At least 158 people have died in Spain’s worst flooding disaster in generations as rescuers battle odds to find survivors.

On Thursday more than 1,200 workers, aided by drones, were deployed to the rescue mission as rains continued to threaten parts of the country.

“Right now the most important thing is to save as many lives as possible,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told victims in a visit to affected communities.

But in some of the towns worst- hit in Tuesday night’s floods, people were left to the task of recovering bodies from the mud and wreckage.

• ‘It was like a tsunami’: Spaniards recount horror of deadly floods

• Timing of flood alert under scrutiny as blame game rages

• Scientists say climate change made Spanish floods worse

A least 155 deaths were recorded in Valencia, while another two have been recorded in Castilla-La Mancha to the province’s west, and another, a British man, in Andalusia.

In the town of Paiporta, Valencia where a river burst its banks, at least 40 deaths have been recorded so far.

“We all know someone who has died,” said pharmacist Miguel Guerrilla, standing outside his chemist shop which has been covered in thick mud.

“It’s a nightmare.”

On Thursday, the BBC saw undertakers and funeral vans retrieving bodies from the street, while on nearby roads, cars swept away by the storm surge were piled on top of each other.

Motorists have recounted the horror of being trapped by the surging tides on Tuesday which turned highways and streets into rivers – many who survived climbed trees or bridges to escape.

Officials haven’t disclosed the number of people still missing but said there are “many”, as the toll rose by about another 60 deaths on Thursday.

More than 90 deaths were recorded on Wednesday alone in the immediate aftermath of the torrential rains and flash floods, which largely affected Valencia, as well as Castilla-La Mancha in Andalusia, and as far south as Malaga.

The town of Chiva near Valencia received the equivalent of one year’s rainfall in just eight hours according to the Spanish meteorological agency Aemet.

As further rain warnings were issued for the south and east of the country on Thursday, King Felipe VI warned the emergency was “still not over” and PM Sánchez warned citizens to take shelter where necessary.

Meanwhile in flood-affected areas, hundreds are sheltering in temporary accommodation and beginning the slow, arduous task of clearing streets and recovering homes and businesses.

Many roads and the rail network connecting Valencia to the rest of Spain remain cut off.

Spain began an official three-day national mourning period on Thursday with flags at half-mast on government buildings and minutes of silence held.

Public anger is growing over how a developed European country appeared to fail to warn many communities of the flood danger in time.

Questions have been asked over whether disaster management services issued warnings too late.

The civil protection agency, deployed during national disasters, did not issue an alert until 20:15 on Tuesday evening local time, by which time several places in Valencia had been flooded for hours.

Authorities have called the downpours and flooding “unprecedented”.

Many factors contribute to flooding, but a warming atmosphere caused by climate change makes extreme rainfall more likely.

Weather researchers have identified the likely main cause of the intense rainfall as a “gota fria” – a natural weather event that hits Spain in autumn and winter when cold air descends on warmer waters over the Mediterranean.

However, the increase in global temperatures had led to the clouds carrying more rain, scientists told the BBC.

The world has already warmed by about 1.1C since the industrial era began and temperatures will keep rising unless governments around the world make steep cuts to emissions.

“No doubt about it, these explosive downpours were intensified by climate change,” said Dr Friederike Otto, from Imperial College London, who leads an international group of scientists who try to understand the role that warming plays in these type of events.

The death toll is the worst from floods in Spain since 1973, when at least 150 people were estimated to have died in the southeastern provinces of Granada, Murcia and Almeria.

The first trailer for the second season of Squid Game has been released, thrusting viewers back into the deadly arena where Player 456 has returned to play once more.

Three years after his victory in the lethal series of children’s games Seong Gi-hun, played by actor Lee Jung-jae, returns as Player 456 and is joined by hundreds of new competitors – and tries to lead them to safety.

The first season of the South Korean drama followed a group of 456 people, desperate and in debt, fighting to the death for a huge cash prize.

It became Netflix’s biggest ever series launch, streamed by 111 million users in its first 28 days.

The trailer opens as the sinister masked guards welcome a new cast of characters to the competition.

They are despatched for their first game, also familiar from season one: Red Light Green Light.

In the game, players must advance toward the finish line while a giant mechanical doll has its back turned and freeze when it turns around – or face being shot dead.

Gi-hun only just survived the game in season one, launching himself over the finish line, and this time around tries to coach the players to safety.

But things take a lethal turn when a player moves after being told a bee has landed on her, and is then shot in the head.

As in season one, the players get to vote to stop the game or keep playing. While Gi-hun encourages them to focus on “getting out of this place,” the players ignore his pleas.

“One more game,” they chant, as the cash prize fills a giant piggy-bank dangling above them.

Director Hwang Dong-hyuk said: “Gi-hun’s endeavour to find out who these people are and why they do what they do is the core story of season two.”

He told Reuters news agency that the season would feature “more intriguing games” and a larger cast of characters than the debut season.

Also returning is the black-masked mysterious Front Man, who oversees the games, and Hwang Jun-ho, the police detective that broke into the games last season to search for his missing brother.

Hwang Dong-hyuk previously said he felt “a lot of pressure” on how to make season two “even better” after the show’s runaway success.

In its first four weeks, viewers spent 1.65 billion hours watching Squid Game, according to Netflix.

It followed efforts by the streaming giant to increase its offering of international shows and invest in South Korean dramas.

This time Netflix will be hoping to mirror season one’s success as it comes under pressure to show what will power growth in the years ahead, as its already massive reach makes finding new subscribers more difficult.

Netflix has announced that the final, third season of Squid Game will be released in 2025.

Hello Kitty, arguably Japan’s best loved creation, is celebrating her 50th anniversary.

But all has not always been well at Sanrio, the Japanese company behind the character. The business has been on a spectacular journey of financial peaks and valleys.

Hello Kitty has been ranked the second-highest grossing media franchise in the world behind Pokémon, and ahead of the likes of Mickey Mouse and Star Wars.

Underscoring her global fame, Britain’s King Charles wished her a happy birthday during the state visit to the UK by Japan’s Emperor and Empress in June.

In recent years though Sanrio had been struggling to make money, as interest in Hello Kitty waned.

Two previous surges in Sanrio sales, in 1999 and 2014, were both driven by the character’s popularity. But these jumps in demand for the firm’s products were not sustainable, says Yasuki Yoshioka of investment company SMBC Nikko.

“In the past, its performance had many ups and downs, as if it was on a rollercoaster ride,” Mr Yoshioka says.

Then, in 2020, Tomokuni Tsuji inherited the role as Sanrio’s boss.

He is the grandson of the firm’s founder, Shintaro Tsuji, and was just 31 at the time, making him the youngest chief executive of a listed Japanese company.

His grandfather then became Sanrio’s chairman.

Under the younger Mr Tsuji’s leadership, Sanrio changed its marketing strategy of its stable of other characters.

“It is not about lowering Hello Kitty’s popularity but it is about boosting others’ recognition,” he says.

This resulted in Hello Kitty losing the position of Sanrio’s most popular character.

According to a poll of customers, that spot is now held by Cinnamoroll – a blue-eyed white puppy with pink cheeks, long ears and a tail that looks like a Cinnamon roll.

Sanrio is also no longer just about cute characters.

If Hello Kitty is Japan’s ambassador of cute, then angry red panda Aggressive Retsuko – or Aggretsuko – channels the frustrations of an ordinary working woman.

The character, which is popular among Gen Zers, first appeared in a cartoon series on Japan’s TBS Television before it became a global hit on Netflix.

Another unconventional character is Gudetama, or “lazy egg”, who is living with depression and fires out cold one-liners that reflect dark realities of life.

As well as diversifying its characters, Sanrio boosted its overseas marketing and is now tackling counterfeits more rigorously.

“We are now using artificial intelligence to detect fake products and to make removal requests,” says Mr Tsuji.

For its marketing strategy, collaborations with major brands – including Starbucks, Crocs and the LA Dodgers baseball team – have been key, he added.

“In addition to our own promotion, by collaborating with global brands, we are trying to have our characters in the market throughout the year without many breaks.”

In a society that puts so much emphasis on seniority, Mr Tsuji’s surname was crucial to his ability to make major changes at Sanrio.

Almost a quarter of listed companies in Japan, like car makers Toyota and Suzuki and camera firm Canon, are managed by members of the family that founded them.

The reason is cultural, according to Professor Hokuto Dazai of Nagoya University of Commerce and Business.

In Japan, home to the world’s oldest continuous monarchy, “there is strong recognition of families and family businesses,” he says.

The master-servant relationship from the samurai period has transitioned into the relationship between founding families and their employees, and “historically commoners never fought over the top job”.

“It is also because Japan has a smaller pool of professional executives to choose from,” says Professor Dazai.

“Firms tend to look for their next boss internally, including founding family members.”

Still, “it would be a lie if I said there was no pushback” from other managers and employees in the company, Mr Tsuji says.

He also says he clashed with his grandfather over how to run the company.

“But one day I realised that I was being arrogant, trying to convince someone 60 years senior,” he says.

“After about a year, my grandfather told me to run the company as I see fit – that he will leave it up to me.”

The new boss’s revamp of the business has been paying off so far.

Within two years of the younger Tsuji becoming chief executive, Sanrio was profitable again, in what analyst Mr Yoshioka calls “a beautiful V-shaped recovery”.

Its share price has risen tenfold since 2020 and the company now has a stock market valuation of more than a trillion yen ($6.5bn; £5bn).

Away from the boardroom and stock market, there was also an intriguing incident earlier this year.

While Hello Kitty’s true identity is relatively well-known in Japan, some overseas fans were shocked by comments from a Sanrio executive in July.

Speaking on US television, retail business development director Jill Koch told viewers that “Hello Kitty is not a cat” and is in fact a British schoolgirl.

Her comments sparked a flurry of social media posts, with fans expressing their shock and confusion about the revelation.

“Hello Kitty is Hello Kitty and she can be whoever you want her to be – she can be your sister, your mother, it can be another you,” Mr Tsuji says.

Pushed on whether he has any idea why his grandfather decided not to make her Japanese, Mr Tsuji concludes: “London is an amazing city and it was the envy of many Japanese girls, so that may be one of the reasons they decided that she’s from London.”

It may not be the definitive answer her fans are looking for – but after all, Hello Kitty was created 14 years before the younger Tsuji was even born. Half a century since her creation, it is possible that the beloved character’s origin story will continue to be shrouded in mystery for years to come.

Jennylyn M Barrios’ job as a make-up artist takes her all over Manila – precious time away from Uno, her 10-month-old son.

There simply isn’t enough time in the day to make the homemade meals her growing baby needs. But in rapidly developing Philippines, there are increasingly options for busy, working mums like her.

“If I need to make something from scratch, I need to work double time before I finish the product,” she explains.

“But for Cerelac, I just need to add hot water and prepare the mix. I feed it three times a day – for breakfast, lunch, and then for dinner. It’s easy to feed, available, affordable – all great for working mums.”

Jennylyn is one of many mums increasingly turning to commercially available baby food products in recent years: sales of instant cereals, porridges, pureed foods, pouches and snacks across South East Asia have doubled in five years.

Cerelac – an instant porridge mix – is Nestle’s biggest seller here, offering not only convenience but aspiration as well, all for an affordable price, a key consideration with a rise in cost of living.

A quick search on social media shows a slew of aspirational mums with their smiling infants extolling its virtues – including offering some of the crucial nutrients growing children need.

But while the product will be instantly recognisable to parents across the world, the ingredients here may not be.

Because, along with the benefits of added micronutrients Cerelac offers parents in the Philippines and the UK, some flavours offer something else: added sugar.

And that, in a country where parents are increasingly turning from traditional diets to convenience foods, has health professionals worried.

In the Philippines, Nestle says it follows a set of standards and guidelines from the Codex Commission – a collective established by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) consisting of food manufacturers, governments and UN agencies.

“The added sugar we have in our products are all well below the threshold prescribed by international and local guidelines who always follow the FDA, who follows Codex, and these are the experts in this field,” said Arlene Tan-Bantoto, Nestlé Nutrition business executive officer.

But WHO has called the current standards inadequate and recommends they be updated with a particular focus on avoiding sugar and salt in any food for children under three.

Yet a Unicef study of 1,600 baby foods across South East Asia found nearly half included added sugars and sweeteners.

