border and guarantee the return of around 60,000 residents who have been displaced because of Hezbollah’s rocket, missile and drone attacks.

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On Wednesday, Israeli public broadcaster Kan published what it said was a draft agreement, written by Washington and dated Saturday, for an initial 60-day ceasefire.

Israel would withdraw its forces from Lebanon within the first week of the deal, and the Lebanese army would be deployed along the border. During the pause, Hezbollah would end its armed presence in the area.

The objective is to pave the way for the full implementation of United Nations Resolution 1701, which ended the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.

The text, among other things, called for the removal of all armed groups, including Hezbollah, from the area south of the Litani River, 30km (20 miles) north of the border. Only the UN peacekeeping force known as Unifll and the Lebanese army would be allowed there.

Israel, however, distrustful that the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers will be able to keep Hezbollah away from the border, reportedly wants to be given the right to strike the group if needed after the end of the war. This demand is likely to be rejected by the Lebanese authorities, who say there should be no changes to Resolution 1701.

When asked about the document reported by Kan, White House national security spokesperson Sean Savett said there were “many reports and drafts circulating” that “do not reflect the current state of negotiations”. He did not, however, respond to a question about whether that text was the basis for further talks.

Hezbollah, a powerful militia and political party which is armed and financially supported by Iran, faces domestic pressure for a deal, particularly from critics who say the group dragged Lebanon into a conflict which was not in the country’s interests.

Israel’s bombardments have killed most of the Hezbollah leadership, including long-time chief Hassan Nasrallah, and brought extensive destruction to areas of southern Lebanon, the eastern Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs, where the group holds sway.

The group started its campaign the day after the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October last year, and has long said its attacks will continue unless there is a ceasefire in Gaza. It is not clear whether it would be willing to change its position.

On Wednesday, Naim Qassem gave his first speech as Hezbollah’s new secretary general, in which he said the group would continue with its war plan under his leadership, but that it could agree to a deal within certain terms. So far, he said, Israel had not presented any proposal that could be discussed.

As he spoke, Israel launched heavy air strikes on the historic city of Baalbek, in the Bekaa Valley, in what could indicate an expansion of its military campaign against the group in a strategically important area near the border with Syria.

Hours later, in an interview to Lebanon’s Al Jazeed television, Mr Mikati said he became “cautiously optimistic” after a phone call with Mr Hochstein, who had visited Lebanon last week, saying a ceasefire could be possible in the “coming hours or days”.

It remained unclear, however, if any agreement could be reached before the US presidential election on Tuesday, with reports suggesting the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was waiting the outcome of the vote before deciding.

Violence continued on Thursday, with rocket attacks by Hezbollah killing seven in Israel – the deadliest day in the country since the escalation in the conflict – while Israeli attacks killed six health workers in southern Lebanon.

US officials are also trying to reach a ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The White House said CIA director William Burns would travel to Cairo on Thursday for talks.

A Russian court has fined Google two undecillion roubles – a two followed by 36 zeroes – for restricting Russian state media channels on YouTube.

In dollar terms that means the tech giant has been told to pay $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Despite being one of the world’s wealthiest companies, that is considerably more than the $2 trillion Google is worth.

In fact, it is far greater than the world’s total GDP, which is estimated by the International Monetary Fund to be $110 trillion.

The fine has reached such a gargantuan level because – state news agency Tass says – it doubles every day it is not paid.

According to Tass, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted he “cannot even pronounce this number” but urged “Google management to pay attention.”

The company has not commented publicly or responded to a BBC request for a statement.

Russia media outlet RBC reports the fine on Google relates to the restriction of content of 17 Russian media channels on YouTube.

While this started in 2020, it escalated after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years later.

That saw most Western companies pull out of Russia, with doing business there also tightly restricted by sanctions.

Russian media outlets were also banned in Europe – prompting retaliatory measures from Moscow.

In 2022, Google’s local subsidiary was declared bankrupt and the company has stopped offering its commercial services in Russia, such as advertising.

However, its products are not completely banned in the country.

This development is the latest escalation between Russia and the US tech giant.

In May, 2021, Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor accused Google of restricting YouTube access to Russian media outlets, including RT and Sputnik, and supporting “illegal protest activity”.

Then, in July, 2022, Russia fined Google 21.1bn rouble (£301m) for failing to restrict access to what it called “prohibited” material about the war in Ukraine and other content.

There is virtually no press freedom in Russia, with independent news outlets and freedom of expression severely curtailed.

Warning: This story contains details some may find distressing.

Several women have taken their lives in Sudan’s central Gezira state after being raped by paramilitary fighters in the brutal civil war raging in the country, rights groups and activists have said.

The reports come after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) was accused by the UN of “atrocious crimes”, including mass killings, in the state last week.

With RSF fighters continuing to advance, one rights group has told the BBC it is in contact with six women who are contemplating taking their own lives as they fear being sexually assaulted.

But the RSF has dismissed a recent UN report blaming a rise in sexual violence on its combatants, telling the BBC the accusations “were not based on evidence”.

The vicious struggle for power between the army and RSF has killed tens of thousands of people and forced more than 11 million people from their homes since the conflict began in April 2023.

The head of the UN World Food Programme, Cindy McCain, visited the aid hub of Port Sudan this week, and told the BBC that the country could see the world’s largest-ever humanitarian crisis if a ceasefire is not reached.

She warned that millions of people could die from starvation.

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Reports of paramilitary fighters on the rampage in Gezira follow the recent defection to the army of Abu Aqla Kayka, the RSF’s top commander in the state.

“The RSF started a revenge campaign in areas under the control of Abu Kayka. They looted, killed civilians who were resisting and raped women and little girls,” Hala al-Karib, head of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (Siha), told the BBC.

Siha, which has been documenting gender-based violence in Sudan during the war, had confirmed three cases of suicide by women over the last week in Gezira state, she said.

Ms Karib said that two were in the village of Al Seriha and a third in the town of Ruffa.

The sister of a woman who took her own life in the village told Siha it happened after she was raped by RSF soldiers in front of her father and brother. The two men were later killed.

A series of videos have been shared online over the last week that appear to show dozens of bodies wrapped in blankets from an alleged RSF massacre in Al Seriha.

BBC Verify has been able to match the location of this footage to the courtyard of a mosque in Al Seriha.

The evidence of suicides came from only two areas out of the 50 or so villages that have recently come under attack, Ms Karib said, adding that the figure could be higher as mobile communications were patchy.

A female activist from Gezira, who asked to remain anonymous as she feared for her life, told the BBC she had confirmed accounts of women taking their lives after their husbands had been killed by the RSF.

She had seen WhatsApp messages from one woman who described how her sister had taken her own life after being raped by RSF militiamen, who had also killed five of her brothers and some of her uncles also in Al Seriha.

But like Siha, she said it was impossible to verify accounts on social media of reported mass suicides of women fearing rape given the communication problems.

On Tuesday, an 80-page UN report said that since the conflict began, at least 400 survivors of conflict-related sexual violence have been documented up to July 2024, with the actual figure suspected to be much higher.

“The sheer scale of sexual violence we have documented in Sudan is staggering,” said Mohamed Chande Othman, the UN chair of the panel that compiled the report.

Victims it documented have ranged from between eight and 75 years – with many of them needing medical treatment, but most hospitals and clinics have been destroyed in the fighting, the UN said.

RSF spokesperson Nizar Sayed Ahmed told the BBC: “These accusations are false and not based on evidence.

“To find out the facts on the ground, the UN must send a fact-finding team to Sudan,” he said.

Ms Karib told the BBC Siha was trying to keep in touch with the six women who were fearful of the RSF’s advance and contemplating taking their own lives.

She said Siha was giving them psychological support as activists tried to work out how they could move them to more secure locations.

She also said they were trying to help a 13-year-old girl who had been gang-raped by RSF fighters in Gezira and was in urgent need of medical care.

The girl was currently on the road from her home village north of Ruffa to the town of New Halfa, and was bleeding profusely, she said.

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The Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD has seen its quarterly revenues soar, beating Tesla’s for the first time.

It posted more than 200bn yuan ($28.2bn, £21.8bn) in revenues between July and September. This is a 24% jump from the same period last year, and more than Elon Musk’s company whose quarterly revenue was $25.2bn.

However, Tesla still sold more electric vehicle (EVs) than BYD in the third quarter.

It comes as EV sales in China have been getting a boost from government subsidies to encourage consumers to trade their petrol-powered cars for EVs or hybrids.

BYD also notched a monthly sales record in the last month of the quarter, in a sign that momentum continues to build for China’s bestselling car maker.

But there is a growing backlash abroad against the Chinese government’s support for domestic car makers like BYD.

Earlier this week, European Union tariffs of up to 45.3% on imports of Chinese made EVs came into force across the bloc.

Chinese EV makers were already facing a 100% tax from the United States and Canada.

The tariffs are in response to alleged unfair state subsidisation of China’s car industry.

As of last week, official data showed 1.57 million applications had been submitted for a national subsidy of $2,800 per each older vehicle traded in for a greener one.

That’s on top of other government incentives already in place.

China has been counting on high-tech products to help revive its flagging economy, and the EU is the largest overseas market for the country’s electric car industry.

Its domestic car industry has grown rapidly over the past two decades and its brands, such as BYD, have begun moving into international markets, prompting fears from the likes of the EU that its own companies will be unable to compete with the cheaper prices.

Israel must immediately address the “catastrophic humanitarian situation” in Gaza, the US envoy to the UN has warned, as the deadline approaches to improve the flow of aid or face cuts to American military assistance.

“Israel’s words must be matched by action on the ground,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield said. “Right now, that is not happening.”

The US has given its ally until 12 November to “surge” all assistance, with a minimum of 350 lorries entering Gaza daily. But the UN says only 10% of that number have crossed each day on average since then.

Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, said it was going “above and beyond its humanitarian obligations” and blamed Hamas.

Mr Danon also rejected international criticism of the Israeli parliament’s decision to ban the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) from working in Israel.

Israel’s allies have warned that Unrwa plays a critical role in delivering humanitarian assistance to Gaza, where it is the largest humanitarian organisation on the ground.

In a briefing to the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday, UN Middle East peace envoy Tor Wennesland said he had witnessed a “horrific humanitarian nightmare” during a recent visit to Gaza.

He said the north of the Palestinian territory had received virtually no humanitarian assistance since the start of October, when the Israeli military began a ground offensive in the Jabalia area that it said was aimed at stopping Hamas fighters from regrouping there.

The operation has killed scores of Palestinians, caused mass displacement and led to the closure of essential services, including water wells and medical facilities.

The US ambassador said the reports of children going days without food in Jabalia had made her think about how she had seen a girl die of starvation almost three decades ago.

Ms Thomas-Greenfield said the Biden administration had made clear to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel must address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza immediately and that the US “rejects any Israeli efforts to starve Palestinians in Jabalia, or anywhere else”.

“The US has stated clearly that Israel must allow food, medicine and other supplies into all of Gaza – especially the north, and especially as winter sets in – and protect the workers distributing it,” she added.

Mr Danon told the Council that Israel had been “hard at work delivering humanitarian aid”.

“The problem isn’t the flow of aid. It is Hamas, which hijacks supplies, storing or selling them to fuel their terror machine while Gaza’s civilians are neglected. Israel remains committed to working with our partners to deliver aid to those in need,” he added.

On 13 October, the Biden administration told Mr Netanyahu’s government that Israel must act within 30 days on a series of concrete measures to boost aid supplies, citing US laws which can prohibit military assistance to countries that impede delivery of US humanitarian aid.

They included enabling a minimum of 350 lorries a day to enter through all Israeli-controlled crossings with Gaza and ending the “isolation” of the north immediately.

According to data published Unrwa, only 852 aid lorries have crossed into Gaza this month, compared with about 3,000 lorries in September. A total of 502 have entered since the letter, with an average of 35 lorries crossing each day between 14 and 29 October.

Israel’s own data, meanwhile, says a total of 1,386 lorries have crossed between 1 and 28 October – a daily average of 49. It says there are also 670 lorry loads of aid awaiting collection from inside Gaza.