There is, says Ms Tan-Bantoto, a simple explanation for why it is needed in Cerelac in particular: to disguise the taste of crucial nutrients like iron, which has a metallic taste, and the brain nutrient, DHA, which smells like fish.

“Micronutrient deficiency is widespread in the country and we are serious in our efforts in alleviating it,” said Ms Tan-Bantoto.

“Ninety-seven percent of babies do not meet their daily nutrient requirement, 40% of babies, zero to five, suffer from iron deficiency anaemia. And we know that to be anaemic has lifelong consequences. For instance, brain development and next poor immunity and 20% of kids zero to five are stunted. That means we fortify our products.”

At a clinic in Manila, they see first-hand the impacts of malnutrition on babies and toddlers on a regular basis – although as diets change, so too is how the cases are presenting.

“Sometimes they are underweight, some are overweight, and some are severely malnourished,” one doctor told the BBC.

It is impossible to say exactly why there has been a rise in overweight children. There are multiple factors in the rise of obesity – including a change in lifestyles and urbanisation. But nutritionists say taste preferences are developed at a young age and in some countries like in the Philippines, many foods catering to a sweet palate are started early.

It is why the added sugar in a product like Cerelac is such a concern, according to public health experts like Dr Mianne Silvestre. The most popular flavour of Cerelac in the Philippines has about 17.5g of total sugars per serving – more than four teaspoons of sugar – but that can include both naturally occurring and added sugars. Nestle says in the Philippines, it has several variants or flavours without added sugar, and also flavours with added sugar.

“We always mention that malnutrition isn’t just being undernourished, it’s also overnourished also overweight and obese children, and very difficult to diet,” explains Dr Silvestre

“Starting these babies so young on this level of sugar. It’s mind-boggling.”

But, says Ms Tan-Bantoto, Nestle is “well below the threshold prescribed by international and local guidelines” when it comes to added sugar.

Unicef nutrition officer for the Philippines, Alice Nokori, says a lack of local, government regulation puts parents at a distinct disadvantage.

“If you go to other countries in Europe… they will have regulations that control what is sold out there and also make sure that companies put out what is they’re clear on what is in the content and at the front of the pack, it’s easy for the families and consumers to understand what is good for them and what is unhealthy,” she points out.

And it is not just what is in the product – or on the packaging – which needs regulating, she adds. “We conducted a digital scan… and what we saw is that families are bombarded 99% on what is on social media,” Ms Nokori said. “There’s a need for us to regulate what is coming out or being pushed out there in social media, especially targeted to children.”

Chiara Maganalles – or Mommy Diaries PH as she’s known on social media – has 1.6 million Facebook followers. In a lively YouTube video for Nestle’s “Parenteam” educational platform, she tells tens of thousands of subscribers about the benefits of Cerelac.

She’s been promoting the product for years, and for her, it is a win-win.

“I mean with my first kid… I did feed her Cerelac first because it’s convenient… It suits our budget… because of the nutritional content as well, it says that it’s fortified with iron,” she said.

Influencing has also transformed Chiara’s life – she’s now able to support her family from the money she makes from brand deals.

But critics say paid partnerships can look like trustworthy expert advice compared to conventional advertising methods. And what Chaira recommended – feeding Cerelac several times a day – goes even against what Nestle told the BBC.

Ms Tan-Bantoto described it as a “complementary” food to a baby’s diet, which should not be taken “the whole day”.

“At least give one bowl,” she said, for the nutritional value.

Nestle says it recommends one serving of infant cereal each day along with a diverse diet of foods, like fruits, vegetables, and meat daily. The company says the information is shared on its product labels, but promotional material on e-commerce sites and its educational platform suggest meal plans with Cerelac products up to three times a day.

The demand for regulation in the Philippines does have some star power. The sister of the current President and daughter of former President Ferdinand Marcos Snr – Imee Marcos – is sponsoring a bill that would prohibit manufacturers of baby food from adding sugar in their products.

A failure to comply could lead to a hefty fine, and imprisonment of producers and manufacturers for one to five years.

“I’m very hopeful that it will see the light of day. There’s so many bills and the food lobbies, the huge multinationals that purvey all these foods are immensely powerful and until today I haven’t even had a hearing,” Senator Imee Marcos told the BBC.

For its part Nestle says it is listening to concerns, and is phasing out added sugar in baby food – but that balancing the nutritional profile and composition of the product with taste takes time.

The company’s bestseller is due to get a sugar-free variety, with plans to completely eliminate all added sugar in the next “two to three years”, Ms Tan-Bantoto said.

Research published this week indicates that cutting sugar in the first 1,000 days of a baby’s life – from conception to the age of two – appears to reduce the risk of developing significant health issues in adult life.

A team of researchers at the University of Southern California found that limiting the intake of sugar in early life cut the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 35%, and high blood pressure by 20%.

Experts believe the first 1,000 days of life are a crucial period which can shape a person’s future health.

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.

As she sweeps up broken glass outside her shop, Inna knows her country’s future is in the hands of Americans voting more than 5,000 miles away.

“We hope that the woman, Kamala Harris, will win and support us,” she says.

A Russian bomb had shattered her shop windows – a common occurrence in the city of Zaporizhzhia. There’s a 10-metre (32ft) wide crater in the middle of the road.

“Of course we are worried about the outcome [of the election],” she adds. “We want to defeat the enemy!”

For Ukraine to have a remote chance of doing that, it needs the help of the US.

It was here in 2023, on this south-eastern part of the front line, where Ukraine launched a counteroffensive it hoped would force out the Russian invaders.

Instead, after little to no progress, Ukraine’s ambitions have switched to survival. Missiles and glide bombs slam into towns and cities daily, and its soldiers weather constant Russian attacks.

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

While Democratic Vice-President Kamala Harris has suggested military aid would continue if she emerged the victor, her powers could be constrained by a Republican-run Congress. And the pipeline of military support, which so far totals more than $50bn, is looking less likely to be sustained under a second term for Donald Trump.

Whoever becomes the next US president will have a profound impact on Ukraine’s borders and everyone who lives within them.

If, for example, they forced Ukraine to give up land and freeze the front lines, then regions like Zaporizhzhia could become suddenly divided like North and South Korea after the ceasefire that halted fighting – but never officially ended the war there – in the 1950s.

Trump has said he would “work out something” to settle the war and suggested Ukraine may have to give up some land.

A second US option would be to pull its support completely, which would mean over time that Russian forces could eventually engulf the entire region and even more of Ukraine beyond it.

The third scenario of Ukraine completely liberating its occupied territories is looking less and less likely.

It’s this lack of battlefield progress that has made the merits of supporting Ukrainian troops like Andriy increasingly up for debate across the Atlantic.

He’s in charge of his unit’s fleet of US-made armoured vehicles on the front lines. When they’re not used for moving soldiers, they sit under camouflage netting along tree lines.

“If aid stops or slows, the burden will fall on the shoulders of the infantry,” he explains. “We’ll fight with what we have, but everyone knows Ukraine can’t do it on its own.”

• Russian drones hunt civilians, evidence suggests
• WATCH: Putin challenged over Ukraine war by BBC reporter

Andriy and his fellow Ukrainians are nervously awaiting the US vote on 5 November. The uncertainty is stifling battlefield ambitions and frustrating political efforts to secure more help.

Western allies often look to America’s example when deciding how or whether to support Kyiv’s war effort.

“When we hear how one candidate, who is less willing to help us, is leading in the polls, it’s upsetting and frustrating,” says Andriy. “But we’re not going anywhere.”

Amidst the autumnal farmland, the soldiers are keen to demonstrate the American kit they use – drones, grenade launchers and mounted machine guns.

All, they say, far superior to their Soviet-era alternatives.

Whether it’s through Ukraine’s natural resources or business ventures, President Zelensky is also trying to pitch his country as an investment opportunity to his allies.

Drone pilot Serhiy explains how they can give direct feedback to Western manufacturers.

“We have an online chat with them, and we make suggestions,” he says with a grin. “Improvements are already happening.”

As demonstrated with drone manufacturing, the war in Ukraine is forcing innovations domestically. It’s also allowing Western companies to test their products in an active warzone.

Billions of dollars of Western aid has also driven reforms in some areas of government. Kyiv wants to show it’s a horse worth backing.

The question is whether these advances will be eclipsed by a conflict increasingly going Russia’s way.

With an army typically only being as strong as its society, we head to meet someone who experienced Russian brutality first-hand.

Lyubov’s daughter and grandchildren fled to the US at the start of the full-scale invasion.

We last met in her front-line village of Komyshuvakha two years ago, after the invading troops had destroyed her home.

This time, she seemed happier, despite living close to the fighting for so long. In the warm confines of her new flat, I ask her whether Ukraine should negotiate to end the war.

“What about those who gave their lives?” she replies. “I see the end of the war only when we reach the 1991 borders of our country, when Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk were ours.”

There is almost endless coverage of the US election on Ukrainian news programmes, with war projections based on the potential winner.

Kamala Harris is undoubtedly seen as Ukraine’s preferred candidate, and journalists are trying to combat Russian disinformation against her.

But across Ukraine’s south and east, we find a growing number of people who want the war to end immediately, and see a Donald Trump presidency as the best chance of bringing respite.

We spoke to many of these people around the embattled eastern town of Pokrovsk, where Russian forces are inching closer.

There’s a feeling here that Ukraine should have negotiated at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, to prevent the death and destruction they’ve seen since.

Both sides engaged in talks in those early months of 2022. But evidence of alleged Russian war crimes halted attempts at diplomacy, and strengthened Ukraine’s resolve to fight on.

“Death is not worth territory,” as one woman put it. “We have to stop this war, and Trump is the person who knows how to do that.”

Eleven years of Russian aggression is enough for some.

For the politicians in Ukraine’s parliament, it is not an openly shared sentiment. While there is still cross-party support to keep fighting, President Zelensky’s “victory plan” has been criticised for not having a clearer timeline.

As for Lyubov, she certainly wasn’t going to voice her preference on who should win the White House:

“I would like a true friend of Ukraine to win, who will continue to support us. But who it is going to be, I cannot tell you.”

As much as I admire Lyubov’s inner steel, she reflects an increasingly popular and uncomfortable contradiction: a desire for Russia’s defeat, while also wanting the bloodshed to end as soon as possible.

The pendulum between US interventionism and isolationism is closely watched and felt in Ukraine.

Ever since it voted overwhelmingly to be an independent country in 1991 during the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has had to fight for its sovereignty.

It’s found itself on the edge of a geopolitical tectonic plate, trying to align itself with the West as Russia pulls it the other way.

Moscow’s full-scale invasion means Ukraine needs the helping hand of America to stop it from being torn apart.

• How US election could impact the Middle East
• How UK is preparing for a Harris or Trump White House
• 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

US rapper Young Thug was released from jail Thursday evening after pleading guilty to gang, drug and gun charges, in a dramatic twist that ended the longest criminal trial in Georgia history.

The 33-year-old Grammy winner, born Jeffery Lamar Williams, has spent more than 900 days behind bars since his arrest on racketeering and gang-related charges.

In May 2022, prosecutors alleged the rap label he founded was a front for an organised crime syndicate responsible for “75 to 80% of violent crime” in Atlanta.

He was sentenced on Thursday to time served and 15 years of probation, and jail records show he was released later that night.

“I take full responsibility for my crimes, for my charges,” Mr Williams told the court.

“To really everybody that has got something to do with this situation, I want to say sorry.”

In a five-minute speech, he described himself as “a good guy with a good heart” who found himself “in a lot of stuff because I was just nice or cool”.

“And I understand that you can’t be that way when you reach a certain height because it could end bad… and it could fall on you.”

Prosecutors had planned to recommend a sentence of 45 years, including 25 in custody and 20 on probation.

But the plea negotiations were unsuccessful, and Superior Court Judge Paige Whitaker instead chose his punishment, commuting his sentence to the time he has already served, paving the way for his release.

“I want you to try to be more of the solution and less of the problem,” Judge Whitaker told him.

As part of the deal, Mr Williams pleaded guilty to one gang charge, three drug charges and two gun charges.

He also entered a no-contest plea to leading a gang and violating the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act, meaning that he decided not to contest those charges and accepts punishment for them.