Ms Thomas-Greenfield also expressed US concern about the two laws adopted by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, forbidding Israeli state officials from contact with Unrwa and prohibiting Unrwa operations in Israel and annexed East Jerusalem in three months’ time.

“We know that right now, there is no alternative to Unrwa when it comes to delivering food and other life-saving aid in Gaza. Therefore, we have concerns about this legislation being implemented,” she said.

Mr Danon accused Unrwa of being “a terrorist front camouflaged as a humanitarian agency”, citing the involvement of a handful of its thousands of staff in the 7 October attacks on Israel.

Unrwa insists it is impartial and that the laws breach the UN charter and Israel’s obligations under international law.

On Monday, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said his Israeli counterpart had floated the possibility of delayed implementation of the legislation during a call at the weekend.

“When I raised this issue with Foreign Minister [Israel] Katz yesterday, he was at pains to explain that, although the Knesset could pass its bill today, that does not mean that it has to be implemented,” Mr Lammy told the UK Parliament.

But in an unusual statement sent to the BBC on Wednesday, the Israeli foreign ministry contradicted Mr Lammy’s account.

“In general, we do not refer to the content of diplomatic talks. Nevertheless, and in order to remove any doubts, it should be clarified that the description of Foreign Minister Katz’s remarks is not true and does not reflect what was said in the conversation,” it said.

“The foreign minister is, of course, committed to the implementation of the Knesset’s legislation as well as to Israel’s international humanitarian obligations.”

Israel’s parliament voted on Monday evening to ban the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa) from operating within Israel and occupied East Jerusalem.

Contact between Unrwa employees and Israeli officials will be banned, crippling its ability to operate in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Almost all of Gaza’s population of more than two million people are dependent on aid and services from the agency.

The move has faced widespread condemnation, with Unrwa warning the new law could see aid supply chains “fall apart” in the coming weeks.

Israel has defended the move, repeating its allegation that a number of the agency’s staff were involved in Hamas’s 7 October attacks last year, which killed 1,200 people.

However, Israel’s opposition to Unrwa also goes back decades.

Founded in 1949, the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or Unrwa, works in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, initially caring for the 700,000 Palestinians who were forced from or fled their homes after the creation of the state of Israel.

Over the decades, Unrwa has grown to become the biggest UN agency operating in Gaza. It employs some 13,000 people there and is key to humanitarian efforts.

It is funded primarily by voluntary donations by UN member states, with the UN itself providing some direct funds.

It distributes aid and runs shelters and key infrastructure – such as medical facilities, teacher training centres and almost 300 primary schools.

Since the war in Gaza began, the agency says it has distributed food parcels to almost 1.9 million people. It has also offered nearly six million medical consultations across the enclave over the course of the conflict.

More than 200 Unrwa staff have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 2023 in the course of those duties, according to the agency.

Unwra has long been criticised by Israel, with many there objecting to its very existence.

The fate of refugees has been a core issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with Palestinians harbouring a dream of returning to homes in historic Palestine, parts of which are now in Israel.

Israel rejects their claim and criticises the set-up of Unrwa for allowing refugee status to be inherited by successive generations.

It says this entrenches Palestinians as refugees, and encourages their hopes of a right of return.

The Israeli government has also long denounced the agency’s teaching and textbooks for, in its view, perpetuating anti-Israel views.

In 2022, an Israeli watchdog said Unrwa educational material taught students that Israel was attempting to “erase Palestinian identity”.

The European Commission identified what it called “anti-Semitic material” in the schoolbooks, “including even incitement to violence”, and the European Parliament has called repeatedly for EU funding to the Palestinian Authority to be conditional on removing such content.

Unrwa has previously said reports about its educational material were “inaccurate and misleading” and that many of the books in question were not used in its schools.

After the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel, allegations that some Unrwa staff were involved further amplified calls in Israel for the agency to be banned.

The military claimed that in total, more than 450 Unrwa staff were members of “terrorist organisations”. In the wake of the allegations, some 16 Western countries temporarily suspended funding for the aid agency.

The UN investigated Israel’s claim and fired nine people, but it said Israel had not provided evidence for more allegations and Unrwa denied any wider involvement with Hamas.

Speaking on Monday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated the allegations, writing on X that “Unrwa workers involved in terrorist activities against Israel must be held accountable.”

Under the new law – which was approved by 92 MPs and opposed by just 10 – contact between Unrwa employees and Israeli officials will be banned.

While most of Unrwa’s projects take place in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, it relies on agreements with Israel to operate. This includes moving aid through checkpoints between Israel and Gaza.

Along with the Palestinian Red Crescent, Unrwa handles almost all aid distribution in Gaza through 11 centres across the enclave. It also provides services to 19 refugee camps in the West Bank.

Unrwa director William Deere told the BBC that on a practical level, the ban on interacting with Israeli officials meant it would become almost impossible for the agency’s staff to operate in the country.

“We won’t be able to move in Gaza without being subject to possible attack, international staff won’t be able to get visas any longer,” he said.

The executive director of the UN’s World Food Programme said without Unrwa’s presence in Gaza, aid agencies will be unable to distribute essential food and medicine.

“They do all the work on the ground there,” Cindy McCain told the BBC. “We don’t have the contacts. We don’t have the ability to get to know the contacts, because things are so intensely difficulty there.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu said on Monday that “sustained humanitarian aid must remain available in Gaza” despite Unrwa’s ban, and that Israel would work with its international partners to ensure this.

But on Monday the US state department said Israel must do “much more” to allow international aid to enter Gaza. The warning came two weeks after it gave Israel 30 days to boost supplies, or risk seeing some military assistance cut.

People in war-torn Gaza are already struggling with a deep humanitarian crisis – but now they fear it will get much more difficult because of Israel’s ban on the biggest UN agency which operates there.

“Unrwa means everything to us: it is our life, our food, our drink and our medical care. When it closes, there will be no flour. If my son gets sick, where will I go?” asks Yasmine el-Ashry in Khan Younis.

“Banning Unrwa is another war for the Palestinian people,” said registered refugee Saeed Awida.

“They want to exterminate the Palestinian people and not provide us with humanitarian services.”

Despite international opposition, in Israel’s parliament there was wide support for the new legislation, which will prevent Israeli officials being in contact with Unrwa – the UN’s relief and works agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East.

The agency is accused of being complicit with Hamas.

“A terrorist organisation has completely taken over it,” claims Sharren Haskel from the opposition National Unity Party – a co-sponsor of the bill.

“If the United Nations is not willing to clean this organisation from terrorism, from Hamas activists, then we have to take measures to make sure they cannot harm our people ever again.”

Unrwa insists on its own neutrality.

It says that if the new Israeli laws against it are implemented as planned in three-months’ time, the effect will be profound, particularly in the occupied Palestinian territories.

“It would essentially make it impossible for us to operate in Gaza,” Sam Rose, Unrwa’s Gaza deputy director, has said.

“We wouldn’t be able to bring in supplies, because that has to take place in co-ordination with Israeli officials. It wouldn’t further be able for us to manage our movements safely in and out of Gaza around checkpoints, but just in and around conflict zones.”

He points out that the protected status of Unrwa schools, clinics and other buildings where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have been sheltering would effectively be lost.

Israeli media suggest that there were warnings from diplomats and the security establishment about the consequences of taking action against Unrwa.

Israel stands accused of being in breach of the UN charter and its obligations under international humanitarian law.

However, ultimately domestic politics outweighed these considerations

Unrwa was set up in 1949 by the UN General Assembly in the wake of the first Arab-Israeli war which followed the creation of the state of Israel.

It helped some 700,000 Palestinians who had fled or been forced from their homes.

Seven decades on, with the descendants of those original refugees registered, the number of Palestinians supported by Unrwa has grown to six million across Gaza, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

It helps them with aid, assistance, education and health services.

The agency has long been a lightning rod for Israeli criticism, for example with allegations that the textbooks used in its schools promote hatred of Israel.

However, this has grown dramatically since Hamas’s 7 October attack last year.

Last week, Unrwa confirmed that a Hamas commander killed in an Israeli strike had been an employee since 2022.

He was apparently filmed leading the killing and kidnapping of Israelis from a bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im.

The UN launched an investigation after Israel charged that 12 Unrwa staff took part in the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel; seven more cases later came to light.

In August, Unrwa said that nine staff members out of the thousands it employs in Gaza may have been involved in the attacks and had been fired.

“We have taken immediate and strong and direct action against any allegations that we have received,” maintains Sam Rose.

Israel has long complained that the existence of Unrwa perpetuates the problem of Palestinian refugees – a core issue in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

UN officials counter that this can only be solved as part of a negotiated political settlement.

But in Gaza, where most of the 2.3 million population are registered refugees, the new actions against Unrwa are also seen as a troubling attack on their status.

“I am telling you that the word “refugee” will disappear. They do not want the word refugee. Israel is looking for this,” Mohammed Salman from Deir al-Balah told the BBC.

At least 60 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley, the Lebanese health ministry said.

Two children were among those killed in strikes which targeted 16 areas in the Baalbek region, officials said.

The ministry said 58 people were wounded, adding rescue efforts were still under way in the valley, which is a Hezbollah stronghold.

The Israeli military has not yet commented.

Israel has carried out thousands of air strikes across Lebanon over the past five weeks, targeting what it says are Hezbollah’s operatives, infrastructure and weapons.

Governor Bachie Khodr called the attacks the “most violent” in the area since Israel escalated the conflict against Hezbollah last month.

Unverified video posted on social media showed damage to buildings and forests ablaze, as rescuers searched for the injured.

In the town of Boudai, videos on social media appeared to show residents pleading for heavy equipment to be sent to help rescue people believed to be trapped.

The regional head of Baalbek’s Civil Defence crews told the BBC that the air strikes were like a “ring of fire”.

‘It was a very violent night,” Bilal Raad said.

“It was like a ring of fire has suddenly surrounded the area.”

He added the attacks had targeted “residential quarters where civilians live or near them”, and said a lack of equipment had hampered search and rescue efforts.

The town of Al-Allaq was hardest hit with 16 people killed, all from the same family, he said.

Baalbek is home to the ancient Roman ruins of Heliopolis – a UNESCO World Heritage site – where, in Roman times, thousands of pilgrims went to worship three deities.

A UNESCO spokesperson said that analysis of satellite images had not revealed any damage within the perimeter of the inscribed site of Baalbek.

They added they were “closely following the impact of the ongoing crisis in Lebanon on the cultural heritage sites”.

Earlier on Monday, Israeli air strikes on the coastal city of Tyre left seven dead and 17 injured, Lebanon’s health ministry said. Israel issued a warning for people to leave the centre of the city.

Hezbollah said it clashed with Israeli troops near Lebanon’s southern border on Monday and fired rockets at a naval base inside Israel near Haifa.

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

The Lebanese health ministry says more than 2,700 people have been killed and more than 12,400 wounded in Lebanon since then.

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

Lebanon’s government says up to 1.3 million people have been internally displaced as a result of the conflict.

Hezbollah has announced the group’s deputy secretary general will become its new head.

Naim Qassem replaces long-term leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in Beirut last month.

He is one of the few senior Hezbollah leaders who remains alive, after Israel killed most of the group’s leadership in a series of attacks.

The appointment comes as the conflict in Lebanon intensified in recent weeks.

For more than 30 years, Naim Qassem was Hezbollah’s deputy secretary general and one of the group’s most recognised faces.

Hezbollah said he was elected by the Shura Council, in accordance with the group’s rules. His whereabouts are unclear, however some reports suggest he has fled to Iran, which is Hezbollah’s main supporter.

He was born in Beirut in 1953 to a family from Lebanon’s south.

Qassem was one of Hezbollah’s founding members and since Nasrallah’s death in an Israeli air strike he has made three televised addresses.

In one speech, he said a ceasefire was the only way Israel could guarantee the return of its residents to the north.

Announcing Qassem’s promotion, Hezbollah released a statement describing him as “bearing the blessed banner in this march”.

The statement also honoured the late Nasrallah and others killed in the conflict.

The new Hezbollah leadership was expected to be passed to cleric Hashem Safieddine, but on 22 October it was revealed that he had been killed in an Israeli air strike nearly three weeks prior.

Reacting to Qassem’s appointment on social media, Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant described it as a “temporary appointment” and “not for long”.

• Follow live updates on the conflict
• What we know about Israel’s attack on Iran
• Israel-Hezbollah conflict in maps

Israel has carried out air strikes across Lebanon in recent weeks, targeting what it says are Hezbollah’s operatives, infrastructure and weapons.

On Monday night, the Israeli military carried out air strikes in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley, an area where Hezbollah has a strong presence.

The Lebanese health ministry said at least 60 people were killed and more than 50 wounded.

The Israeli military has yet to comment on the attack.

Israel went on the offensive against Hezbollah after almost a year of cross-border hostilities sparked by the war in Gaza, saying it wanted to ensure the safe return of residents of border areas displaced by Hezbollah rocket, missile and drone attacks.

Over the past year, more than 2,700 people have been killed and nearly 12,500 injured in Lebanon, according to the country’s health ministry.

Hezbollah has attacked Israel with thousands of rockets and drones over the same period, and at least 59 people have been killed in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.

Scrolling through Zara’s transactions shows she has spent thousands of dollars on TikTok.

Zara, not her real name, is in her 20s, lives in the US and has Somali roots. She became obsessed with the platform’s live battle feature – which sees two influencers verbally spar and sometimes mock each other as they solicit money from their followers to win the bout.

She would later discover there is a much darker side to these games and has shared her story with BBC World Service.

The battles are popular with TikTok users across the world but the premise of the Somali game is different because the influencers on either side often represent a Somali clan and sometimes trade insults that can descend into vitriol.

It is known as the Big Tribal Game and tens of thousands of people regularly tune in as the influencers play rap music that extolls the virtue of their clan, with lyrics that praise the bravery and beauty of their people.

An event we watched on a Saturday night in October was a typical example: there were two influencers on a split screen. About 50,000 people were watching with us.

Doing “battle” largely means encouraging viewers to give the players more gifts, which they need to win each five-minute round.

The winner is the influencer that has received the most gifts – and the loser is then expected to congratulate their opponent by admitting their clan is more powerful on the night.

Sometimes the events have been advertised online for several months in advance.

The influencers, often based in the US and Europe, go live before the game starts, hyping up the crowd.

At kick-off, sometimes the debates continues, but the in-game chatter can be fairly mundane. The action is between the people donating, trying to outspend each other.

There is a whole new language, a digital currency and many obscure rules that are part of the gameplay, adding a surreal quality to the events.

We saw some of the highest value items being gifted, like the “TikTok universe”, which is worth more than $500 (£385) and equates to almost 50,000 TikTok coins. It prompts an animation of people dancing to a catchy song.

Slightly cheaper at $400 (£308) and a fan favourite is the lion, which roars loudly when it runs on the screen. Or there is the gentler whale swimming out of an underwater tunnel.

Some gifts apply filters to the influencer’s face like the cowboy hat and moustache, a red beret or seasonal pumpkin head.

Zara says she started playing because she wanted to defend the pride of her clan.

It was “exciting” and “my side always won”, she recalls.

But Zara spent more than $7,000, meant to pay for her university fees, on the games.

“My parents, if they found out that I spend a lot of money in TikTok, they would be devastated – they would not [be] happy – but somehow it’s kind of like addiction.”

She also questions why she gave away hard-earned cash to influencers who very rarely showed any gratitude.

But as she was pulled deeper into this world, she experienced something much more sinister.

We have seen evidence that a US-based male influencer has been insulting female TikTokers and making threats against them – threatening to post sexualised images of them.

Zara says it happens a lot: “They find who you are, they grab your family photos, your picture, and they say, ‘I’m gonna expose you.'”

She says the US-based male influencer did this to her and she was so scared and worried her family would see a manipulated picture that he threatened to share, she could not sleep at night.

“Imagine your family see your photos in a naked body. They don’t know it was Photoshopped.”

When Zara reported the account to TikTok, she says they did not act.

The influencer goes by the name Hussein Kibray online and has more than 200,000 followers. He frequently takes part in the games.

Zara believes other women have been threatened in this way but we have not seen images Photoshopped of her – or other women – shared by him in the public domain.

We asked him about his behaviour but he did not respond to our message.

After the BBC contacted TikTok about Kibray’s accounts, the social media platform replied to say it had now banned them for violating its policies on adult sexual and physical abuse.

In a statement a TikTok spokesperson said: “We prioritise the safety of our community with some of the industry’s firmest streaming requirements, including specific policies for Match content, customisable safety tools for viewers, and only allowing people over 18 to go live or send gifts.”

• Listen to the BBC Trending podcast: The cost of an addiction to Somali TikTok battles from the BBC World Service.

The TikTok live games feed on confrontation and sometimes at the very least the appearance of aggression – whether staged or authentic. The matches can get heated when the influencers debate the strengths of different clans.

Clan identity is deeply ingrained in Somali society and politics, but it can be a sensitive topic. Clans fought against each other in the Somali civil war that started after the overthrow of long-time ruler Siad Barre in 1991 and the worst of the fighting continued until 2001.

Sometimes the influencers revisit the civil war – who won, what happened – and insult their ancestors and even brag about having killed rivals.

Many people are worried the games are also contributing to a toxic online environment. TikTok told us that live content must abide by their community guidelines, which apply across the platform.

Away from the arena of the Big Tribal Game, there are serious concerns about the level of clannism and hateful speech across social media platforms spread by influential Somali accounts, often based abroad.

Moustafa Ahmad, a security researcher with a focus on the Horn of Africa, says there is a sort of irony in that.

“People who are leaving the country and building their lives in the West because of the conflicts, because of the tensions they left behind, are becoming part of [the] cycle that’s perpetuating violence and intercommunal tensions in the region,” he says.

And the Big Tribal Game is proving popular within Somalia – discussed at many tea stalls in capital, Mogadishu, and in higher echelons of society.

“Sometimes you will see some politicians and elders talking and joking about how their clan won last night’s game. It’s not something we should joke about,” says influencer Bilaal Bulshawi who has almost two million followers and is known for his fun videos and online challenges.

Based in Somalia, unlike many of those who do TikTok battles, he says he took part in a game when they started to become a trend but it was not a clan-based match planned in advance.

He has been watching the spending on these events go up and up and suggests this money could be used to help the country instead.

“It’s really unfortunate, spending that much money, knowing Somalia is suffering and begging the world for help,” he says.

If you do some basic calculations it might look like the influencers are pocketing thousands of dollars during the most high-profile games.

However, the reality is probably less impressive, says Crystal Abidin, the founder of the TikTok Cultures Research network and a professor of internet studies at Curtin University in Australia.

She has not studied the Somali “battles” but says influencers often create the illusion of vast wealth.

“A lot of followers get the impression that all the coins and the glittery graphics flowing through the screen indicate that there’s a lot of cash flow going straight into the pockets of influencers,” says Prof Abidin.

“And really, the exact figure, the volume or the breakdown in percentage is actually quite opaque.”

She says from her research elsewhere there are unseen costs: the platform takes a cut, sometimes there are people who manage the creators, sometimes there is seed money to create the impression the giving is organic.

We know that for many involved in the Big Tribal Game, the sentiment and interest are real.

These events are anticipated for months and they are driving high engagement – but Zara understands why some “gifters” would be desperate for an exit.

• BBC Trending podcast: Addictive Somali TikTok battles
• ‘I wanted my clitoris back’ – FGM survivor fights back
• Somalia’s opioid overdose: Young, female and addicted

Millions of Indians are celebrating Diwali, the festival of lights and one of the most important events in the Hindu calendar.

The annual festival tends to fall between October and November, but the exact date varies each year as the Hindu calendar is based on the Moon.

This year, Diwali is being celebrated on Thursday, but some parts of the country will observe the festival on Friday.

People light oil lamps and candles on the day to symbolise the triumph of light over darkness and good over evil.

In the lead up to Diwali, people clean and organise their homes. New clothes are bought and sweets and gifts are exchanged with friends, families and neighbours.

Many draw traditional designs like rangoli – made using colourful powders – outside their doors to welcome luck and positivity.

On this day, families worship Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth.

Lamps are lit and windows and doors are left open to help the goddess find her way into people’s homes.

Fireworks are also a big part of the celebrations but in recent years, several state governments have imposed curbs or banned the practice as northern Indian states grapple with severe air pollution.

There is a complete ban on sale and use of firecrackers in the capital, Delhi, during the festival while states like Haryana, Punjab and Karnataka have limited firecracker use to specific hours on Diwali evening.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has delivered Labour’s first Budget since 2010, after the party’s return to power in July’s general election.

She announced tax rises worth £40bn to fund the NHS and other public services.

Here is a summary of the main measures.

• This is not a Budget we want to repeat, says Reeves
• How the Budget will affect you and your money
• NHS, schools, transport: Where Budget pledges are being spent
• Read more Budget coverage here

• Rates of income tax and National Insurance (NI) paid by employees, and of VAT, to remain unchanged
• Income tax band thresholds to rise in line with inflation after 2028, preventing more people being dragged into higher bands as wages rise
• Basic rate capital gains tax on profits from selling shares to increase from from 10% to 18%, with the higher rate rising from 20% to 24%
• Rates on profits from selling additional property unchanged
• Inheritance tax threshold freeze extended by further two years to 2030, with unspent pension pots also subject to the tax from 2027
• Exemptions when inheriting farmland to be made less generous from 2026

• Companies to pay NI at 15% on salaries above £5,000 from April, up from 13.8% on salaries above £9,100, raising an additional £25bn a year
• Employment allowance – which allows smaller companies to reduce their NI liability – to increase from £5,000 to £10,500
• Tax paid by private equity managers on share of profits from successful deals to rise from up to 28% to up to 32% from April
• Main rate of corporation tax, paid by businesses on taxable profits over £250,000, to stay at 25% until next election

• Legal minimum wage for over-21s to rise from £11.44 to £12.21 per hour from April
• Rate for 18 to 20-year-olds to go up from £8.60 to £10, as part of a long-term plan to move towards a “single adult rate”
• Basic and new state pension payments to go up by 4.1% next year due to the “triple lock”, more than working age benefits
• Eligibility widened for the allowance paid to full-time carers, by increasing the maximum earnings threshold from £151 to £195 a week

• 5p cut in fuel duty on petrol and diesel brought in by the Conservatives, due to end in April 2025, kept for another year
• £2 cap on single bus fares in England to rise to £3 from January, outside London and Greater Manchester
• Commitment to fund tunnelling work to take HS2 high-speed rail line to Euston station in central London
• Government says it will “secure the delivery” of Transpennine rail upgrade between York and Manchester, after reports ministers were looking to cut costs
• Air Passenger Duty to go up in 2026, by £2 for short-haul economy flights and £12 for long-haul ones, with rates for private jets to go up by 50%
• Extra £500m next year to repair potholes in England
• Vehicle Excise Duty paid by owners of all but the most efficient new petrol cars to double in their first year, to encourage shift to electric vehicles

• New flat-rate tax of £2.20 per 10ml of vaping liquid introduced from October 2026, as ministers shelve Tory plans to link the levy to nicotine content
• Tax on tobacco to increase by 2% above inflation, and 10% above inflation for hand-rolling tobacco
• Tax on non-draught alcoholic drinks to increase by the higher RPI measure of inflation, but tax on draught drinks cut by 1.7%
• Government to review thresholds for sugar tax on soft drinks, and consider extending it to “milk-based” beverages

• Day-to-day spending on NHS and education in England to rise by 4.7% in real terms this year, before smaller rises next year
• Defence spending to rise by £2.9bn next year
• Home Office budget to shrink by 3.1% this year and 3.3% next year in real terms, due to assumed savings from asylum system
• £1.3bn extra funding next year for local councils, which will also keep all cash from Right to Buy sales from next month

• Social housing providers to be allowed to increase rents above inflation under multi-year settlement
• Discounts for social housing tenants buying their property under the Right to Buy scheme to be reduced
• Stamp duty surcharge, paid on second home purchases in England and Northern Ireland, to go up from 3% to 5%
• Point at which house buyers start paying stamp duty on a main home to drop from £250,000 to £125,000 in April, reversing a previous tax cut
• Threshold at which first-time buyers pay the tax will also drop back, from £425,000 to £300,000
• Current affordable homes budget, which runs until 2026, boosted by £500m

• Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts the UK economy will grow by 1.1% this year, 2% next year, and 1.8% in 2026
• Inflation predicted to average 2.5% this year, 2.6% next year, before falling to 2.3% in 2026
• Official definition of UK government debt loosened by including a wider range of financial assets, such as future student loan repayments
• Budget policies will increase UK borrowing by £19.6bn this year and by an average of £32.3bn over the next five years, according to the OBR

• £11.8bn allocated to compensate victims of the infected blood scandal, with £1.8bn set aside for wrongly prosecuted Post Office sub-postmasters
• Government to stop receiving surplus cash from pension scheme for mineworkers
• Extra spending in England will lead to £3.4bn more for Scotland, £1.7bn more for Wales, and £1.5bn more for Northern Ireland in devolution payments

A Chinese spacecraft with a three-person crew, including the country’s first female space engineer, has docked after a journey of more than six hours.