Judge Whitaker additionally stipulated 100 hours of community service, a ban on contact with gang members or former co-defendants, and a prohibition from remaining in the metropolitan Atlanta area for the first 10 years of his 15-year probation period except under special circumstances – including weddings, funerals and the anti-gang and anti-gun presentations he is required to host four times a year.

Thursday’s change of plea brings an end to a multi-defendant case that was plagued by multiple delays, courtroom disturbances and motions for mistrial.

When the man known to his fans as “Thugger” was arrested in May 2022, prosecutors charged him and 27 associates at his rap label – Young Stoner Life (YSL) Records – with conspiracy to violate the Rico Act, famously used in mafia prosecutions.

Arguing that YSL in fact stands for a criminal gang called Young Slime Life, they tied the men – including fellow rap superstar Gunna – to a series of felony offences, including murder, armed robbery and carjacking in the streets of Atlanta.

But the indictment drew widespread outrage over prosecutors’ use of YSL rap lyrics as evidence of the gang’s actions and criminal intent. Critics argued the charges violated the rappers’ freedom of speech and were part of a growing assault on a black-dominated art form.

Several of Mr Williams’s co-defendants took plea deals or had their cases severed, and one even had his charges dropped after an unrelated murder conviction – and, by the time the trial began, only six defendants remained.

Jury selection began in January 2023 and lasted nearly 10 months.

In July this year, the trial was put on hold indefinitely after Mr Williams’s lawyers asked a previous judge to recuse himself over misconduct allegations.

The lawyers said Fulton County Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville held an “improper” meeting on 10 June when he met privately with prosecutors and a key witness.

They claimed Judge Glanville sought to pressure the witness into testifying and the lawyers pressed him to recuse himself, motions which the judge had denied.

Mr Williams’s lead attorney, Brian Steel, was also found in criminal contempt in June this year after refusing to reveal how he got to know about the meeting.

The trial also saw a number of unusual incidents, including the arrest of a Fulton County deputy for allegedly attempting to smuggle contraband to a defendant.

In another instance, the court’s Zoom account was hacked into by an apparent supporter of Mr Williams who yelled “free Thug!”.

Earlier this week, three of Mr Williams’s co-defendants in the case took plea deals.

The remaining two defendants in the case, Shannon Stillwell and Deamonte Kendrick, reportedly plan to move ahead with their trials.

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.

It is Halloween once again and two things are inevitable – running out of sweets before young crowds of trick or treaters have knocked on your door, and social media feeds being inundated with celebrities in costumes.

So to save you some aimless scrolling, here are some of the best celebrity Halloween costumes we’ve seen this year.

Heidi Klum is famous for both her annual Halloween party and the incredible costumes she wears to them.

This year, for the 23rd instalment of the event, Klum and husband, German guitarist, Tom Kaulitz dressed as E.T., the extra-terrestrial from Steven Spielberg’s 1982 classic film.

Klum’s outfit was complete with a glowing first finger on her left hand, just like the original character, and a wig of blonde hair to match her own.

But Klum wasn’t the only celebrity to dress as E.T.

Janelle Monae appeared as the endearing alien for a Halloween special of The Jennifer Hudson show.

Monae is similarly famous for going the extra mile with her costumes, and told Hollywood Reporter: “Halloween is such a happy space for me, it has been since I was a kid.

“It opens a larger conversation of how do we become agents of joy? How do we become agents of happy?

“Bringing Halloween experiences and creative experiences is heart work, not hard work. I do this because my heart needs it.”

On Thursday, Lupita Nyong’o swapped trick or treating for the opening night of a Broadway musical in New York City.

But she still made sure to get in the spirit – donning a ghostly-white wig and contact lenses.

TV chat show host Jonathan Ross handed out sweets to trick-or-treaters who turned up outside his London home

It’s not often that you get thirsty looking at Halloween costumes, but Pixie Lott mastered her look this year by dressing as a fashionable Aperol Spritz cocktail.

The 33-year-old also completed her look with a slice of orange as a hat.

Meanwhile, Maya Jama attended her own Halloween bash in a Beetlejuice-inspired costume.

Fans might recognise her vibrant green hair and monochrome suit from the 1988 film, or the sequel which hit cinemas earlier this year.

Rather than imitating the man himself, she described her costume as “Beetlejuice’s unruly niece”.

Amelia Dimoldenberg really reached into the Disney/Pixar archives for this look, as she appeared as the character Roz from the 2001 film Monsters Inc.

You’d be forgiven for not remembering this slug-like monster, who played a small part as an extremely grumpy office worker in the animated film.

Lizzo definitely wins the award for most timely Halloween costume.

She dressed as a fake weight loss drug, which was dreamt up in a recent South Park episode that joked about her body positivity message.

The costume also doubled up as a response to online speculation that her recent weight loss had been fuelled by the drug Ozempic.

The singer posted on Instagram in September: “When you finally get Ozempic allegations after five months of weight training and calorie deficit…”

Ed Sheeran’s costume echoed an AI-generated image of him wearing a monkey costume that’s become a popular internet meme.

The singer posted a photo of himself posing in a replica outfit and holding a phone displaying the image.

“Haters will say its AI”, the caption read, with the hashtag: “#FeltCuteMightDeleteLater”.

Nostalgia is always a big part of Halloween and Paris Hilton has leaned into this trend with her 2024 look.

Taking it back 30 years, she dressed up as Uma Thurman’s character Mia Wallace from the 1994 Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction.

Selena Gomez and her boyfriend Benny Blanco fell down the rabbit hole for their costumes this year.

The actor dressed as Alice in Wonderland whilst her musician partner paid homage to the Mad Hatter.

Two separate Hezbollah rocket attacks have killed seven people in northern Israel, authorities say – the deadliest day of such strikes in months.

An Israeli farmer and four foreign agricultural workers were killed when rockets landed near Metula, a town on the border with Lebanon, Foreign Minister Israel Katz said.

Later, an Israeli woman and her adult son were killed in an olive grove near Kibbutz Afek, on the outskirts of the coastal city of Haifa.

Hezbollah said it had fired barrages of rockets towards the Krayot area north of Haifa and at Israeli forces south of the Lebanese town of Khiam, which is across the border from Metula.

The Israeli military identified two projectiles crossing from Lebanon and falling in an open area near Metula on Thursday morning.

The Israeli farmer who was killed was named by local media as Omer Weinstein, a 46-year-old father-of-four from nearby Kibbutz Dafna.

According to Haaretz, four foreign workers who were killed were all Thai nationals.

A fifth foreign worker was seriously injured by shrapnel. Videos posted online showed them being transferred by helicopter to the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa.

Haaretz said Mr Weinstein and the foreign workers were in an agricultural field near the border fence at the time of the attack.

It cited a member of the local emergency response team as saying the Israeli military had permitted them to enter the area despite Metula being inside a closed military zone.

The military established the zone at the end of September, just before it launched a ground invasion of Lebanon with the aim of destroying Hezbollah weapons and infrastructure.

Thursday’s second rocket attack reportedly hit an agricultural area near Kibbutz Afek, which is about 65km (40 miles) south-west of Metula and 28km from the Lebanese border.

The military said a total of 55 projectiles were fired towards the Western Galilee region, where the kibbutz is located, as well as the Central Galilee and Upper Galilee in the early afternoon. Some of the projectiles were intercepted and others fell in open areas, it added.

According to Haaretz, 60-year-old Mina Hasson and her 30-year-old son, Karmi, were killed by a rocket that hit an olive grove where they were picking olives.

A 70-year-old man was also lightly injured by shrapnel and taken to Rambam hospital, according to the Magen David Adom ambulance service.

“We were called to the olive grove and saw a man in his 30s lying on the ground, unconscious,” MDA paramedics Mazor and Yishai Levy told the Jerusalem Post.

“We began resuscitation efforts while conducting further searches, during which we located another casualty, also in critical condition with multi-system injuries. We provided her with medical treatment and performed resuscitation, but unfortunately, we had to pronounce both of them dead,” they said.

Meanwhile, the head of the Irish military said a UN peacekeeping base in southern Lebanon that houses Irish troops was hit by a rocket fired towards Israel on Wednesday night.

The rocket landed inside an unoccupied area of Camp Shamrock, which is 7km (4 miles) from the Israeli border, causing minimal damage on the ground and no casualties, Lt Gen Sean Clancy said.

Irish premier Simon Harris said: “Thankfully everyone is safe but it is completely unacceptable that this happened. Peacekeepers are protected under international law and the onus is on all sides to ensure that protection.”

• US envoys in push for Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire

The deadly rocket attacks in northern Israel came as two US special envoys met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem to discuss a possible ceasefire deal to end the war with Hezbollah.

Netanyahu told Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk that the main issue was what he called Israel’s ability to “thwart any threat to its security from Lebanon in a way that will return our residents safely to their homes”, his office said in a statement.

Israel went on the offensive against Hezbollah – which it proscribes as a terrorist organisation – after almost a year of cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza.

It said it wanted to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents of northern Israeli border areas displaced by rocket attacks, which Hezbollah launched in support of Palestinians the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

More than 2,800 people have been killed in Lebanon since then, including 2,200 in the past five weeks, and 1.2 million others displaced, according to Lebanese authorities.

Israeli authorities say more than 60 people have been killed by Hezbollah rocket, drone, and missile attacks in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.

Earlier on Thursday, the Israeli military said troops were continuing operations inside southern Lebanon and that aircraft had struck dozens of Hezbollah targets throughout the country.

Lebanon’s health ministry meanwhile said Israeli strikes had killed six paramedics in three southern towns.

Four from the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Society’s Civil Defence branch, which provides emergency services, were killed when Israeli forces targeted a gathering point at Derdghaya junction, it said.

A fifth IHS paramedic was killed in an air strike on a vehicle in Deir al-Zahrani, while a strike in Zefta killed a paramedic from the Islamic Risala Scout Association, which is affiliated to the Hezbollah-allied Amal movement, according to the ministry.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. But dozens of paramedics and other emergency workers have been killed and injured since it intensified its air campaign against Hezbollah five weeks ago.

The military has previously accused Hezbollah of using ambulances to transport weapons and fighters. The IHS has denied having ties to military operations.

There were also fresh Israeli strikes near Baalbek, in the eastern Bekaa Valley, a day after the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of the entire city and two neighbouring towns.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) reported that a woman was killed in a strike in the Kayyal area.

Another six people were killed when a house was bombed in Maqna, which is 5km north-east of Baalbek but was not included in the evacuation zone, it said.

Israeli strikes have killed 19 people, including eight women, around Lebanon’s eastern city of Baalbek, the country’s health ministry has said.

It came hours after tens of thousands of residents fled in response to evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military that covered the entire city and two neighbouring towns.

Mayor Mustafa al-Shell told the BBC more than 20 strikes were reported on Wednesday afternoon in the Baalbek area, with five inside the city itself, where there is a Unesco-listed ancient Roman temple complex.

The Israeli military said it had struck Hezbollah command-and-control centres and infrastructure in Baalbek and Nabatiyeh, in southern Lebanon.

The military also said it had targeted Hezbollah fuel depots in the Bekaa Valley, where Baalbek is located. It gave no details, but Lebanon’s state news agency said diesel tanks were hit in the town of Douris, where Mr Shell said pictures showed a huge column of black smoke rising into the air.

The attacks came as Hezbollah’s new secretary-general said the group would continue its war plan against Israel under his leadership and that it would not “cry out” for a ceasefire.

Speaking a day after his appointment was announced, Naim Qassem said he would follow the agenda of his predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in Beirut last month.

Qassem made the speech from an undisclosed location amid reports suggesting he had fled to Iran, which is Hezbollah’s main supporter.

After weeks of an air offensive that has brought devastation to large parts of southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs, the Israeli military appears to be expanding its campaign against Hezbollah in the east of the country – another area where the group has a strong presence and support.

Baalbek is a key population centre in the Bekaa Valley, near the border with Syria. It is a largely rural area and one of Lebanon’s poorest regions.

Hezbollah has established part of its infrastructure and recruited fighters from there.

The area is also strategically important for Hezbollah, as it is part of a route linking the group to its allies in Syria and Iraq and, ultimately, to Iran.

On Wednesday morning, the Israeli military issued evacuation orders for the whole of Baalbek and the neighbouring towns of Ain Bourday and Douris, warning that it would “act forcefully against Hezbollah interests”.