The crew will use the homegrown space station as a base for six months to conduct experiments and carry out spacewalks as Beijing gathers experience and intelligence for its eventual mission to put someone on the Moon by 2030.

Beijing declared the launch of Shenzhou 19 a “complete success” – it is one of 100 launches China has planned in a record year of space exploration as it tries to outdo its rival, the United States.

The BBC was given rare access to the Jiuquan Satellite launch centre in Gansu and we were just over a kilometre away when the spacecraft blasted off.

Flames shot out of the rocket launcher as it took to the skies, lighting up the Gobi Desert with a deafening roar.

Hundreds of people lined the streets, waving and cheering the names of the taikonauts, China’s word for astronauts, as they were sent off.

At the Tiangong space station, the Shenzhou 19 crew met with three other astronauts who are manning the Shenzhou 18 and will return to Earth on 4 November.

Just two years ago, President Xi Jinping declared that “to explore the vast cosmos, develop the space industry and build China into a space power is our eternal dream”.

But some in Washington see the country’s ambition and fast-paced progress as a real threat.

Earlier this year, Nasa chief Bill Nelson said the US and China were “in effect, in a race” to return to the Moon, where he fears Beijing wants to stake territorial claims.

He told legislators that he believed their civilian space programme was also a military programme.

However, in Dongfeng Space City, a town built to support the launch site, China’s space programme is celebrated.

Every street light is adorned with the national flag.

Cartoon-like astronaut figurines and sculptures sit in the centre of children’s parks and plastic rockets are a centrepiece on most traffic roundabouts.

A huge poster with Xi Jinping on one side and a photo of the Shenzhou spacecraft on the other greets you as you drive into the main compound.

Hundreds have gathered in the dark after midnight to wave flags and brightly coloured lights as the Taikonauts make their last few steps on Earth before heading to the launch site.

The brass band strikes up Ode to the Motherland as young children, kept up late for the occasion, their cheeks adorned with the Chinese flag, all shout in full song.

This is a moment of national pride.

The pilot of this mission, Cai Xuzhe, is a veteran but he’s travelling with a new generation of Chinese-trained taikonauts born in 1990 – including China’s first female space engineer, Wang Haoze.

“Their youthful energy has made me feel younger and even more confident,” he told the gathered media ahead of take-off.

“Inspired by dreams that spark glory, and by glory that ignites new dreams, we assure the party and the people that we will stay true to our mission, with our hearts and minds fully devoted. We will strive to achieve new accomplishments in China’s crewed space programme.”

Standing to his left, beaming, is Song Lingdong.

He recalls watching one of China’s first space station missions as a 13-year-old with “excitement and awe”. He chose to become a pilot in the hope that this is how he could serve his country.

All three convey their deep sense of national pride, and state media has emphasised that this will be its “youngest crew” to date.

The message is clear: this is a new generation of space travellers and an investment in the country’s future.

China has already selected its next group of astronauts and they will train for potential lunar missions as well as to crew the space station.

“I am determined not to let down the trust placed in me,” says Mr Song. “I will strive to make our country’s name shine once again in space.”

China’s name has been “shining brightly” a lot lately when it comes to headlines about its space programme.

Earlier this year, the country achieved a historic first by retrieving rock and soil samples from the far side of the Moon.

In 2021, China safely landed a spacecraft on Mars and released its Zhurong rover – becoming just the second nation to do so.

China also has a fleet of satellites in space and has plans for many more.

In August it launched the first 18 of what it hopes will eventually be a constellation of 14,000 satellites providing broadband internet coverage from space, which it hopes will one day rival SpaceX’s Starlink.

Elon Musk, Starlink’s chief executive, admitted on his own platform X that China’s space programme is far more advanced than people realise.

But others in the US are voicing even greater concerns, as they fear this technology can be weaponised.

The head of US Space Command, General Stephen Whiting, told a space symposium in April that China and Russia were both investing heavily in space at a “breath-taking speed”.

He claimed that since 2018, China has tripled the amount of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites it has in orbit, building a “kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and target United States and allied military capabilities”.

China’s space exploration is a “collective mission for humanity”, says Li Yingliang, director of the general technology bureau of China’s Manned Space Agency, dismissing US concerns as “unnecessary”.

“I don’t think this should be called a competition… China has long upheld the notion of peaceful use of space in its manned space programme. In the future, we will further develop international co-operation in various aspects of manned space technology, all based on sharing and collaboration,” he adds.

But the new space race is no longer about getting to the Moon. It’s about who will control its resources.

The Moon contains minerals, including rare earths, metals like iron and titanium – and helium too, which is used in everything from superconductors to medical equipment.

Estimates for the value of all this vary wildly, from billions to quadrillions. So it’s easy to see why some see the Moon as a place to make lots of money. However, it’s also important to note that this would be a very long-term investment – and the tech needed to extract and return these lunar resources is some way off, writes the BBC’s science editor Rebecca Morelle.

Chinese experts at the launch centre were keen to point out the benefits of Beijing’s space station experiments.

“We study bones, muscles, nerve cells, and the effects of microgravity on them. Through this research, we’ve discovered that osteoporosis on Earth is actually similar to bone loss in space. If we can uncover unique patterns in space, we might be able to develop special medications to counteract bone loss and muscle atrophy,” said Zhang Wei, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“Many of these experimental results can be applied on Earth.”

China is, at times, trying to downplay its advances.

At the launch of a roadmap for its space ambitions, which include building a research station on the Moon, returning samples of Venus’s atmosphere to Earth and launching more than 30 space missions by the middle of this century, Ding Chibiao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said the country did not have a great number of achievements “compared to developed nations”.

And even here at the launch centre, they admit to “significant challenges” as they try to land a crew on the Moon.

“The technology is complex, there’s a tight schedule, and there are a lot of challenges,” said Lin Xiqiang, spokesperson for the China Manned Space Agency.

“We’ll keep up the spirit of ‘two bombs and one star’. We will maintain our self-confidence and commitment to self-improvement, keep working together and keep pushing forward. We’ll make the Chinese people’s dream of landing on the Moon a reality in the near future.”

That’s perhaps why President Xi appears to be prioritising the country’s space programme even as the economy is in a slow decline.

And even though they are bringing along international press to witness their progress – there are key restrictions.

We were kept in a hotel three hours from the launch site and transported back and forth by bus, a total journey of 12 hours, rather than being left on site for a few hours.

A simple trip to a friendly local restaurant was carefully guarded by a line of security personnel.

We also noticed a large sign in town holds a stern warning: “It’s a crime to leak secrets. It’s an honour to keep secrets. You’ll be jailed if you leak secrets. You’ll be happy if you keep secrets. You’ll be shot if you sell secrets.”

China is taking no chances with its new technology, as its rivalry with the United States is no longer just here on Earth.

The world’s two most powerful countries could soon be staking territorial claims well beyond this planet.

Canada has launched a new drive to get more overseas tourists to visit the country. Yet staffing shortages, wildfires and a spat with China will not make the task easy.

“You can learn about nature, indigenous culture and our history,” says tour guide Jack Rivers.

These are three reasons why he thinks more people should take a chance on holidaying in Canada.

Mr Rivers, who is indigenous, leads organised walks around Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory on Manitoulin Island, in Ontario.

It’s an unspoiled area, where dense forests line the shore of Lake Huron.

The walking tours are part of Wiikwemkoong Tourism, an indigenous tourism organisation that teaches visitors about native history and the land.

Mr Rivers says his job is “great”, but he admits that it is not for everyone. “It’s not an 8-4 job,” he says, adding that “it relies on people working weekends and being away from their family”.

Aa a result, Wikwemikong Tourism has struggled to retain staff, a problem that’s reflected across a Canada-wide tourism sector still said to be short of hundreds of thousands of workers.

These staffing shortfalls will have to be addressed if the Canadian government is successful in its new drive to increase visitor numbers to the country.

The push, led by government body Destination Canada, comes as visitor numbers to Canada have failed to recover post-Covid to their 2019 peak of 22 million people. Last year the total was 18.3 million, 17% lower.

The new strategy called A World Of Opportunity, aims to increase revenue from Canada’s tourism sector to $CA160bn ($116bn; £89bn) by 2030, up from $CA109bn last year.

It also wants to see Canada become the world’s seventh most-visited country, up from the current 13th place.

More than 3,000km (1864 miles) west of Manitoulin Island, sits the popular tourist town of Jasper in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains.

Back in July, a wildfire dubbed “the biggest in the region for a century” destroyed a third of the town’s buildings.

One of those hit was Maligne Lodge, a hotel that has been welcoming guests since the 1960s. Owner Karyn Decore says the fire was “devastating”.

“There is a lot to do, but I try and focus on what I have to do today, and leave tomorrow to tomorrow,” she says.

Thankfully for Ms Decore, Maligne Lodge was insured, and she hopes to rebuild it before next summer. But how long will it take for all the other hotels in the town to reopen?

“Jasper is an international tourist destination, and the hotels here are booked 100% between 1 June and the middle of October,” she explains. “We’re already sold out for next summer. The challenge is that not as many people will be able to visit Jasper until all the hotels are rebuilt, and we don’t know how long that will take.”

Another big issue for the Canadian tourism sector is a fall in the number of Chinese visitors.

Relations between the two countries have been fraught since a diplomatic row back in 2018.

That year the chief financial officer of Chinese telecoms firm Huawei was arrested in Canada in response to a US warrant. China responded by detaining two Canadian citizens living in China on spying charges.

The trio were not released until 2021.

Some analysts say this row is a main reason why, following the Covid pandemic, China still hasn’t put Canada back on its list of approved countries for Chinese citizens to visit.

James Griffiths, Asia correspondent for Canadian newspaper Globe & Mail, says that “the freeze in bilateral relations [between China and Canada] still hasn’t really recovered”.

He also points to the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which means that Western airlines can no longer fly through Russian airspace.

“A lot of North American and European carriers have really struggled with routes to China because they can’t fly through Russia or over Russia, and by avoiding Russia, you add about three hours to the flight time, which is more expensive for the airlines and onerous for passengers.”

Canada’s Minister of Tourism Soraya Martinez Ferrada is the politician in charge of bringing more tourists to the country. She tells the BBC that she also wants them “to stay longer” and “spend more money”.

When asked about the drop in Chinese visitors, she says Canada is focused on its largest markets, Europe and the US. Though “with Chinese visitors, we see that Canada is still of interest to them,” she adds.

Tackling climate change is another of the government’s priorities, which Ms Martinez Ferrada accepts is an “existential threat to Canadian tourism”.

Yet Canada, she says, is a big country, and “it’s not the whole country that’s on fire”. “We have to make sure travellers understand that there might be threats around climate change, but there are so many other places to discover that aren’t impacted.”

As for staffing shortages hampering firms like Wiikwemkoong Tourism, she admits: “I do think that we need to do a better job of promoting the sector and the career opportunities that we have.

“Having the skills and having the training to do that, I think it’s important.”

An Israeli military official has told the BBC that it carried out a deadly strike on a five-storey residential building in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza on Tuesday in response to seeing a “spotter” on the roof with binoculars observing Israeli forces.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said more than 90 Palestinians, including 25 children, were killed or missing beneath the rubble of the building, which collapsed as a result of the strike.

The military official said it was not a planned strike and troops did not know the building was being used as a shelter for displaced people.

They also said there were discrepancies between the number of casualties reported and what the military had observed.

The strike provoked a strong response from Israel’s closest ally, the US, which described it as a “horrifying incident with a horrifying result” and demanded an explanation.

On Wednesday, after the military official had spoken to reporters, US state department spokesman Matthew Miller said Israel was “not doing enough to get us the answers that we have requested”.

“They have said to us what they had said publicly, which is they’re investigating the matter,” he added.

Israel does not allow the BBC and other international media into Gaza to report independently, making it difficult to verify facts on the ground, so we rely on information from video footage and witness testimonies.

Videos posted on social media a few hours after the strike showed multiple bodies wrapped in blankets and people collecting body parts at the scene of the strike.

Umm Malik Abu Nasr later told BBC Arabic’s Gaza Today programme on Tuesday that the strike destroyed her family’s home and that she was among the survivors pulled from the rubble.

“At around 00:30 or 01:00, the Awda family house next to us was bombed,” she said. “We rushed to help and host them but their daughter [died] in our home.”

“At 04:00 the multi-storey house of the Abu Nasr family collapsed on top of us. They [Israel forces] bombed the house, which was housing about 300 displaced people who had fled their homes. These people sought to take refuge in our houses. We hosted them because they were just civilians and had nothing to do with resistance [Palestinian armed groups].”

“My husband and other young men are still under the rubble and have not been pulled out yet,” she added. “My husband’s cousin and her five children are still under the rubble.”

The director of the nearby Kamal Adwan hospital – which only has two doctors and limited nursing staff following an Israeli raid last week – said in a voice message recorded on Tuesday that it had received the bodies of more than 25 people killed in the strike and that another 77 were trapped under the rubble.

About 45 injured, including children and women, had also been brought to the hospital either by horse-drawn carts or by people carrying them, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya added.

The UN’s Middle East peace envoy, Tor Wennesland, said it was the latest in “a deadly series of recent mass casualty incidents, alongside a massive displacement campaign, in the north of Gaza that raises serious concerns about violations of humanitarian law”.

Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed since the Israeli military launched a ground offensive in Beit Lahia as well as neighbouring Jabalia and Beit Hanoun on 6 October, saying it was acting against regrouping Hamas fighters.

More than 70,000 residents have fled to Gaza City, but the UN estimates that about 100,000 remain in dire conditions, with severe shortages of food, water and medical supplies.

The offensive has also forced the closure of essential services, including medical facilities, firefighting, search and rescue, water wells and bakeries.

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

More than 43,160 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 polls were relatively stable in September and early October but they have tightened in the last couple of weeks, as shown in the chart below, with trend lines showing the averages and dots for individual poll results for each candidate.

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

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 leads in the swing states are so small that it’s impossible to know who is really ahead from looking at the polling averages.

Polls are designed to broadly explain how the public feels about a candidate or an issue, not predict the result of an election by less than a percentage point so it’s important to keep that in mind when looking at the numbers below.

It’s also important to remember that the individual polls used to create these averages have a margin of error of around three to four percentage points, so either candidate could be doing better or worse than the numbers currently suggest.

If you look at the trends since Harris joined the race, it does highlight some differences between the states.

In Arizona, Georgia 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. It’s a similar story in Nevada but with Harris the candidate who is slightly ahead.

In the three other states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – Harris had led since the start of August, sometimes by two or three points, but 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.

The polls have underestimated support for Trump in the last two elections and the national polling error in 2020 was the highest in 40 years according to a post-mortem by polling experts – so there’s good reason to be cautious about them going into this year’s election.

The polling miss in 2016 was put down to voters changing their minds in the final days of the campaign and because college-educated voters – who were more likely to support Hillary Clinton – had been over-represented in polling samples.

In 2020, the experts pointed to problems with getting Trump supporters to take part in polls, but said it was “impossible” to know exactly what had caused the polling error, especially as the election was held during a pandemic and had a record turnout.

Pollsters have made lots of changes since then and the polling industry “had one of its most successful election cycles in US history” in the 2022 midterm elections, according to analysts at 538.

But Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot in the midterms and we won’t know until after election day whether these changes can deal with the influx of irregular voters he tends to attract.

• 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

Bill Donovan knows that every vote matters in the swing state of Pennsylvania.

That’s why the 78-year-old Democrat travelled from university to university throughout Pittsburgh to approach students in coffee shops and on sidewalks to ensure they registered to vote.

Mr Donovan plans to back Vice-President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election and volunteers with a non-profit voter registration group aimed at boosting Democratic turnout in the state.

With 19 electoral votes – the most electoral votes out of any swing state – Pennsylvania has become this election’s must-win prize, shining a spotlight on everyday voters.

• Harris v Trump poll tracker
• What is the electoral college?
• A guide to Pennsylvania
• ‘It’s non-stop’: Swing state voters bombarded with ads – will they make a difference?

Mr Donovan said they have to take advantage of it.

“A lot of people are saying this is where it’s going to be decided… and I think they might be right,” he told the BBC. “That gives us just a little more incentive to keep going when we feel like going home.”

How Pennsylvania votes is often seen as a predictor of who will win the country – the candidate who has won the state in 10 of the last 12 presidential elections landed in the White House.

The state has a history of close races. Former President Donald Trump carried Pennsylvania in 2016. Four years later, President Joe Biden narrowly won. And with just days to go before election day, polls show it’s a dead heat between Harris and Trump.

The power that comes with casting a vote in Pennsylvania is exactly the reason Dimitri Chernozhukov, a 21-year-old university student at Lafayette College in the city of Easton, chose to attend university in the state.

“My vote matters here,” said the soon-to-be, two-time Trump voter. “When I was registering in Pennsylvania, I made sure all the forms were correct because this vote matters.”

The state has been inundated with campaign stops from both Harris and Trump, who along with their running mates, have made more than 50 appearances total in the state since mid-July.

Kari Holmes, a pastor in eastern Pennsylvania, sees the limelight on her state and feels the weight of being one of its highly coveted voters. She has been working with other faith leaders to encourage voters of colour – a highly sought after demographic – to cast a ballot.

“This is the time to feel the gravity of our vote as voters of colour in this very important commonwealth,” Ms Holmes, who plans to vote for Harris, said.

With some nine million registered voters in Pennsylvania, turnout is essential for success for either campaign come November.

Registration numbers show that political affiliation is split nearly 50-50, with around 3.9 million registered Democrats and 3.6 million registered Republicans. There are also around 1.4 million Independent or third-party registered voters, who both campaigns have courted.

Marc Pane, owner of an auto-repair business in the city of Scranton, is among those millions of registered Republicans excited to cast his ballot for Trump this November.

“It could come down to Pennsylvania,” Mr Pane said. “We could make or break the election. It’s important. Our vote is important, more so than ever and I’m really kind of happy it’s us.”

In Pennsylvania, Democrats are mostly clustered along the eastern and western borders in urban areas like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. The middle of the state, which is rural, leans heavily Republican.

Two counties specifically – Erie in western Pennsylvania and Northampton in eastern Pennsylvania – are seen as bellwether counties, meaning they often trend with how the overall country votes. Both counties favoured Trump in 2016, but went for Biden in 2020.

“They have the balance of urban, rural, suburban and it’s really a place to look on election night to see what’s happening,” Christopher Borick, director of Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, told the BBC.

Lori McFarland, chair of the Lehigh County Democrats, spends her days working to ensure Pennsylvanians in Lehigh County, which neighbours Northampton County, back Harris. She is not so sure every voter understands the gravity of their decision come 5 November.

“It’s challenging to not get overexcited, stay calm, stay focused and know what the job is,” Ms McFarland said. “There is pressure because both the campaigns [and] the world is looking at not only Lehigh and Northampton counties, they are also looking at Erie County.”

“We are the three major counties that feel like it’s falling on us, it’s overwhelming,” she told the BBC.

The focus on courting voters in the crucial swing state leads to an influx of political advertising.

Between 22 July and October 8, the Harris campaign spent $159.1m (£122.6m) on advertising in Pennsylvania, according to a recent AdImpact report. The Trump campaign spent $120.2m (£92.4m) in the same time period.

Andy Jones, who is voting for Trump in Allegheny County, said television and radio advertisements, billboards and yard signs in western Pennsylvania are “out of control”. He describes it as a battle among his neighbours to see who can “out-sign” the other in their yards.

“People are definitely charged up around here,” he said. “It’s an important state.”

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

Donald Trump has said his rally in New York City on Sunday was an “absolute lovefest”, ignoring bipartisan calls that he personally apologise after a comedian’s joke at the event caused widespread offence.

The Republican White House nominee said it was “an honour to be involved” in the Madison Square Garden rally, though he distanced himself from the stand-up comic who described Puerto Rico during a routine as “an island of garbage”.

Opinion polls suggest Trump and his Democratic rival, US Vice-President Kamala Harris, are neck-and-neck with just one week to go until the 5 November election.

Both are scrambling to woo Latino voters in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, home to more than 470,000 Puerto Ricans.

On Tuesday night, Trump is campaigning in the heavily Latino town of Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Some members of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the US have expressed outrage at Tony Hinchliffe’s routine. A number of prominent Puerto Ricans – including Trump allies – have urged the Republican candidate to publicly disavow the joke.

Among them was Angel Cintron, president of Puerto Rico’s Republican Party, who was quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying it was “disgraceful, ignorant and totally reprehensible”.

In an interview with ABC News on Tuesday, Trump distanced himself from Hinchcliffe.

“I don’t know him, someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is,” he said.

Speaking at his resort in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, Trump insisted the rally was an “absolute lovefest”.

“The love in that room. It was breathtaking,” he added.

Trump’s allies have hit back at Democrats, accusing actor George Lopez of making an insensitive joke about Mexicans as he spoke at a Kamala Harris rally in Arizona over the weekend.

Also over the weekend, Harris unveiled a new policy platform for Puerto Rico, promising economic development and improved disaster relief.

She accused Trump of having “abandoned and insulted” the island during Hurricane Maria in 2017.

The Trump campaign retorted that his administration rebuilt the US territory’s infrastructure after the storm, awarding billions of dollars in grant funding to the island.

At another event in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, Trump told a Puerto Rican voter that his administration “helped you through a lot of bad storms”.

“I think no president’s done more for Puerto Rico than I have,” he said.

Seeking to put the controversy behind him, the Republican assailed Harris on the border and inflation, arguing that “on issue after issue, she broke it” and “I’m going to fix it and fix it very fast”.

• 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

Radiohead singer Thom Yorke briefly walked off stage during his Australian solo tour after an exchange with an audience member who heckled him with a protest about deaths in Gaza.

Videos posted online by concert-goers at the Melbourne show on Wednesday show a man in the crowd shouting at Yorke. While not all of his words can be heard, he calls on the singer to “condemn the Israeli genocide of Gaza”.

Yorke responds by telling the heckler to “hop up on stage” to make his remarks.

“Don’t stand there like a coward, come here and say it. You want to piss on everybody’s night? Ok you do it, see you later,” Yorke continues, before removing his guitar and halting his set.

His exit came as the heckler had repeated his call and added “how many dead children will it take”.

Segments of the crowd could be heard booing the disturbance, and Yorke returned to cheers shortly after to play the Radiohead song Karma Police.

Concert-goer Elly Brus said the protester “did not have support” from the Sidney Myer Music Bowl crowd.