Roula Zeaiter, programme manager for the Lebanese Women Democratic Gathering (RDFL), said the orders sparked panic among residents, including displaced families from other parts of the country.

“Minutes after the order to leave came, the streets were filled with people grabbing their things, locking their homes and closing their shops,” she told the charity ActionAid.

“We’re scrambling like scared mice, moving from place to place. Lebanon is becoming like Gaza, with Israeli forces using the same tactics.”

Videos posted online showed huge traffic jams on the main roads out of the city.

Mustafa al-Shell estimated that about 50,000 people fled within two hours, but he added that many others decided to stay behind “for various reasons”.

He said the initial wave of Israeli strikes on Wednesday afternoon hit villas and other residential buildings in Baalbek’s city centre and its outskirts.

“It’s not clear what the Israelis have targeted,” he added. “But I can tell you that there are no ammunition dumps or weapons caches in Baalbek.”

The state-run National News Agency (NNA) reported that the Ras al-Ain Hills, Amshki, al-Asira, al-Kayyal Road areas were hit, and the northern and southern entrances to Baalbek. The strikes also targeted Ain Bourday and Douris, including diesel tanks in its vicinity, it said.

Later, the Lebanese health ministry said 11 people, including three women, were killed in a strike on Salibi Farm in the Baalbek area. Eight others, including five women, were killed in another strike in Bednayel, it added.

The ministry separately said another 11 people were killed in Israeli strikes in the town of Sohmor, in the southern Bekaa Valley.

Following the strikes on Baalbek, the Israeli military said it had conducted “intelligence-based strikes on fuel depots located inside military compounds belonging to Hezbollah’s Logistical Reinforcement Unit 4400 in the Bekaa Valley”. The unit was responsible for transferring weapons from Iran, it added.

A second statement said aircraft had “struck command-and-control centres and terrorist infrastructure” in the Baalbek area.

It also accused Hezbollah of systematically using civilian infrastructure and areas for military activities, which the group has previously denied.

Mr Shell said none of the strikes hit Baalbek’s Unesco World Heritage site, which comprises the ruins of Roman temples which date back to the 1st Century AD and are among the largest and best-preserved in the world.

However, he warned of what he called “Israeli treachery” and said Lebanese authorities were “pleading… for international bodies to stand fast in defence of Baalbek’s Roman ruins”.

Unesco warned in a post on X on Wednesday that featured a photo of the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, that World Heritage sites across the Middle East, particularly those in Lebanon, were under threat.

“Unesco recalls to all parties their obligation to respect and protect the integrity of these sites. They are the heritage of all humanity and should never be targeted,” it said.

On Monday night, several buildings were levelled around the Gouraud Barracks area of Baalbek, near the Roman ruins, during Israeli strikes that killed more than 60 people across the Bekaa Valley.

When asked by reporters in Washington about the Baalbek strikes, US state department spokesman Matthew Miller called on Israel not to threaten the lives of civilians or damage critical civilian infrastructure and cultural heritage.

He also confirmed that US Middle East envoys Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk were “traveling to Israel to engage on issues including a diplomatic resolution in Lebanon, as well as how we get to an end to the conflict in Gaza”.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Najob Mikati, expressed optimism that a ceasefire might be possible in “the coming hours or days”.

Two sources told Reuters news agency that US mediators were working on a proposal for a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah which would be used to finalise the full implementation of UN Security Council resolution 1701.

The resolution ended the last war they fought in 2006 and included a call for southern Lebanon to be free of any armed personnel or weapons other than those of the Lebanese state and a UN peacekeeping force.

Israel went on the offensive against Hezbollah – which it proscribes as a terrorist organisation – after almost a year of cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza.

It says it wants to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents of northern Israeli border areas displaced by rocket attacks, which Hezbollah launched in support of Palestinians the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

The Israeli military said about 60 projectiles fired by Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel on Wednesday. No injuries were reported.

More than 2,800 people have been killed in Lebanon since then, including 2,100 in the past five weeks, and 1.2 million others displaced, according to Lebanese authorities.

Israeli authorities say more than 60 people have been killed in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.

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.

Throughout an election campaign, US voters are bombarded with images of the two candidates – speaking from podiums, greeting rally crowds and stepping down aircraft stairs. Here’s a different visual perspective of who they are and where they’ve come from.

Long before they even knew what the White House was… Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are pictured above both aged three.

Decades apart, Democratic presidential nominee Harris spent her early years in Oakland, California, and Republican nominee Trump was raised in the New York borough of Queens.

Harris (left in the left-hand image below) and her sister Maya (centre) were primarily brought up by their Indian mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a cancer researcher and social activist.

Trump’s father Fred Trump was the son of German immigrants and his mother Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was born in Scotland. They enrolled him in the New York Military Academy at age 13.

Harris spent five years at high school in Montreal, Canada, where her mother took up a teaching job at McGill University. She later enrolled in the historically black college, Howard University in Washington DC.

Trump has said his five years at the academy, which began in 1959, gave him military training and helped shape his leadership skills. He later sat out the Vietnam War due to deferments – four for academic reasons and one due to bone spurs.

From an early age, Harris was taught by her mother the importance of the civil rights movement and she attended the annual Martin Luther King Jr Freedom March in Washington in 2004.

After earning a degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Trump became favoured to succeed his father at the helm of the family business.

Harris returned to California, where she rose swiftly to the top of the state’s criminal justice system – taking a job as its attorney general – and used that momentum to mount a successful run for the US Senate in 2016.

At the same time as she entered Congress, Trump was stepping into the White House for the first time, having stunned the world to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Three years later Harris ran a lacklustre presidential campaign, but was picked by the victor of the Democratic race, Joe Biden, to be his running mate. They proved to be the winning ticket, defeating Trump and Mike Pence.

The end of the Trump presidency and the start of the Biden-Harris term were marked by Covid lockdowns, mask mandates and social unrest following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Harris struggled at times to make her mark as vice-president, but found her voice in 2022 when the US Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion.

President Biden was happy for her to become the White House champion for the pro-choice movement.

It was Trump who had made the Supreme Court more conservative, paving the way for the abortion ruling.

During his time in the Oval Office, he also took the US out of the Paris climate accord and took steps to reduce immigration.

Harris’s debut international visit as vice-president was to Guatemala in 2021, as part of the responsibility she was given to reduce the numbers of Latin American migrants reaching America’s southern border with Mexico.

Foreign policy issues that have dominated her time in office include the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the chaotic US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Trump’s first visit overseas as president was to Saudi Arabia in 2017. Trump advocates isolationist policies that involve disentangling his country from foreign conflicts and promoting American industry.

Harris is married to Doug Emhoff (pictured below), who campaigns regularly on her behalf. She is stepmother – or “Momala”, as she says – to Emhoff’s children from his first marriage, Cole (left) and Ella (right).

Various members of Donald Trump’s family have played roles in his political career, though appearances in the 2024 campaign by his wife, former First Lady Melania Trump, have been limited.

With his first wife, Ivana, Trump had three children: Donald Jr (second left in the lower picture), Ivanka (second right) and Eric (right). He had a daughter, Tiffany (left), with his second wife, Marla Maples. He married his third wife Melania (third left) in 2005, with whom he has one son, Barron.

Harris entered the 2024 presidential race relatively late in the process, replacing Joe Biden who pulled out.

She made history as the first black and Asian-American woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, and went on to give a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.

In the same election, Donald Trump earned the rare distinction of earning a third presidential nomination from his party. He spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – sporting a bandaged ear after surviving the first of two assassination attempts during the campaign.

• 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?

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Hello Kitty, arguably Japan’s best loved creation, is celebrating her 50th anniversary.

But all has not always been well at Sanrio, the Japanese company behind the character. The business has been on a spectacular journey of financial peaks and valleys.

Hello Kitty has been ranked the second-highest grossing media franchise in the world behind Pokémon, and ahead of the likes of Mickey Mouse and Star Wars.

Underscoring her global fame, Britain’s King Charles wished her a happy birthday during the state visit to the UK by Japan’s Emperor and Empress in June.

In recent years though Sanrio had been struggling to make money, as interest in Hello Kitty waned.

Two previous surges in Sanrio sales, in 1999 and 2014, were both driven by the character’s popularity. But these jumps in demand for the firm’s products were not sustainable, says Yasuki Yoshioka of investment company SMBC Nikko.

“In the past, its performance had many ups and downs, as if it was on a rollercoaster ride,” Mr Yoshioka says.

Then, in 2020, Tomokuni Tsuji inherited the role as Sanrio’s boss.

He is the grandson of the firm’s founder, Shintaro Tsuji, and was just 31 at the time, making him the youngest chief executive of a listed Japanese company.

His grandfather then became Sanrio’s chairman.

Under the younger Mr Tsuji’s leadership, Sanrio changed its marketing strategy of its stable of other characters.

“It is not about lowering Hello Kitty’s popularity but it is about boosting others’ recognition,” he says.

This resulted in Hello Kitty losing the position of Sanrio’s most popular character.

According to a poll of customers, that spot is now held by Cinnamoroll – a blue-eyed white puppy with pink cheeks, long ears and a tail that looks like a Cinnamon roll.

Sanrio is also no longer just about cute characters.

If Hello Kitty is Japan’s ambassador of cute, then angry red panda Aggressive Retsuko – or Aggretsuko – channels the frustrations of an ordinary working woman.

The character, which is popular among Gen Zers, first appeared in a cartoon series on Japan’s TBS Television before it became a global hit on Netflix.

Another unconventional character is Gudetama, or “lazy egg”, who is living with depression and fires out cold one-liners that reflect dark realities of life.

As well as diversifying its characters, Sanrio boosted its overseas marketing and is now tackling counterfeits more rigorously.

“We are now using artificial intelligence to detect fake products and to make removal requests,” says Mr Tsuji.

For its marketing strategy, collaborations with major brands – including Starbucks, Crocs and the LA Dodgers baseball team – have been key, he added.

“In addition to our own promotion, by collaborating with global brands, we are trying to have our characters in the market throughout the year without many breaks.”

In a society that puts so much emphasis on seniority, Mr Tsuji’s surname was crucial to his ability to make major changes at Sanrio.

Almost a quarter of listed companies in Japan, like car makers Toyota and Suzuki and camera firm Canon, are managed by members of the family that founded them.

The reason is cultural, according to Professor Hokuto Dazai of Nagoya University of Commerce and Business.

In Japan, home to the world’s oldest continuous monarchy, “there is strong recognition of families and family businesses,” he says.

The master-servant relationship from the samurai period has transitioned into the relationship between founding families and their employees, and “historically commoners never fought over the top job”.

“It is also because Japan has a smaller pool of professional executives to choose from,” says Professor Dazai.

“Firms tend to look for their next boss internally, including founding family members.”

Still, “it would be a lie if I said there was no pushback” from other managers and employees in the company, Mr Tsuji says.

He also says he clashed with his grandfather over how to run the company.

“But one day I realised that I was being arrogant, trying to convince someone 60 years senior,” he says.

“After about a year, my grandfather told me to run the company as I see fit – that he will leave it up to me.”

The new boss’s revamp of the business has been paying off so far.

Within two years of the younger Tsuji becoming chief executive, Sanrio was profitable again, in what analyst Mr Yoshioka calls “a beautiful V-shaped recovery”.

Its share price has risen tenfold since 2020 and the company now has a stock market valuation of more than a trillion yen ($6.5bn; £5bn).

Away from the boardroom and stock market, there was also an intriguing incident earlier this year.

While Hello Kitty’s true identity is relatively well-known in Japan, some overseas fans were shocked by comments from a Sanrio executive in July.

Speaking on US television, retail business development director Jill Koch told viewers that “Hello Kitty is not a cat” and is in fact a British schoolgirl.

Her comments sparked a flurry of social media posts, with fans expressing their shock and confusion about the revelation.

“Hello Kitty is Hello Kitty and she can be whoever you want her to be – she can be your sister, your mother, it can be another you,” Mr Tsuji says.

Pushed on whether he has any idea why his grandfather decided not to make her Japanese, Mr Tsuji concludes: “London is an amazing city and it was the envy of many Japanese girls, so that may be one of the reasons they decided that she’s from London.”