“He was escorted away by security. He then continued to engage with people outside the venue as well,” she told the BBC.

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

More than 43,160 people have been killed in Gaza since then – including thousands of women and children – according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Both sides deny accusations they have broken the laws of war.

In the past, Radiohead has faced pressure to cancel shows in Israel and take part in a cultural boycott of the country over its policies towards the Palestinians.

Yorke pushed back on that pressure, saying that “playing in a country isn’t the same as endorsing its government”.

“We’ve played in Israel for over 20 years through a succession of governments, some more liberal than others,” Yorke said in a statement in 2017, defending a decision to go ahead with a planned concert in Tel Aviv.

“We don’t endorse [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu any more than Trump, but we still play in America. Music, art and academia is about crossing borders not building them,” he added at the time.

Earlier this year, pro-Palestinian activists also accused Yorke’s bandmate Jonny Greenwood of “artwashing” for performing alongside Israeli-Arabic musician Dudu Tassa in Tel Aviv.

“No art is as ‘important’ as stopping all the death and suffering around us,” Greenwood said in a statement on X.

“But… silencing Israeli artists for being born Jewish in Israel doesn’t seem like any way to reach an understanding between the two sides of this apparently endless conflict.”

The BBC has contacted representatives for Yorke’s Australian tour. The Arts Centre Melbourne, which oversees the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, declined to comment.

Anna Kendrick has said she donated her fee from hit Netflix true crime film Woman of the Hour to two victims’ charities because she would have felt “gross” profiting from it.

Kendrick directed and stars in the movie, about a serial killer who appeared on a 1970s TV dating show in the midst of his crimes.

The star said she didn’t expect the film to make any money, and didn’t think about the possibility until its premiere.

“I was just making the movie… and then it was like, oh, there’s money going to be exchanging hands. And I asked myself the question of, do you feel gross about this? And I did. And so, yeah, I’m not making money off of the movie.”

As well as directing Woman of the Hour, Kendrick plays Cheryl Bradshaw, who appeared on The Dating Game with Rodney Alcala in 1978.

Alcala was later found guilty of eight murders between 1971 and 1979, but is suspected of killing more than 100 women and girls.

Speaking to Ashley Flowers, host of SiriusXM’s Crime Junkie AF podcast, Kendrick said “we’re both steeped in some really valid ethical questions around true crime”.

The Pitch Perfect and Trolls star continued: “Believe me, this was never a money-making venture for me, because all the resources went to actually just making the movie.

“But it wasn’t until the Toronto Film Festival (TIFF), where the movie premiered, and it’s this big film festival for someone to buy movies… and eventually Netflix bought the movie.

“But it wasn’t until the week before TIFF that I thought, oh, the movie’s going to make money.”

At the time, Netflix was reported to have paid $11m (£8.5m) for the rights.

Kendrick didn’t disclose her fee, which she said she donated to charities Rainn (the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) and the National Centre for Victims of Crime.

“It’s still a complicated area, but that felt like certainly the least that I should do,” she added.

Woman of the Hour was watched the equivalent of 23 million times in the two weeks after its release earlier this month, Netflix has said.

Kendrick explained: “It is really meant to be the story of the impact that he [Alcala] had on the people that were unfortunate enough to come across him, so the aim was always really to centre the women’s stories.”

Elon Musk did not appear at a Philadelphia court for a hearing over the billionaire’s cash giveaways to registered voters.

The Donald Trump supporter has, through his political group America PAC, been offering cash prizes to registered voters in swing states who sign a petition – something US officials suggest may break electoral law. Musk denies this.

Philadelphia District Attorney Lawrence Krasner sued Musk earlier this week over the $1m (£770,000) giveaways and said Musk “must be stopped, immediately, before the upcoming presidential election”.

Though a hearing did take place Thursday – without Musk – Mr Krasner and his team said afterwards that Musk’s lawyers had filed papers on Wednesday night requesting that the matter be moved from the state’s hands to a federal judge.

It will now move to federal court, John Summers, a lawyer working with Mr Krasner, told reporters after the hearing.

“We will proceed to federal court and we will address the issues there and seek to have the matter remanded back to the state court,” Mr Summers said.

“After all, this is a case that involves state law issues,” he added.

• Philadelphia prosecutor sues Musk over voter lottery
• Is Musk’s giveaway legal?
• US election: Follow live coverage
• Who’s ahead in the polls, Harris or Trump?

Musk announced earlier this month that he would randomly award a $1m prize to people in battleground states – Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina – every day until 5 November.

These swing states suggest a particularly close contest between Trump and his Democratic rival for president, Kamala Harris.

To be eligible to win, the giveaway requires registered voters to release personal identifying information, like addresses and phone numbers. They are also required to sign a pledge that says they support the US Constitution.

The lawsuit filed against Musk claimed he was “running an illegal lottery”.

“America PAC and Musk are lulling Philadelphia citizens… to give up their personal identifying information and make a political pledge in exchange for the chance to win $1 million,” Mr Krasner said in the lawsuit. “That is a lottery. And it is indisputably an unlawful lottery.”

The lawsuit also accuses the Tesla co-founder of violating consumer protection laws by using “deceptive, vague or misleading statements” that could create confusion.

But Musk’s lawyers have argued otherwise.

“The complaint, in truth, has little to do with state-law claims of nuisance and consumer protection,” Musk’s lawyers wrote in federal filings, according to a CNN report.

“Rather, although disguised as state law claims, the complaint’s focus is to prevent defendants’ purported ‘interference’ with the forthcoming federal presidential election by any means.”

Before the case was filed, Musk’s PAC was also warned by the US justice department that its lottery-style giveaway might violate federal election law.

The BBC has previously reached out to America PAC for comment.

Under US law, it is illegal to pay people to register to vote. But legal experts have told the BBC that whether the giveaway violates federal law is a grey area.

Musk himself, who has been aggressively campaigning for Trump, has insisted voters who want to be eligible for the prizes do not need to register as Republicans or go ahead with casting a vote.

• 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?

The Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD has seen its quarterly revenues soar, beating Tesla’s for the first time.

It posted more than 200bn yuan ($28.2bn, £21.8bn) in revenues between July and September. This is a 24% jump from the same period last year, and more than Elon Musk’s company whose quarterly revenue was $25.2bn.

However, Tesla still sold more electric vehicle (EVs) than BYD in the third quarter.

It comes as EV sales in China have been getting a boost from government subsidies to encourage consumers to trade their petrol-powered cars for EVs or hybrids.

BYD also notched a monthly sales record in the last month of the quarter, in a sign that momentum continues to build for China’s bestselling car maker.

But there is a growing backlash abroad against the Chinese government’s support for domestic car makers like BYD.

Earlier this week, European Union tariffs of up to 45.3% on imports of Chinese made EVs came into force across the bloc.

Chinese EV makers were already facing a 100% tax from the United States and Canada.

The tariffs are in response to alleged unfair state subsidisation of China’s car industry.

As of last week, official data showed 1.57 million applications had been submitted for a national subsidy of $2,800 per each older vehicle traded in for a greener one.

That’s on top of other government incentives already in place.

China has been counting on high-tech products to help revive its flagging economy, and the EU is the largest overseas market for the country’s electric car industry.

Its domestic car industry has grown rapidly over the past two decades and its brands, such as BYD, have begun moving into international markets, prompting fears from the likes of the EU that its own companies will be unable to compete with the cheaper prices.

A Russian court has fined Google two undecillion roubles – a two followed by 36 zeroes – for restricting Russian state media channels on YouTube.

In dollar terms that means the tech giant has been told to pay $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Despite being one of the world’s wealthiest companies, that is considerably more than the $2 trillion Google is worth.

In fact, it is far greater than the world’s total GDP, which is estimated by the International Monetary Fund to be $110 trillion.

The fine has reached such a gargantuan level because – state news agency Tass says – it doubles every day it is not paid.

According to Tass, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted he “cannot even pronounce this number” but urged “Google management to pay attention.”

The company has not commented publicly or responded to a BBC request for a statement.

Russia media outlet RBC reports the fine on Google relates to the restriction of content of 17 Russian media channels on YouTube.

While this started in 2020, it escalated after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years later.

That saw most Western companies pull out of Russia, with doing business there also tightly restricted by sanctions.

Russian media outlets were also banned in Europe – prompting retaliatory measures from Moscow.

In 2022, Google’s local subsidiary was declared bankrupt and the company has stopped offering its commercial services in Russia, such as advertising.

However, its products are not completely banned in the country.

This development is the latest escalation between Russia and the US tech giant.

In May, 2021, Russia’s media regulator Roskomnadzor accused Google of restricting YouTube access to Russian media outlets, including RT and Sputnik, and supporting “illegal protest activity”.

Then, in July, 2022, Russia fined Google 21.1bn rouble (£301m) for failing to restrict access to what it called “prohibited” material about the war in Ukraine and other content.

There is virtually no press freedom in Russia, with independent news outlets and freedom of expression severely curtailed.

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 polls were relatively stable in September and early October but they have tightened in the last couple of weeks, as shown in the chart below, with trend lines showing the averages and dots for individual poll results for each candidate.

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

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 leads in the swing states are so small that it’s impossible to know who is really ahead from looking at the polling averages.

Polls are designed to broadly explain how the public feels about a candidate or an issue, not predict the result of an election by less than a percentage point so it’s important to keep that in mind when looking at the numbers below.

It’s also important to remember that the individual polls used to create these averages have a margin of error of around three to four percentage points, so either candidate could be doing better or worse than the numbers currently suggest.

If you look at the trends since Harris joined the race, it does highlight some differences between the states.

In Arizona, Georgia 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. It’s a similar story in Nevada but with Harris the candidate who is slightly ahead.

In the three other states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – Harris had led since the start of August, sometimes by two or three points, but 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.

The polls have underestimated support for Trump in the last two elections and the national polling error in 2020 was the highest in 40 years according to a post-mortem by polling experts – so there’s good reason to be cautious about them going into this year’s election.

The polling miss in 2016 was put down to voters changing their minds in the final days of the campaign and because college-educated voters – who were more likely to support Hillary Clinton – had been over-represented in polling samples.

In 2020, the experts pointed to problems with getting Trump supporters to take part in polls, but said it was “impossible” to know exactly what had caused the polling error, especially as the election was held during a pandemic and had a record turnout.

Pollsters have made lots of changes since then and the polling industry “had one of its most successful election cycles in US history” in the 2022 midterm elections, according to analysts at 538.

But Donald Trump wasn’t on the ballot in the midterms and we won’t know until after election day whether these changes can deal with the influx of irregular voters he tends to attract.

• 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

North Korea has fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, which flew for 86 minutes – the longest flight recorded yet – before falling into waters off its east, South Korea and Japan said.

The ICBM was fired at a sharply-raised angle and reached as high as 7,000km (4,350 miles). This means that it would have covered a further distance if it were launched horizontally.

Thursday’s launch violated UN curbs and came at a time of deteriorating relations between the two Koreas and Pyongyang’s increasingly aggressive rhetoric towards Seoul.

South Korea had also warned on Wednesday that the North was preparing to fire its ICBM close to the US presidential election on 5 November.

Seoul’s defence ministry said the test was intended to develop weapons that “fire farther and higher”.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said in a rare same-day report on state media that the launch shows “our will to respond to our enemies” and described it as “appropriate military action”.

“I affirm that [North Korea] will never change its line of bolstering up its nuclear forces,” Kim said.

The US called Thursday’s launch a “flagrant violation of multiple UN Security Council resolutions”.

“It only demonstrates that [North Korea] continues to prioritise its unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programmes over the well-being of its people,” the White House’s National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said in a statement.

South Korea said it would impose fresh sanctions on the North in response to the launch.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also condemned the launch, which he said were “clear violations of relevant Security Council resolutions”, according to his spokesperson.

Earlier, neighbouring China noted it was “concerned”.

Pyongyang last fired an ICBM in December 2023, in defiance of long-standing and crippling UN sanctions. That missile travelled for 73 minutes and covered about 1,000km.

North Korea experts believe the launch was aimed at increasing its missiles’ payload.