It may not be the definitive answer her fans are looking for – but after all, Hello Kitty was created 14 years before the younger Tsuji was even born. Half a century since her creation, it is possible that the beloved character’s origin story will continue to be shrouded in mystery for years to come.

The door of Juan Botero’s apartment in Houston, Texas is made of wood – with a classy, walnut-like finish.

But, for Halloween, he planned an eye-catching change. “I’m going to paint my door orange,” Mr Botero, founder and chief executive of Colombia-based Glasst, told the BBC last month. And he has kept his promise.

However, the move is not as drastic as it sounds. Mr Botero’s firm, an “innovation company”, has designed the paint to be removable – once dry, you can peel it off like plastic wrap. If it works as intended, it shouldn’t leave behind any marks or residue.

Mr Botero had the idea for the product, called Unpaint, about five years ago and, initially, his investors weren’t keen. “They said I was crazy,” he recalls. Nevertheless, he insisted: “People are looking for customisation in their lives.”

Glasst is just one of many firms that claim house paint can do more than look nice. Various products now on the market, their makers promise, will save you money, keep you comfortable during heatwaves, or transform your relationship with the walls of your home. But is it all too good to be true?

Unpaint is due to launch in the US this November, and Mr Botero is convinced that there is a market for the stuff. He argues it will appeal to people living in rented accommodation, who can’t make permanent changes to their decor.

Glasst, unsurprisingly, declines to share details about how it makes the paint, but Mr Botero says it is a resin from a renewable source. I ask if he means trees and he confirms.

Peelable paint already exists for car bodywork, but getting such a product to work reliably on softer home interiors is more challenging.

There is a risk of damaging your existing, underlying paint when you eventually wrest Unpaint off your walls, but, if the permanent paint below is in good condition, this shouldn’t happen, says Mr Botero.

It does have an odd texture: “A little bit rubbery,” says Mr Botero. Plus, it is easier to scratch than water-based emulsion.

Bringing the product to market hasn’t been easy. Glasst posted a video about the paint to YouTube two years ago, but the launch was delayed until this year “to align with the correct funding and resources needed,” says Mr Botero.

He mentions that Glasst is working on other coatings with unusual properties – including “Thermglasst”, an insulating resin due to launch next year. Mr Botero claims that less than a millimetre of this coating will provide the same insulating effect as 40 millimetres of foam.

There’s no independent validation of that claim just yet, but there are already a range of insulating paints on the market that promise to reduce your heating bills and, it is fair to note, they have not always performed well in scientific evaluations.

In 2019, Richard Fitton of the University of Salford and colleagues published a paper in which they investigated the efficacy of six thermal paints available on the UK market at the time. In short, they found that claims that such paints could reduce heating bills by up to 20% or 25% were impossible to validate.

First, the researchers coated boards with the paints, which allowed them to measure the coatings’ thermal resistance, or insulating values. Then, the team calculated the reduction in heating costs you would expect after applying each of these paints to the interior of a typical Victorian terraced house.

The biggest cost saving measured was a mere 2.9%, and, given the price of the paints in question, homeowners would potentially have to wait centuries or even up to a millennium – at 2019 prices – before they would recoup the decorating fees in terms of reduced heating costs.

“If someone brought me a paint that could save me 25% of my energy bill, it would be on my wall by the weekend,” says Prof Fitton. He adds that he is currently working on a follow-up paper to the 2019 study, and would also be open to testing Thermglasst, or any other insulating paint, in the future.

Paints that help to keep your house cool might be more effective. For years, researchers have pursued the idea of improving the reflectivity of paint on exterior walls or roofs, since this could help keep buildings cool on hot, sunny days. Such weather is becoming ever more common due to climate change.

The principle is as old as the hills – consider the white painted houses of the Mediterranean. But paints designed to be significantly more reflective than standard white paint could heighten the effect. i2Cool in Hong Kong is one of several firms marketing such a product at present.

In their case, the paint contains tiny nanoparticles inspired by the extremely reflective body of the Saharan silver ant – which must naturally cope with baking sunshine.

Martin Zhu, chief executive and co-founder, says the paint made by i2Cool was tested on the roof of a shopping mall in Hong Kong – but only on one of its two buildings, in order to find out whether there was a noticeable effect in terms of reducing the costs of running that building’s air conditioning (AC).

“We used a power meter to measure the energy consumption of the AC system,” says Dr Zhu. The cost of running the AC duly fell in the painted building, by 40%, he adds.

Dr Zhu first began working on the paint while a doctoral student, and he mentions that early versions made around 2017 contained silver, which made it very expensive – more than $100,000 just to cover a small area. Years of development later, it now costs around $10 per square metre of coverage. It also now comes in a variety of light colours, including grey, yellow and green.

Researchers have noted that highly reflective coatings for passive cooling applications need to be resistant to dirt and soiling, for example, to avoid their efficacy dropping overt time. And glare from ultra-reflective roofs risks heating up nearby darker structures, a 2020 paper suggested.

The paint from i2Cool does not contain heavy metals and uses a water-based emulsion, and while it is not biodegradable, it can be recycled, says Dr Zhu.

The company’s latest major project is the Dubai Mall. The roof of this sprawling complex – the largest mall in the world by total area – will eventually be fully coated with the paint. A 1,000 sq m section has been completed to date.

While not yet available in Europe, that could change, says Dr Zhu. “We are discussing with some distributors in the UK,” he says.

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.

Since endorsing Donald Trump for president in July, Elon Musk – the owner of X – has posted about the US election hundreds of times, attracting more than four billion views.

BBC Verify, working with data firm Node XL, analysed all of his posts since then – over 8,000 – and searched for key words to track the election issues he has been posting about most to his 200 million followers.

Immigration and voting emerge as key themes with Mr Musk engaging with misinformation online about “illegal aliens” voting in this election.

He has also claimed repeatedly that Democrats have been “importing” immigrants who will vote for them in future elections.

But voting and immigration experts we have spoken to have challenged this, pointing out that it is illegal for them to vote in federal elections and that even if some might qualify for citizenship eventually, the process would take many years.

Mr Musk has engaged with posts on X which suggest that illegal immigrants are already voting in this election.

On 30 October, he responded to a claim that illegal voters were able to apply for mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania.

Mr Musk replied to the claim, which has been rejected by local election officials, saying: “Is this real?”

It is against the law for non-citizens to vote in US federal elections – punishment includes a year in prison, a fine, and possibly deportation.

A number of studies, both from conservative and left-leaning organisations, suggest instances of non-citizens having voted in US federal elections are very small.

Since July, Mr Musk has posted at least 22 times about voters being “imported” from abroad.

The language in many of these posts is ambiguous as to whether he means this will impact this election or future ones.

In seven posts, he has said they are going directly into swing states.

On 20 October, in a post viewed 21 million times, he said: “Triple digit increases of illegals in swing states over the past 4 years. Voter importation at an unprecedented scale!”

Along with the post, he shared a table that showed very large percentage increases in “unauthorized migrants” in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin, since 2021.

The table, which does not have a source, had been posted by “America” – a political action committee Mr Musk set up to support Trump.

We could not find evidence for these figures but migration experts pointed us towards the latest Department of Homeland Security report which has estimates for each state between 2018 to 2022.

These show that in several states – including Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina – the number of “unauthorised immigrants” has remained steady or dropped over this period.

They do show large numbers living in these states under the Biden administration but also when Trump was president.

Mr Musk has repeatedly suggested that illegal immigrants will gain citizenship and sway future elections for the Democrats.

In a post on 25 October, which got almost 17 million views, he said: “Their stated plan is to give them citizenship as soon as possible, turning all swing states Dem. America would then become a one-party, deep blue socialist state.”

Voting and immigration experts described this as a far-fetched claim.

Democrats have expressed a desire for some undocumented migrants in the US to have “an earned pathway” to citizenship, but it is not their stated policy to grant them all this.

“Some undocumented migrants who arrive in the US could have a route to citizenship – but that would typically take a decade or longer, if they even have a path at all, which many of them will not,” says Michelle Mittelstadt of the Migration Policy Institute.

In several posts, Mr Musk mentions a 1986 bill which granted amnesty to approximately three million undocumented immigrants in the US.

This was passed by Congress and signed into law by Republican President Ronald Reagan. It forgave individuals who came into the US illegally but did not give them immediate citizenship.

“Perhaps Musk imagines that a president or administration can simply decree mass naturalisation of noncitizens without going through the prescribed individual legal processes, and that Congress and the courts would simply then accept this. That’s not how it works”, Walter Olson, a voting rights expert from the conservative think tank, the Cato Institute told us.

On 25 October, Mr Musk posted on X: “Massive numbers flown directly to swing states and put on the fast track to citizenship. Voter importation.”

The post, viewed almost 19 million times, included a chart entitled “inadmissible aliens” shared by Mario Nawfal.

Mr Nawfal has been community noted (the process on X which crowdsources fact-checking from users) several times for making unverified claims.

He is one of the people Mr Musk has interacted with most on X over the last few months, according to Node XL.

It is unclear where the figure of 823,000 “inadmissible aliens” comes from.

The chart refers to @fentasyl – the anonymous X account of a “data expert” – but does not have a source.

It shows a large increase in migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Haiti entering the US from 2023 onwards.

This appears to be a reference to the Humanitarian Parole Scheme launched in January 2023. This scheme allows vetted migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to live and work in the US legally – if they have a US sponsor.

Big numbers have arrived under this scheme – 531,000 people up until the end of September 2024.

But they are not allowed to vote and are not put on “a fast track to citizenship”.

They are permitted to stay in the US for a maximum of two years.

Some may be able to apply for protected status which would allow their temporary stay to be extended. But, even if they got this, they would not be able to vote in a federal election.

Those who do not qualify have to leave the country or face deportation proceedings.

“There is no direct path to a green card for people entering the US from Nicaragua, Venezuelan or Haiti on the Humanitarian Parole Scheme,” says Ms Mittelstadt.

“They could apply for asylum but these claims can take years, and if granted it doesn’t give you the right to vote,” she adds.

• Investigating Trump campaign’s biggest illegal voter claim
• Can illegal immigrants really vote in the US election?

To become a US citizen – and get the right to vote in a federal election – you have to go through naturalisation.

To apply, someone has to have been a lawful permanent resident for five years; married to a US citizen and a lawful permanent resident for three years; or be a member of the military.

As of August 2024, 3.3 million immigrants had become naturalised citizens under the Biden administration.

Under Trump, the figure was around three million people.

It is also worth noting that new citizens are not guaranteed Democratic voters.

According to a recent survey, 54 percent of naturalised citizens said they would vote for Harris in November, while 38 percent said they would vote for Trump.

We have asked X for comment and to provide further evidence for Mr Musk’s claims.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

On the morning of 31 October 1984, India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her bodyguards as she stepped out of her official residence in capital Delhi.

The daughter of India’s Independence leader and first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, she was serving her fourth term in the highest office.

A day before her assassination, Gandhi told a political rally in the eastern state of Odisha (formerly Orissa), “I don’t mind if my life goes in the service of the nation. If I die today, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation.”

Often termed as the “Iron Lady”, Gandhi played a significant role in India’s eastern neighbour Bangladesh winning independence from Pakistan in 1971.

In 1975, she imposed a state of emergency for a 21-month period from June 1975 to March 1977. The period was marked by massive media censorship, restrictions on civil rights and a forced mass sterilisation campaign.

Gandhi lost the next parliamentary election, including her own seat, but returned with a decisive mandate within months.

In the 1980s, Sikh separatists in Punjab demanded an independent homeland, called Khalistan. In 1984, Gandhi ordered a massive military action against those who were sheltering in Amritsar’s Golden Temple, the faith’s holiest shrine.

About 400 people, including soldiers and pilgrims, were killed during the military raid known as Operation Blue Star. Sikh groups dispute this figure, claiming thousands died.

Within months, Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, allegedly seeking revenge for her decision to send troops inside the shrine.

The news of her death sparked violent attacks on Sikhs by her supporters in Delhi and beyond, with nearly 3,000 killed within days.

Forty years on, victims continue to seek justice, as many accused remain acquitted and appeals are still pending in court.

When the US vice-presidential candidate JD Vance made a comment about “childless cat ladies”, he evoked an image of educated, urbanite, career-minded women.