Pyongyang has been developing missiles that can “hit the US mainland even if it carries a larger and heavier warhead” or even multiple warheads, said Kim Dong-yup, an assistant professor at the University of North Korean Studies.

Neighbouring Japan said it monitored Thursday’s launch.

South Korean and US officials met after the launch and agreed to “take strong and varied response measures”, the South’s military said in a statement.

“Our military maintains full readiness as we closely share North Korean ballistic information with US and Japanese authorities,” it added.

Thursday’s launch comes after South Korea and US accused North Korea of sending troops to Russia to support Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

The Pentagon estimates that around 10,000 North Korean soldiers have been deployed to train in eastern Russia. A “small number” has been sent to Kursk in Russia’s west, with several thousand more on their way, the US said earlier this week.

The alleged presence of North Korean troops in Russia has added to growing concerns over deepening ties between Putin and Kim.

Pyongyang and Moscow have neither confirmed nor denied these allegations.

Last time Donald Trump was president, Israel’s prime minister was so pleased, he named a community after him.

Trump Heights is an isolated cluster of pre-fabricated houses in the rocky, mine-strewn landscape of the Golan Heights, a soaring eagle-and-menorah statue guarding the entrance gate. Mauve mountain peaks jut into the azure sky at the horizon.

This was Trump’s reward for upending half a century of US policy – and wide international consensus – by recognising Israel’s territorial claims to the Golan, captured from Syria in the 1967 war, and later unilaterally annexed.

The question for residents there – two dozen families and a few billeted soldiers – is what impact Republican candidate Trump or his Democratic rival Kamala Harris might have on Israel’s interests in the region now.

Elik Goldberg and his wife Hodaya moved to Trump Heights with their four children for the security of a small rural community.

Since the 7 October Hamas attacks in southern Israel last year, they’ve watched Israel’s war with Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, escalate along the northern border with Lebanon, 10 miles away from them.

“For the last year, our beautiful green open space has a lot of smoke, and our lovely view is a view of rockets that Hezbollah is sending to us,” said Elik. “This is a war zone and we don’t know when it will end.”

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump winning?
• How the election could change the world

Elik tells me he wants the new US administration to “do the right thing”. When I ask what that means, he replies, “support Israel”.

“Support the good guys, and have the common sense of right and wrong,” he says.

It’s the kind of language you hear a lot in Israel. It’s also the kind of language Trump understands.

He won favour with Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, during his last stint as US president by scrapping an Iran nuclear deal that Israel opposed, brokering historic normalisation agreements with several Arab countries, and recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – countering decades of US policy.

Mr Netanyahu once called him “the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House”.

As America prepares to vote, the Israeli leader has not hidden his appreciation for the Republican candidate – and polls suggest he’s not alone.

Around two-thirds of Israelis would prefer to see Trump back in the White House, according to recent surveys.

Less than 20% appear to want Kamala Harris to win. According to one poll, that drops to just 1% among Mr Netanyahu’s own supporters.

Gili Shmuelevits, 24, shopping in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market, said Ms Harris “showed her true colours” when she appeared to agree with a protester at a rally who accused Israel of genocide. The vice-president said “what he’s talking about, it’s real”.

She later clarified that she did not believe Israel was committing genocide.

Rivka, shopping nearby, said she was “100% for Donald Trump”.

“He cares more for Israel. He’s stronger against our enemies, and he’s not scared,” she said. “I get that people don’t love him, but I don’t need to love him. I need him to be a good ally for Israel.”

For many people here, good allies never pressure, criticise or constrain. The war in Gaza has helped drive a wedge between Israel and its US ally.

Harris has been more outspoken in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and has put more emphasis on humanitarian issues.

After meeting Netanyahu at the White House in July, she said she would “not be silent” about the situation in Gaza and said she had expressed to him her “serious concern about the scale of human suffering” and the deaths of innocent civilians.

Mr Trump has framed ending the war in terms of Israel’s “victory”, and has opposed an immediate ceasefire in the past, reportedly telling Netanyahu “do what you have to do”.

But many Palestinians see little hope in either candidate.

“The overall estimation is that the Democrats are bad, but if Trump is elected it’ll be even worse,” said Mustafa Barghouti, a respected Palestinian analyst and politician in the occupied West Bank.

“The main difference is that Kamala Harris will be more sensitive to the shift in American public opinion, and that means more in favour of a ceasefire.”

The Gaza War has increased pressure from US allies like Saudi Arabia for progress towards a Palestinian State.

But neither candidate has put the establishment of a Palestinian state at the forefront of their agenda.

When Mr Trump was asked during the presidential debates if he would support it, he replied, “I’d have to see”.

Many Palestinians have given up the promise of a Palestinian state – and on US support more generally.

“The general feeling is that the US has failed drastically in protecting international law, has failed the Palestinians more than once [and] took the side of total bias to Israel,” said Mustafa Barghouti.

“The issue of a Palestinian state is nothing but a slogan.”

• 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
• PEOPLE: How much is abortion shaping women’s vote?
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

On wider regional issues like Iran, the two candidates have historically had different approaches with Trump recently advising Israel to “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later”.

He was speaking before Israel carried out strikes on Iran in retaliation for an Iranian missile attack earlier this month.

“Maybe Trump would play more hardball, and the Iranians would be more hesitant if he was president,” said former Israeli ambassador to the US, Danny Ayalon, but he says it is easy to overstate the differences between the two candidates.

Both Harris and Trump are now talking about making a new deal to block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon, and both want to expand the normalisation agreements between Israel and neighbouring Arab countries – in particular Saudi Arabia.

What would be different is their approach.

“I think if it’s Kamala Harris [in the White House], the direction will be bottom-up,” said Danny Ayalon, meaning that ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon would come first, before turning to the bigger questions of Iran or new regional alliances.

With Trump, he says, “the direction would be top-down – he will go straight to Tehran and from there, try to sort out all the different prongs and theatres throughout the Middle East”.

Political insiders in both Israel and the US see Kamala Harris as closer to America’s traditional bipartisan positions on foreign policy in the Middle East – and Donald Trump as unpredictable, reluctant to involve America in foreign conflicts, and prone to ad-hoc deal-making.

But Ambassador Ayalon believes it’s not only policy that has an impact on public mood in Israel.

“Biden stood by Israel for the entire year,” he said. “But did not get his recognition [because of] things like not inviting him to the White House – things that are more optics than real issues.”

When it comes to US-Israeli relations, he says, public gestures – and emotions – count.

“A lot is personal. The [shared] interests are a given, but the personalities matter.”

• 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

A man has been cleared of murdering a British woman during a break-in at her home in Australia.

Emma Lovell, 41, was stabbed after confronting two intruders in a suburb north of Brisbane on Boxing Day 2022.

A judge listened to three days of evidence earlier this month – and handed down his not guilty verdict on Thursday.

The other man admitted murder earlier this year, and was jailed for 14 years.

The judge-only trial heard it had been accepted the second defendant, who cannot legally be named as he was 17 at the time of the attack, did not stab anyone himself.

The matter in contention was whether he knew his co-accused – also then aged 17 – was carrying a knife.

He had earlier pleaded not guilty to murder.

Mother-of-two Mrs Lovell emigrated from Ipswich in Suffolk in 2011 with her daughters and her husband Lee, who was also injured in the attack.

The couple had confronted the intruders on the front lawn of their home, after being alerted by the sound of their dogs barking.

The second defendant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had also pleaded not guilty to armed break-in as well as malicious acts and assault occasioning bodily harm on Mr Lovell, who was kicked and then stabbed in the back.

He was convicted of burglary and assault, but cleared of more serious charges including the alternative charge of manslaughter.

The prosecution had argued he was liable for Mrs Lovell’s murder as the pair intended to break into the home while armed and there was the potential they could endanger human life.

But the teenager’s defence team said there was no proof beyond reasonable doubt that he had knowledge of the knife. The judge ultimately agreed.

Speaking outside court, an emotional Lee Lovell described the verdict as “a bit of a joke”.

“I don’t feel justice for Emma one bit. You try to do the best you can for her, and I don’t feel I’ve been able to do that,” he said.

“We’re the ones left with the life sentence.”

The case was heard by a judge alone because the issue of youth crime was a key debate during last weekend’s state government elections – and it was feared this could prejudice a jury.

The Liberal National Party swept to power in Queensland, with a campaign that promised tougher sentences for juveniles under the slogan “adult crime, adult time”.

Justice Michael Copley remanded the man in custody, awaiting a pre-sentence report by early December.

Defence barrister Laura Reece told the court that her client may be eligible for release soon, given he had been on remand since the incident almost two years ago.

Canada has launched a new drive to get more overseas tourists to visit the country. Yet staffing shortages, wildfires and a spat with China will not make the task easy.

“You can learn about nature, indigenous culture and our history,” says tour guide Jack Rivers.

These are three reasons why he thinks more people should take a chance on holidaying in Canada.

Mr Rivers, who is indigenous, leads organised walks around Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory on Manitoulin Island, in Ontario.

It’s an unspoiled area, where dense forests line the shore of Lake Huron.

The walking tours are part of Wiikwemkoong Tourism, an indigenous tourism organisation that teaches visitors about native history and the land.

Mr Rivers says his job is “great”, but he admits that it is not for everyone. “It’s not an 8-4 job,” he says, adding that “it relies on people working weekends and being away from their family”.

Aa a result, Wikwemikong Tourism has struggled to retain staff, a problem that’s reflected across a Canada-wide tourism sector still said to be short of hundreds of thousands of workers.

These staffing shortfalls will have to be addressed if the Canadian government is successful in its new drive to increase visitor numbers to the country.

The push, led by government body Destination Canada, comes as visitor numbers to Canada have failed to recover post-Covid to their 2019 peak of 22 million people. Last year the total was 18.3 million, 17% lower.

The new strategy called A World Of Opportunity, aims to increase revenue from Canada’s tourism sector to $CA160bn ($116bn; £89bn) by 2030, up from $CA109bn last year.

It also wants to see Canada become the world’s seventh most-visited country, up from the current 13th place.

More than 3,000km (1864 miles) west of Manitoulin Island, sits the popular tourist town of Jasper in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains.

Back in July, a wildfire dubbed “the biggest in the region for a century” destroyed a third of the town’s buildings.

One of those hit was Maligne Lodge, a hotel that has been welcoming guests since the 1960s. Owner Karyn Decore says the fire was “devastating”.

“There is a lot to do, but I try and focus on what I have to do today, and leave tomorrow to tomorrow,” she says.

Thankfully for Ms Decore, Maligne Lodge was insured, and she hopes to rebuild it before next summer. But how long will it take for all the other hotels in the town to reopen?

“Jasper is an international tourist destination, and the hotels here are booked 100% between 1 June and the middle of October,” she explains. “We’re already sold out for next summer. The challenge is that not as many people will be able to visit Jasper until all the hotels are rebuilt, and we don’t know how long that will take.”

Another big issue for the Canadian tourism sector is a fall in the number of Chinese visitors.

Relations between the two countries have been fraught since a diplomatic row back in 2018.

That year the chief financial officer of Chinese telecoms firm Huawei was arrested in Canada in response to a US warrant. China responded by detaining two Canadian citizens living in China on spying charges.

The trio were not released until 2021.

Some analysts say this row is a main reason why, following the Covid pandemic, China still hasn’t put Canada back on its list of approved countries for Chinese citizens to visit.

James Griffiths, Asia correspondent for Canadian newspaper Globe & Mail, says that “the freeze in bilateral relations [between China and Canada] still hasn’t really recovered”.

He also points to the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which means that Western airlines can no longer fly through Russian airspace.

“A lot of North American and European carriers have really struggled with routes to China because they can’t fly through Russia or over Russia, and by avoiding Russia, you add about three hours to the flight time, which is more expensive for the airlines and onerous for passengers.”

Canada’s Minister of Tourism Soraya Martinez Ferrada is the politician in charge of bringing more tourists to the country. She tells the BBC that she also wants them “to stay longer” and “spend more money”.