But the picture of who is childless is changing. Recent research has found that it’s more likely to be men who aren’t able to have children even if they want them – in particular lower income men.

A 2021 study in Norway found that the rate of male childlessness was 72% among the lowest five percent of earners, but only 11% among the highest earners – a gap that had widened by almost 20 percentage points over the previous 30 years.

Robin Hadley is one of those who wanted to have a child but struggled to do so. He didn’t go to university and went on to become a technical photographer in a university lab, based in Manchester, and by his 30s, he was desperate to be a dad.

He was single at the time, having married and divorced in his 20s, and was struggling to pay his mortgage, leaving him with little disposable income. As he couldn’t afford to go out much, dating was a challenge.

When his friends and colleagues started to become fathers, he felt a sense of loss. “Birthday cards for kids or collections for new babies, all that reminds you of what you’re not – and what you’re expected to be. There is pain associated with it,” he says.

His experience inspired him to write a book looking at why, today, more men like him who want to be fathers do not. While researching it, he realised that, as he puts it, he had been hit by “all the things that affect fertility outcomes – economics, biology, timing of events, relationship choice”.

He also observed that men without children were absent from most of the scholarship on ageing and reproduction – as well as from national statistics.

Hadley has interviewed other men in Britain who are childless, not by choice. They also expressed sadness and loss, and told him that there was “something missing” in their life.

This week, figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that births in England and Wales fell to an average of 1.44 births per woman, the lowest rate on record. The US birth rate is at a record low, while in 2022 China reported its first population decline in 60 years.

In almost every country in the world, the proportion of people without children is growing. Statistics are gathered differently around the globe and are difficult to compare but rates of childlessness are particularly high in East Asia, at about 30%. In the UK, it’s 18%.

For some, this is a choice. For others, it is the result of biological infertility, which affects one in seven heterosexual couples in the UK. For many more like Robin, it’s something else, a confluence of factors – which can include lack of resources, financial struggles, or failing to meet the right person at the right time. Some refer to this as “social infertility”.

Anna Rotkirch, a sociologist and demographer at Finland’s Population Research Institute has studied fertility intentions in Europe and Finland for more than 20 years, and argues that something else may be at play too: She has noticed a profound shift in how we view children.

Like marriage, having a child was once seen as a cornerstone event, something young people did as they embarked on adult life. Now, says Professor Rotkirch, it’s seen as a capstone event – what you do once other goals have been achieved.

Outside Asia, Finland has one of the highest rates of childlessness in the world. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was celebrated for battling declining fertility with world-leading child-friendly policies. Parental leave is generous there, childcare is affordable and men and women do a more equal share of domestic work.

Since 2010, however, fertility rates in the country have declined by almost a third.

“People of all different classes seem to think that having a child is adding to the uncertainty in their life,” Professor Rotkirch explains.

In Finland, the wealthiest women are the least likely to end up childless involuntarily, whereas low-income men are the most likely. That’s a big shift from the past. Historically, people from poorer families tended to transition to adulthood earlier – they left education, got jobs and started families at a younger age.

This trend is happening elsewhere in Europe, too. “Now it’s actually the most disadvantaged people who are the least likely to start a family because they can’t afford it,” adds Bernice Kuang, a demographer at the University of Southampton.

When Dr Kuang surveyed the fertility intentions of young people in the UK, she was surprised by the results. Twice as many 18 to 25-year-olds (15%) now say they will never have children, compared with 15 years ago (7-8%). Many more aren’t sure.

Of all those yet to have children, more than half said they don’t want to or aren’t sure. “That’s a big change from previous generations,” says Dr Kuang.

Those who responded negatively tended to be the most financially insecure. Where young people felt they had a lower standard of living than their parents, they were less likely to want a child.

It makes sense, says Dr Kuang, when you consider that the average age of getting a first mortgage in the UK is the mid-thirties, and parents struggle to find affordable childcare.

“If intentions don’t change, it will be a big social change,” she says. “I’d be interested to see if the UK breaks records.”

For men, financial uncertainty has a compounding impact on involuntary childlessness. It has been called “the selection effect” by sociologists, where women tend to look for someone of the same social class or above when they choose a partner.

“I can see I was batting out of my league intellectually, and in terms of confidence,” says Robin Hadley. “I think on reflection, selection effect could have been a factor.”

In his late thirties, he met his current wife. By the time they were talking about children, they were in their forties and were unable to conceive. But he says that she helped him gain the confidence to go to university and get a PhD. “I wouldn’t be where I am now if it wasn’t for her.”

Women are outperforming men in education in 70% of countries worldwide, leading to what Yale sociologist Marcia Inhorn has called “the mating gap”. In Europe, it means that men without a university degree are the group most likely to be childless.

Like most countries, the UK doesn’t have good data on male fertility because they only take the mother’s fertility history when registering a birth. This means that childless men do not exist as a recognised “category”.

Some Nordic countries, however, take both. The 2021 Norwegian study found that a substantial number of men were being “left behind”, arguing that “childlessness is highest among the poorest men”, and that “this inequality in fertility has widened over time”. According to its authors, “while much is already known about female fertility… relatively little is known about male fertility”.

Men’s role in declining birth rates is often overlooked, says Vincent Straub, who studies men’s health and fertility at the University of Oxford.

He’s interested in the role of “male malaise” in fertility decline – the confusion felt by young men as women become empowered in society and expectations of manhood and masculinity change.

The same issues that are causing a crisis in masculinity are also disrupting relationship patterns.

Finland has excellent data on partnerships outside of marriage, and what it shows concerns Prof Rotkirch. In the past, couples would move in together, have a child, get married and have another child. Now couples who live together will break up more often.

As well as the corrosive effect of screentime on relationships, and the pressure of competing careers, there is also a divergence in how couples see their roles in a relationship.

“We’re seeing differences in the expectations of men and women,” says Vincent Straub.

Martha Bao is in her 30s and lives in Shanghai, where she works in human resources. She is part of a rapidly growing group of young Chinese women saying no to parenthood.

In 2019, 4.5% of people under 30 in China didn’t want children – two years later, that number had more than doubled to 9.5%. Those statistics don’t differentiate between women and men, but Martha says most of her female friends don’t want a child while all of the men do. It’s not a surprise, she says, when the burden of looking after children in China is so squarely placed on mothers.

“I think to raise a child means taking on a lot of responsibilities and I don’t want to take them on. I want to be free,” she explains.

Another reason for declining birth rates, Straub and Hadley point out, may be the fact that the conversation on fertility focuses almost totally on women. Any policies designed to tackle it are missing half the picture.

Straub believes we should focus on fertility as a men’s health issue and discuss the benefits of caregiving to fathers. “Only one in 100 men in the EU pause their career to look after a child, for women it’s one in three,” he says. That’s despite mountains of evidence that nurturing a child is good for men’s health.

“We need better data,” says Robin Hadley. Until we record men’s fertility, we can’t fully understand it – or the effect it has on their physical and mental health.

And the invisibility of men in fertility discussions extends beyond records. While there’s more awareness now that young women need to think about their fertility, it’s not a conversation being had among young men.

Men also have a biological clock, says Hadley, pointing to research showing that sperm declines in efficacy after 35. And that is something he thinks more young men need to understand.

So making this invisible group visible is one way of tackling social infertility. And another could be to extend the definition of parenting.

All of the researchers who commented on childlessness were keen to point out that people without children still have a vital part to play in raising them.

It’s called alloparenting by behavioural ecologists, explains Anna Rotkirch. For much of our evolution, a baby had more than a dozen caregivers.

One of the childless men that Dr Hadley spoke to in his research described a family he met regularly at his local football club. For a school project, the two young boys needed a grandparent. But they had none.

He stepped in as their surrogate grandfather for three years and after that, when they saw him at football, they would say, “Hi grandad”. It felt wonderful to be acknowledged in that way, he said.

“I think most childless people actually are involved in this kind of care, it’s just invisible,” says Professor Rotkirch, “That’s not seen in the birth registers, but it’s really important.”

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.”

• How UK is preparing for a Harris or Trump White House
• 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

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

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

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.

Senior American officials have returned to the Middle East to try to reach a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the negotiators had made “good progress” on Thursday on 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 has 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.

• What is Hezbollah and why is Israel attacking Lebanon?
• Israel-Hezbollah conflict in maps: Where is fighting happening in Lebanon?
• How the US election could impact the Middle East

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 Unifil 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.

On Thursday, commenting on the negotiations, Secretary Blinken said there had been progress made on mutual understanding of the requirements of the resolution.

“It’s important to make sure we have clarity, both from Lebanon and from Israel, about what would be required under 1701 to get its effective implementation,” he said during a press conference.

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.

She’s eaten croissants by the Eiffel Tower, drunk espressos outside the Colosseum and now, could it be time for fish and chips on the London Eye?

Emily in Paris star Lily Collins has told the BBC she is keen for an Emily in London spin-off as it “would be so fun”.

Collins, 35, has been living in London for the past few months while preparing to make her West End stage debut in Barcelona.

The romantic thriller sees Collins play an American tourist who has a one-night stand with a handsome Spaniard, played by Money Heist’s Álvaro Morte.

Talking after the opening night of the show, Collins tells me she thinks her Emily in Paris character, Emily Cooper, would love London.

“She would definitely go to Portobello Road and buy some antiques, obviously visit Big Ben and toy shop Hamleys.

“She would also definitely try and get into Buckingham Palace,” Collins says, adding that Emily would love to have tea with the King and would “try and get the guards to smile but I’m not sure she’d be able to do that”.

The Netflix romantic comedy series follows the life of American marketing executive Emily Cooper as she works at a marketing firm in Paris. In season four of the show Emily moves to Rome to open a new office.

The hit series has been renewed for a fifth season, but the location for filming is yet to be announced.

Cooper’s potential love for London is somewhat based on Collins’s own thoughts about the city, which she says really “feels like home”.

You might imagine the A-lister has been enjoying the finer things London has to offer, but it seems it’s the simple pleasures she likes the most.

“I love the Tube but most of all I love sitting on the front of a double-decker bus and looking out of the window.

“I don’t even have a plan on where I want to go, I just sit there and see all the sights and people.”

Collins, who will be performing eight West End shows a week for several months, says she relaxes by “walking the dogs with my husband on Hampstead Heath”.

“I go there so often, it really is huge and it actually feels like countryside even though you’re in London.”

A walk in nature is not the only thing Collins does to relax; she explains that her pre-show routine includes listening to dance music.

“My make-up takes a while to do so I just sit in my chair with very loud dance music on – usually it’s Dua Lipa, Lizzo kind of music – but I’m trying to switch it up a bit at the moment.”

Her co-star Morte, 49, says his pre-show ritual involves some very silly dancing.

“I begin dancing behind the set as the audience come into the theatre,” he says, adding that he loves being nervous.

“I use the nerves to prepare myself to be connected to the audience, and in Spain we have a saying that the day you go on stage without feeling nervous is the day it will be a bad show.”

The Money Heist actor, who is from Madrid, says when he plays the role of the arch-villain professor in the Netflix show his aim is to “enjoy every minute of it and once the plan is set, just try and have fun”.

Bess Wohl’s play has received mixed reviews from critics.

The Times’s Clive Davis awarded Barcelona two stars, saying Collins “struggles to bring her character to life”, while City AM’s Adam Bloodworth wrote that the actress “can’t save the bland two-hander”, also giving the show two stars.

Completing a set of two-star reviews, the Guardian’s Chris Wiegand found the performances “agreeable” but said it was “hard to invest in either character”.

Other critics have been more enthusiastic. The Telegraph’s Claire Allfree wrote that Collins was “one to watch”, adding that she and Morte “elevate a rather dated two-hander into something properly affecting”, giving a three-star rating.

Fiona Mountford from the i awarded the play five stars, calling it “one of the best things I’ve seen on stage all year” and praising Collins’s performance as “remarkable”.

Brat is a word you’ve probably seen just about everywhere over the last couple of months and now it’s officially Collins Dictionary word of the year.

Defined as someone with a “confident, independent and hedonistic attitude” it has been inspired by Charli XCX.

What started as the name of her number one album has arguably grown into a cultural movement for some, with people adopting the brat way of life.

Even the team for US presidential candidate Kamala Harris decided to give her social media a brat rebrand, to attract younger voters at the start of her campaign this summer.