When asked about the drop in Chinese visitors, she says Canada is focused on its largest markets, Europe and the US. Though “with Chinese visitors, we see that Canada is still of interest to them,” she adds.

Tackling climate change is another of the government’s priorities, which Ms Martinez Ferrada accepts is an “existential threat to Canadian tourism”.

Yet Canada, she says, is a big country, and “it’s not the whole country that’s on fire”. “We have to make sure travellers understand that there might be threats around climate change, but there are so many other places to discover that aren’t impacted.”

As for staffing shortages hampering firms like Wiikwemkoong Tourism, she admits: “I do think that we need to do a better job of promoting the sector and the career opportunities that we have.

“Having the skills and having the training to do that, I think it’s important.”

Typhoon Kong-rey, the biggest typhoon to directly hit Taiwan in nearly 30 years, has made landfall on the island’s eastern coast.

Schools and workplaces across Taiwan were closed on Thursday and supermarkets were stripped bare, as millions of residents braced for the storm which hit at about 13:40 local time (04:40 GMT).

At one point before it made landfall, Typhoon Kong-rey was packing winds over 200km/h close to its centre, making it the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane.

Hundreds of flights and ferries, along with Taiwan’s stock exchange, have also been suspended.

The typhoon has injured over 70 people and killed at least one person, authorities said on Thursday afternoon. A 56-year-old woman died after a falling tree struck a vehicle she was in.

Authorities say it has weakened to “moderate typhoon” during local evening time.

It has also caused power outages in half a million households, according to electricity supplier Taiwan Power Company.

In the eastern county of Hualien, one employee of the local township administrative office told news agency AFP that they kept receiving reports of disasters from local residents but couldn’t get to them “due to severe wind and rain”.

It is unusual for a typhoon this big to come so late in the year. Taiwan’s typhoon season, according to its weather agency, generally falls between July and September.

For the last eight decades all the strongest typhoons have come within that window. But this year two huge storms have hit Taiwan in October — the other being super typhoon Krathon, which killed four people and left more than 700 injured.

“I’m 70 years old,” one man in Hualien told a TV reporter, “and I have never seen a typhoon hit this late in the year.”

• Watch: Typhoon Kong-rey turns towards Japan after striking Taiwan

Ocean scientists have reported near-record levels of global sea surface temperatures since July, which means there is more heat energy on the ocean surface to feed storm systems.

Beyond the extreme wind speeds of typhoons, one of the biggest threats to life from these storms is often the huge amount of moisture they carry, which can lead to excessive rain, floods and landslides.

The deadliest storm to hit Taiwan in recent decades was Typhoon Morakot in August 2009. The Category 1 storm dumped 2,777 mm of rain over the south of the island, unleashing flash floods and landslides that killed nearly 900 people.

The eastern part of Taiwan, which is set to be hardest hit by Typhoon Kong-rey, may see up to 1,200mm of rainfall between 29 October and 1 November, according to the island’s weather agency forecasters.

Taiwan’s defence ministry put 36,000 soldiers on standby for potential rescue efforts. Around 8,600 people have already been evacuated from high risk areas, authorities said.

Taiwanese president Lai Ching-te, who attended a briefing about the typhoon on Thursday morning, urged people to stay at home and avoid dangerous areas such as going to the beach to watch the waves.

Kong-rey is expected to weaken gradually after making landfall and moving across Taiwan. The storm should leave the island on Friday, the weather agency said.

The Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD has seen its quarterly revenues soar, beating Tesla’s for the first time.

It posted more than 200bn yuan ($28.2bn, £21.8bn) in revenues between July and September. This is a 24% jump from the same period last year, and more than Elon Musk’s company whose quarterly revenue was $25.2bn.

However, Tesla still sold more electric vehicle (EVs) than BYD in the third quarter.

It comes as EV sales in China have been getting a boost from government subsidies to encourage consumers to trade their petrol-powered cars for EVs or hybrids.

BYD also notched a monthly sales record in the last month of the quarter, in a sign that momentum continues to build for China’s bestselling car maker.

But there is a growing backlash abroad against the Chinese government’s support for domestic car makers like BYD.

Earlier this week, European Union tariffs of up to 45.3% on imports of Chinese made EVs came into force across the bloc.

Chinese EV makers were already facing a 100% tax from the United States and Canada.

The tariffs are in response to alleged unfair state subsidisation of China’s car industry.

As of last week, official data showed 1.57 million applications had been submitted for a national subsidy of $2,800 per each older vehicle traded in for a greener one.

That’s on top of other government incentives already in place.

China has been counting on high-tech products to help revive its flagging economy, and the EU is the largest overseas market for the country’s electric car industry.

Its domestic car industry has grown rapidly over the past two decades and its brands, such as BYD, have begun moving into international markets, prompting fears from the likes of the EU that its own companies will be unable to compete with the cheaper prices.

Just before noon one day Serhiy Dobrovolsky, a hardware trader, returned to his home in Kherson in southern Ukraine. He stepped into his yard, lit a cigarette and chatted with his next-door neighbour. Suddenly, they heard the sound of a drone buzzing overhead.

Angela, Serhiy’s wife of 32 years, says she saw her husband run and take cover as the drone dropped a grenade. “He died before the ambulance arrived. I was told he was very unlucky, because a piece of shrapnel pierced his heart,” she says, breaking down.

Serhiy is one of 30 civilians killed in a sudden surge in Russian drone attacks in Kherson since 1 July, the city’s military administration told the BBC. They have recorded more than 5,000 drone attacks over the same period, with more than 400 civilians injured.

Drones have changed warfare in Ukraine, with both Ukraine and Russia using them against military targets.

But the BBC has heard eyewitness testimony and seen credible evidence that suggest Russia is using drones also against civilians in the frontline city of Kherson.

“They can see who they are killing,” says Angela. “Is this how they want to fight, by just bombing people walking in the streets?”

If Russia is found to be intentionally targeting civilians, it would be a war crime.

The Russian military did not respond to the BBC’s questions about the allegations. Since its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia has consistently denied deliberately targeting civilians.

Evidence of apparent drone attacks on civilians can be seen in numerous videos shared on Ukrainian and Russian social media, six of which were examined by BBC Verify.

In each video, we see through the remote operator’s camera as they track the movements of a pedestrian or motorist in civilian clothing, often dropping grenades which sometimes appear to seriously injure or kill their target.

BBC Verify was also able to identify a Telegram channel which has the earliest public copies yet seen of five of the six videos analysed.

They were each posted with goading and threats to the Ukrainian public, including claims that all vehicles were legitimate targets and that people should minimise their public movement. The injured people were also insulted, called “pigs” or in one case mocked for being a woman.

The account posting some of these drone videos also posted images of boxed and unboxed drones, and other images of equipment, thanking people for their donations.

Kherson’s military administration told the BBC that Russia has changed the type of drone it is using and the city’s electronic systems can no longer intercept a majority of them.

“You feel like you’re constantly being hunted, like someone is always looking at you, and can drop explosives at any moment. It’s the worst thing,” says Kristina Synia, who works at an aid centre just 1km (0.6 mile) from the Dnipro river.

To get to the centre without being followed by drones, we drive at a high speed, take the cover of trees while parking, and then head indoors quickly.

On a shelf behind Kristina, a small device confirms the threat outside – buzzing each time it detects a drone. It buzzed every few minutes while we were there – often detecting the presence of at least four drones.

Trauma is visible on the faces of the residents we meet, who have braved stepping out of their homes only to stock up on food. Valentyna Mykolaivna wipes her eyes, “We are in a horrible situation. When we come out, we move from one tree to another, taking cover. Every day they attack public buses, every day they drop bombs on us using drones,” she says.

Olena Kryvchun says she was narrowly missed by a drone strike on her car. Minutes before she was due to get back in her car after visiting a friend, a bomb fell through the roof above the driver’s seat, ripping through one side of the vehicle and leaving it a mangled mess of metal, plastic and glass.

“If I’d been in my car, I would have died. Do I look like a military person, does my car look like a military car?” she says. She works as a cleaner and the car was essential to her work. She doesn’t have the money to fix it.

Olena says drones are more terrifying than shelling. “When we hear a shell launch from the other side of the river, we have time to react. With drones, you can easily miss their sound. They are quick, they see you and strike.”

Ben Dusing, who runs the aid centre, says drones spread even more fear than shelling, immobilising the population. “If a drone locks on you, the truth is it’s probably ‘game over’ at that point. There’s no defence against it,” he says.

In the last few months, says Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, spokesman for Kherson’s military administration, the Russian military has also begun to use drones to remotely drop mines along pedestrian, car and bus routes.

He said explosions had been caused by butterfly mines – small, anti-personnel mines which can glide to the ground and detonate later on contact – which are coated with leaves to camouflage them.

The BBC has not been able to verify the use of drones to distribute mines in Kherson.

Olena says that as winter approaches, the fear of drones will get worse. “When the leaves fall from the trees, there will be many more victims. Because if you are in the street, there’s nowhere to hide.”

We were able to locate the six videos we analysed, which were all filmed in the eastern side of Kherson, by identifying distinctive features in the city streets. In one case – where a drone dropped an explosive on two pedestrians, injuring one of them so badly he could not walk – this was a curve at a T-junction, which pointed to the Dniprovs’kyi district or the nearby suburb of Antonivka, rather than Kherson city centre.

Once we identified a possible location, we were able to match visible landmarks in the video to satellite images – in this case the buildings and pylons – confirming where in the city the attack took place.

To try to establish where the videos had first appeared publicly, we ran several frames from each through search engines. Often the earliest result was a particular Telegram channel, pre-dating reposts on sites such as X or Reddit by several hours.

Having the location of each attack, we were able to calculate the time of filming using the shadows and to cross-reference with weather records to find the most likely date.

Four of the videos we examined were posted on the Telegram channel the day after the likely filming, and in one example, it was posted eight hours later the same day.

Radiohead singer Thom Yorke briefly walked off stage during his Australian solo tour after an exchange with an audience member who heckled him with a protest about deaths in Gaza.

Videos posted online by concert-goers at the Melbourne show on Wednesday show a man in the crowd shouting at Yorke. While not all of his words can be heard, he calls on the singer to “condemn the Israeli genocide of Gaza”.

Yorke responds by telling the heckler to “hop up on stage” to make his remarks.

“Don’t stand there like a coward, come here and say it. You want to piss on everybody’s night? Ok you do it, see you later,” Yorke continues, before removing his guitar and halting his set.

His exit came as the heckler had repeated his call and added “how many dead children will it take”.

Segments of the crowd could be heard booing the disturbance, and Yorke returned to cheers shortly after to play the Radiohead song Karma Police.

Concert-goer Elly Brus said the protester “did not have support” from the Sidney Myer Music Bowl crowd.

“He was escorted away by security. He then continued to engage with people outside the venue as well,” she told the BBC.

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

More than 43,160 people have been killed in Gaza since then – including thousands of women and children – according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Both sides deny accusations they have broken the laws of war.

In the past, Radiohead has faced pressure to cancel shows in Israel and take part in a cultural boycott of the country over its policies towards the Palestinians.

Yorke pushed back on that pressure, saying that “playing in a country isn’t the same as endorsing its government”.

“We’ve played in Israel for over 20 years through a succession of governments, some more liberal than others,” Yorke said in a statement in 2017, defending a decision to go ahead with a planned concert in Tel Aviv.

“We don’t endorse [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu any more than Trump, but we still play in America. Music, art and academia is about crossing borders not building them,” he added at the time.

Earlier this year, pro-Palestinian activists also accused Yorke’s bandmate Jonny Greenwood of “artwashing” for performing alongside Israeli-Arabic musician Dudu Tassa in Tel Aviv.

“No art is as ‘important’ as stopping all the death and suffering around us,” Greenwood said in a statement on X.

“But… silencing Israeli artists for being born Jewish in Israel doesn’t seem like any way to reach an understanding between the two sides of this apparently endless conflict.”

The BBC has contacted representatives for Yorke’s Australian tour. The Arts Centre Melbourne, which oversees the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, declined to comment.