Collins’ lexicographers, who put together their dictionaries, look at social media and other sources to determine which words should be added to their annual list of new and notable words.

Brat is the name of Charli’s sixth studio album, which has built momentum since its release in June this year, through not only its original tracks, but remixes too.

The song with most commercial success has been Guess, which went to number one in August after a remix with Billie Eilish was released.

Brat is, in the words of the singer, a girl who “has a breakdown, but kind of like parties through it”, who is honest, blunt, “a little bit volatile”.

She told the BBC’s Sidetracked podcast that someone brat might have “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”.

Creating an aesthetic has been something popularised on TikTok, with Charli’s brat girl summer seen as a rejection of other trends such as the “clean girl” who looks feminine and well kept.

Brat is also about being hedonistic and rebellious, something Charli says was inspired by her early days of performing at illegal raves, which is again in stark contrast to other popular aesthetics that focus on staying at home and living a wholesome life.

Another word that has made it onto this year’s list is era – which is inspired by Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which visited the UK and Europe this year.

The Collins team have defined it as “a period of one’s life or career that is of a distinctive character”.

A lot of the words on this year’s list have been popularised by Generation Z, those born between 1995 and 2012 and even Generation Alpha – who are only as old as 10 or 11.

Once again social media apps like TikTok and Snapchat have a lot to answer for when it comes to the growth of new words and phrases, according to Collins.

Yapping, which means talking about length about things that don’t really matter that much and delulu, being unrealistic with your expectations, also make it onto this year’s list.

Despite it being the year of elections globally, only one political term makes it onto this list – supermajority.

It is defined as a “large majority in a legislative assembly that enables a government to pass laws without effective scrutiny” and became popular around the UK general election in July.

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.

Throughout an election campaign, US voters are bombarded with images of the two candidates – speaking from podiums, greeting rally crowds and stepping down aircraft stairs. Here’s a different visual perspective of who they are and where they’ve come from.

Long before they even knew what the White House was… Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are pictured above both aged three.

Decades apart, Democratic presidential nominee Harris spent her early years in Oakland, California, and Republican nominee Trump was raised in the New York borough of Queens.

Harris (left in the left-hand image below) and her sister Maya (centre) were primarily brought up by their Indian mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a cancer researcher and social activist.

Trump’s father Fred Trump was the son of German immigrants and his mother Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was born in Scotland. They enrolled him in the New York Military Academy at age 13.

Harris spent five years at high school in Montreal, Canada, where her mother took up a teaching job at McGill University. She later enrolled in the historically black college, Howard University in Washington DC.

Trump has said his five years at the academy, which began in 1959, gave him military training and helped shape his leadership skills. He later sat out the Vietnam War due to deferments – four for academic reasons and one due to bone spurs.

From an early age, Harris was taught by her mother the importance of the civil rights movement and she attended the annual Martin Luther King Jr Freedom March in Washington in 2004.

After earning a degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Trump became favoured to succeed his father at the helm of the family business.

Harris returned to California, where she rose swiftly to the top of the state’s criminal justice system – taking a job as its attorney general – and used that momentum to mount a successful run for the US Senate in 2016.

At the same time as she entered Congress, Trump was stepping into the White House for the first time, having stunned the world to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Three years later Harris ran a lacklustre presidential campaign, but was picked by the victor of the Democratic race, Joe Biden, to be his running mate. They proved to be the winning ticket, defeating Trump and Mike Pence.

The end of the Trump presidency and the start of the Biden-Harris term were marked by Covid lockdowns, mask mandates and social unrest following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Harris struggled at times to make her mark as vice-president, but found her voice in 2022 when the US Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion.

President Biden was happy for her to become the White House champion for the pro-choice movement.

It was Trump who had made the Supreme Court more conservative, paving the way for the abortion ruling.

During his time in the Oval Office, he also took the US out of the Paris climate accord and took steps to reduce immigration.

Harris’s debut international visit as vice-president was to Guatemala in 2021, as part of the responsibility she was given to reduce the numbers of Latin American migrants reaching America’s southern border with Mexico.

Foreign policy issues that have dominated her time in office include the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the chaotic US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Trump’s first visit overseas as president was to Saudi Arabia in 2017. Trump advocates isolationist policies that involve disentangling his country from foreign conflicts and promoting American industry.

Harris is married to Doug Emhoff (pictured below), who campaigns regularly on her behalf. She is stepmother – or “Momala”, as she says – to Emhoff’s children from his first marriage, Cole (left) and Ella (right).

Various members of Donald Trump’s family have played roles in his political career, though appearances in the 2024 campaign by his wife, former First Lady Melania Trump, have been limited.

With his first wife, Ivana, Trump had three children: Donald Jr (second left in the lower picture), Ivanka (second right) and Eric (right). He had a daughter, Tiffany (left), with his second wife, Marla Maples. He married his third wife Melania (third left) in 2005, with whom he has one son, Barron.

Harris entered the 2024 presidential race relatively late in the process, replacing Joe Biden who pulled out.

She made history as the first black and Asian-American woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, and went on to give a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.

In the same election, Donald Trump earned the rare distinction of earning a third presidential nomination from his party. He spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – sporting a bandaged ear after surviving the first of two assassination attempts during the campaign.

• 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?

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least 158 people have died in Spain’s worst flooding disaster in generations as rescuers battle odds to find survivors.

On Thursday more than 1,200 workers, aided by drones, were deployed to the rescue mission as rains continued to threaten parts of the country.

“Right now the most important thing is to save as many lives as possible,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told victims in a visit to affected communities.

But in some of the towns worst- hit in Tuesday night’s floods, people were left to the task of recovering bodies from the mud and wreckage.

• ‘It was like a tsunami’: Spaniards recount horror of deadly floods

• Timing of flood alert under scrutiny as blame game rages

• Scientists say climate change made Spanish floods worse

A least 155 deaths were recorded in Valencia, while another two have been recorded in Castilla-La Mancha to the province’s west, and another, a British man, in Andalusia.

In the town of Paiporta, Valencia where a river burst its banks, at least 40 deaths have been recorded so far.

“We all know someone who has died,” said pharmacist Miguel Guerrilla, standing outside his chemist shop which has been covered in thick mud.

“It’s a nightmare.”

On Thursday, the BBC saw undertakers and funeral vans retrieving bodies from the street, while on nearby roads, cars swept away by the storm surge were piled on top of each other.

Motorists have recounted the horror of being trapped by the surging tides on Tuesday which turned highways and streets into rivers – many who survived climbed trees or bridges to escape.

Officials haven’t disclosed the number of people still missing but said there are “many”, as the toll rose by about another 60 deaths on Thursday.

More than 90 deaths were recorded on Wednesday alone in the immediate aftermath of the torrential rains and flash floods, which largely affected Valencia, as well as Castilla-La Mancha in Andalusia, and as far south as Malaga.

The town of Chiva near Valencia received the equivalent of one year’s rainfall in just eight hours according to the Spanish meteorological agency Aemet.

As further rain warnings were issued for the south and east of the country on Thursday, King Felipe VI warned the emergency was “still not over” and PM Sánchez warned citizens to take shelter where necessary.

Meanwhile in flood-affected areas, hundreds are sheltering in temporary accommodation and beginning the slow, arduous task of clearing streets and recovering homes and businesses.

Many roads and the rail network connecting Valencia to the rest of Spain remain cut off.

Spain began an official three-day national mourning period on Thursday with flags at half-mast on government buildings and minutes of silence held.

Public anger is growing over how a developed European country appeared to fail to warn many communities of the flood danger in time.

Questions have been asked over whether disaster management services issued warnings too late.

The civil protection agency, deployed during national disasters, did not issue an alert until 20:15 on Tuesday evening local time, by which time several places in Valencia had been flooded for hours.

Authorities have called the downpours and flooding “unprecedented”.

Many factors contribute to flooding, but a warming atmosphere caused by climate change makes extreme rainfall more likely.

Weather researchers have identified the likely main cause of the intense rainfall as a “gota fria” – a natural weather event that hits Spain in autumn and winter when cold air descends on warmer waters over the Mediterranean.

However, the increase in global temperatures had led to the clouds carrying more rain, scientists told the BBC.

The world has already warmed by about 1.1C since the industrial era began and temperatures will keep rising unless governments around the world make steep cuts to emissions.

“No doubt about it, these explosive downpours were intensified by climate change,” said Dr Friederike Otto, from Imperial College London, who leads an international group of scientists who try to understand the role that warming plays in these type of events.

The death toll is the worst from floods in Spain since 1973, when at least 150 people were estimated to have died in the southeastern provinces of Granada, Murcia and Almeria.

Jennylyn M Barrios’ job as a make-up artist takes her all over Manila – precious time away from Uno, her 10-month-old son.

There simply isn’t enough time in the day to make the homemade meals her growing baby needs. But in rapidly developing Philippines, there are increasingly options for busy, working mums like her.

“If I need to make something from scratch, I need to work double time before I finish the product,” she explains.

“But for Cerelac, I just need to add hot water and prepare the mix. I feed it three times a day – for breakfast, lunch, and then for dinner. It’s easy to feed, available, affordable – all great for working mums.”

Jennylyn is one of many mums increasingly turning to commercially available baby food products in recent years: sales of instant cereals, porridges, pureed foods, pouches and snacks across South East Asia have doubled in five years.

Cerelac – an instant porridge mix – is Nestle’s biggest seller here, offering not only convenience but aspiration as well, all for an affordable price, a key consideration with a rise in cost of living.

A quick search on social media shows a slew of aspirational mums with their smiling infants extolling its virtues – including offering some of the crucial nutrients growing children need.

But while the product will be instantly recognisable to parents across the world, the ingredients here may not be.

Because, along with the benefits of added micronutrients Cerelac offers parents in the Philippines and the UK, some flavours offer something else: added sugar.

And that, in a country where parents are increasingly turning from traditional diets to convenience foods, has health professionals worried.

In the Philippines, Nestle says it follows a set of standards and guidelines from the Codex Commission – a collective established by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) consisting of food manufacturers, governments and UN agencies.

“The added sugar we have in our products are all well below the threshold prescribed by international and local guidelines who always follow the FDA, who follows Codex, and these are the experts in this field,” said Arlene Tan-Bantoto, Nestlé Nutrition business executive officer.

But WHO has called the current standards inadequate and recommends they be updated with a particular focus on avoiding sugar and salt in any food for children under three.

Yet a Unicef study of 1,600 baby foods across South East Asia found nearly half included added sugars and sweeteners.

There is, says Ms Tan-Bantoto, a simple explanation for why it is needed in Cerelac in particular: to disguise the taste of crucial nutrients like iron, which has a metallic taste, and the brain nutrient, DHA, which smells like fish.

“Micronutrient deficiency is widespread in the country and we are serious in our efforts in alleviating it,” said Ms Tan-Bantoto.

“Ninety-seven percent of babies do not meet their daily nutrient requirement, 40% of babies, zero to five, suffer from iron deficiency anaemia. And we know that to be anaemic has lifelong consequences. For instance, brain development and next poor immunity and 20% of kids zero to five are stunted. That means we fortify our products.”

At a clinic in Manila, they see first-hand the impacts of malnutrition on babies and toddlers on a regular basis – although as diets change, so too is how the cases are presenting.

“Sometimes they are underweight, some are overweight, and some are severely malnourished,” one doctor told the BBC.

It is impossible to say exactly why there has been a rise in overweight children. There are multiple factors in the rise of obesity – including a change in lifestyles and urbanisation. But nutritionists say taste preferences are developed at a young age and in some countries like in the Philippines, many foods catering to a sweet palate are started early.

It is why the added sugar in a product like Cerelac is such a concern, according to public health experts like Dr Mianne Silvestre. The most popular flavour of Cerelac in the Philippines has about 17.5g of total sugars per serving – more than four teaspoons of sugar – but that can include both naturally occurring and added sugars. Nestle says in the Philippines, it has several variants or flavours without added sugar, and also flavours with added sugar.

“We always mention that malnutrition isn’t just being undernourished, it’s also overnourished also overweight and obese children, and very difficult to diet,” explains Dr Silvestre

“Starting these babies so young on this level of sugar. It’s mind-boggling.”

But, says Ms Tan-Bantoto, Nestle is “well below the threshold prescribed by international and local guidelines” when it comes to added sugar.

Unicef nutrition officer for the Philippines, Alice Nokori, says a lack of local, government regulation puts parents at a distinct disadvantage.

“If you go to other countries in Europe… they will have regulations that control what is sold out there and also make sure that companies put out what is they’re clear on what is in the content and at the front of the pack, it’s easy for the families and consumers to understand what is good for them and what is unhealthy,” she points out.

And it is not just what is in the product – or on the packaging – which needs regulating, she adds. “We conducted a digital scan… and what we saw is that families are bombarded 99% on what is on social media,” Ms Nokori said. “There’s a need for us to regulate what is coming out or being pushed out there in social media, especially targeted to children.”

Chiara Maganalles – or Mommy Diaries PH as she’s known on social media – has 1.6 million Facebook followers. In a lively YouTube video for Nestle’s “Parenteam” educational platform, she tells tens of thousands of subscribers about the benefits of Cerelac.

She’s been promoting the product for years, and for her, it is a win-win.

“I mean with my first kid… I did feed her Cerelac first because it’s convenient… It suits our budget… because of the nutritional content as well, it says that it’s fortified with iron,” she said.

Influencing has also transformed Chiara’s life – she’s now able to support her family from the money she makes from brand deals.

But critics say paid partnerships can look like trustworthy expert advice compared to conventional advertising methods. And what Chaira recommended – feeding Cerelac several times a day – goes even against what Nestle told the BBC.

Ms Tan-Bantoto described it as a “complementary” food to a baby’s diet, which should not be taken “the whole day”.

“At least give one bowl,” she said, for the nutritional value.

Nestle says it recommends one serving of infant cereal each day along with a diverse diet of foods, like fruits, vegetables, and meat daily. The company says the information is shared on its product labels, but promotional material on e-commerce sites and its educational platform suggest meal plans with Cerelac products up to three times a day.

The demand for regulation in the Philippines does have some star power. The sister of the current President and daughter of former President Ferdinand Marcos Snr – Imee Marcos – is sponsoring a bill that would prohibit manufacturers of baby food from adding sugar in their products.

A failure to comply could lead to a hefty fine, and imprisonment of producers and manufacturers for one to five years.

“I’m very hopeful that it will see the light of day. There’s so many bills and the food lobbies, the huge multinationals that purvey all these foods are immensely powerful and until today I haven’t even had a hearing,” Senator Imee Marcos told the BBC.

For its part Nestle says it is listening to concerns, and is phasing out added sugar in baby food – but that balancing the nutritional profile and composition of the product with taste takes time.

The company’s bestseller is due to get a sugar-free variety, with plans to completely eliminate all added sugar in the next “two to three years”, Ms Tan-Bantoto said.

Research published this week indicates that cutting sugar in the first 1,000 days of a baby’s life – from conception to the age of two – appears to reduce the risk of developing significant health issues in adult life.

A team of researchers at the University of Southern California found that limiting the intake of sugar in early life cut the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 35%, and high blood pressure by 20%.

Experts believe the first 1,000 days of life are a crucial period which can shape a person’s future health.

As she sweeps up broken glass outside her shop, Inna knows her country’s future is in the hands of Americans voting more than 5,000 miles away.

“We hope that the woman, Kamala Harris, will win and support us,” she says.

A Russian bomb had shattered her shop windows – a common occurrence in the city of Zaporizhzhia. There’s a 10-metre (32ft) wide crater in the middle of the road.

“Of course we are worried about the outcome [of the election],” she adds. “We want to defeat the enemy!”

For Ukraine to have a remote chance of doing that, it needs the help of the US.

It was here in 2023, on this south-eastern part of the front line, where Ukraine launched a counteroffensive it hoped would force out the Russian invaders.

Instead, after little to no progress, Ukraine’s ambitions have switched to survival. Missiles and glide bombs slam into towns and cities daily, and its soldiers weather constant Russian attacks.

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

While Democratic Vice-President Kamala Harris has suggested military aid would continue if she emerged the victor, her powers could be constrained by a Republican-run Congress. And the pipeline of military support, which so far totals more than $50bn, is looking less likely to be sustained under a second term for Donald Trump.

Whoever becomes the next US president will have a profound impact on Ukraine’s borders and everyone who lives within them.

If, for example, they forced Ukraine to give up land and freeze the front lines, then regions like Zaporizhzhia could become suddenly divided like North and South Korea after the ceasefire that halted fighting – but never officially ended the war there – in the 1950s.

Trump has said he would “work out something” to settle the war and suggested Ukraine may have to give up some land.

A second US option would be to pull its support completely, which would mean over time that Russian forces could eventually engulf the entire region and even more of Ukraine beyond it.

The third scenario of Ukraine completely liberating its occupied territories is looking less and less likely.

It’s this lack of battlefield progress that has made the merits of supporting Ukrainian troops like Andriy increasingly up for debate across the Atlantic.

He’s in charge of his unit’s fleet of US-made armoured vehicles on the front lines. When they’re not used for moving soldiers, they sit under camouflage netting along tree lines.

“If aid stops or slows, the burden will fall on the shoulders of the infantry,” he explains. “We’ll fight with what we have, but everyone knows Ukraine can’t do it on its own.”

• Russian drones hunt civilians, evidence suggests
• WATCH: Putin challenged over Ukraine war by BBC reporter

Andriy and his fellow Ukrainians are nervously awaiting the US vote on 5 November. The uncertainty is stifling battlefield ambitions and frustrating political efforts to secure more help.

Western allies often look to America’s example when deciding how or whether to support Kyiv’s war effort.

“When we hear how one candidate, who is less willing to help us, is leading in the polls, it’s upsetting and frustrating,” says Andriy. “But we’re not going anywhere.”

Amidst the autumnal farmland, the soldiers are keen to demonstrate the American kit they use – drones, grenade launchers and mounted machine guns.

All, they say, far superior to their Soviet-era alternatives.

Whether it’s through Ukraine’s natural resources or business ventures, President Zelensky is also trying to pitch his country as an investment opportunity to his allies.

Drone pilot Serhiy explains how they can give direct feedback to Western manufacturers.

“We have an online chat with them, and we make suggestions,” he says with a grin. “Improvements are already happening.”

As demonstrated with drone manufacturing, the war in Ukraine is forcing innovations domestically. It’s also allowing Western companies to test their products in an active warzone.

Billions of dollars of Western aid has also driven reforms in some areas of government. Kyiv wants to show it’s a horse worth backing.

The question is whether these advances will be eclipsed by a conflict increasingly going Russia’s way.

With an army typically only being as strong as its society, we head to meet someone who experienced Russian brutality first-hand.

Lyubov’s daughter and grandchildren fled to the US at the start of the full-scale invasion.

We last met in her front-line village of Komyshuvakha two years ago, after the invading troops had destroyed her home.

This time, she seemed happier, despite living close to the fighting for so long. In the warm confines of her new flat, I ask her whether Ukraine should negotiate to end the war.

“What about those who gave their lives?” she replies. “I see the end of the war only when we reach the 1991 borders of our country, when Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk were ours.”

There is almost endless coverage of the US election on Ukrainian news programmes, with war projections based on the potential winner.

Kamala Harris is undoubtedly seen as Ukraine’s preferred candidate, and journalists are trying to combat Russian disinformation against her.

But across Ukraine’s south and east, we find a growing number of people who want the war to end immediately, and see a Donald Trump presidency as the best chance of bringing respite.

We spoke to many of these people around the embattled eastern town of Pokrovsk, where Russian forces are inching closer.

There’s a feeling here that Ukraine should have negotiated at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, to prevent the death and destruction they’ve seen since.

Both sides engaged in talks in those early months of 2022. But evidence of alleged Russian war crimes halted attempts at diplomacy, and strengthened Ukraine’s resolve to fight on.

“Death is not worth territory,” as one woman put it. “We have to stop this war, and Trump is the person who knows how to do that.”

Eleven years of Russian aggression is enough for some.

For the politicians in Ukraine’s parliament, it is not an openly shared sentiment. While there is still cross-party support to keep fighting, President Zelensky’s “victory plan” has been criticised for not having a clearer timeline.

As for Lyubov, she certainly wasn’t going to voice her preference on who should win the White House:

“I would like a true friend of Ukraine to win, who will continue to support us. But who it is going to be, I cannot tell you.”

As much as I admire Lyubov’s inner steel, she reflects an increasingly popular and uncomfortable contradiction: a desire for Russia’s defeat, while also wanting the bloodshed to end as soon as possible.

The pendulum between US interventionism and isolationism is closely watched and felt in Ukraine.

Ever since it voted overwhelmingly to be an independent country in 1991 during the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has had to fight for its sovereignty.

It’s found itself on the edge of a geopolitical tectonic plate, trying to align itself with the West as Russia pulls it the other way.

Moscow’s full-scale invasion means Ukraine needs the helping hand of America to stop it from being torn apart.

• How US election could impact the Middle East
• How UK is preparing for a Harris or Trump White House
• 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

Hello Kitty, arguably Japan’s best loved creation, is celebrating her 50th anniversary.

But all has not always been well at Sanrio, the Japanese company behind the character. The business has been on a spectacular journey of financial peaks and valleys.

Hello Kitty has been ranked the second-highest grossing media franchise in the world behind Pokémon, and ahead of the likes of Mickey Mouse and Star Wars.

Underscoring her global fame, Britain’s King Charles wished her a happy birthday during the state visit to the UK by Japan’s Emperor and Empress in June.

In recent years though Sanrio had been struggling to make money, as interest in Hello Kitty waned.

Two previous surges in Sanrio sales, in 1999 and 2014, were both driven by the character’s popularity. But these jumps in demand for the firm’s products were not sustainable, says Yasuki Yoshioka of investment company SMBC Nikko.

“In the past, its performance had many ups and downs, as if it was on a rollercoaster ride,” Mr Yoshioka says.

Then, in 2020, Tomokuni Tsuji inherited the role as Sanrio’s boss.

He is the grandson of the firm’s founder, Shintaro Tsuji, and was just 31 at the time, making him the youngest chief executive of a listed Japanese company.

His grandfather then became Sanrio’s chairman.

Under the younger Mr Tsuji’s leadership, Sanrio changed its marketing strategy of its stable of other characters.

“It is not about lowering Hello Kitty’s popularity but it is about boosting others’ recognition,” he says.

This resulted in Hello Kitty losing the position of Sanrio’s most popular character.

According to a poll of customers, that spot is now held by Cinnamoroll – a blue-eyed white puppy with pink cheeks, long ears and a tail that looks like a Cinnamon roll.

Sanrio is also no longer just about cute characters.

If Hello Kitty is Japan’s ambassador of cute, then angry red panda Aggressive Retsuko – or Aggretsuko – channels the frustrations of an ordinary working woman.

The character, which is popular among Gen Zers, first appeared in a cartoon series on Japan’s TBS Television before it became a global hit on Netflix.

Another unconventional character is Gudetama, or “lazy egg”, who is living with depression and fires out cold one-liners that reflect dark realities of life.

As well as diversifying its characters, Sanrio boosted its overseas marketing and is now tackling counterfeits more rigorously.

“We are now using artificial intelligence to detect fake products and to make removal requests,” says Mr Tsuji.

For its marketing strategy, collaborations with major brands – including Starbucks, Crocs and the LA Dodgers baseball team – have been key, he added.

“In addition to our own promotion, by collaborating with global brands, we are trying to have our characters in the market throughout the year without many breaks.”

In a society that puts so much emphasis on seniority, Mr Tsuji’s surname was crucial to his ability to make major changes at Sanrio.

Almost a quarter of listed companies in Japan, like car makers Toyota and Suzuki and camera firm Canon, are managed by members of the family that founded them.

The reason is cultural, according to Professor Hokuto Dazai of Nagoya University of Commerce and Business.

In Japan, home to the world’s oldest continuous monarchy, “there is strong recognition of families and family businesses,” he says.

The master-servant relationship from the samurai period has transitioned into the relationship between founding families and their employees, and “historically commoners never fought over the top job”.

“It is also because Japan has a smaller pool of professional executives to choose from,” says Professor Dazai.

“Firms tend to look for their next boss internally, including founding family members.”

Still, “it would be a lie if I said there was no pushback” from other managers and employees in the company, Mr Tsuji says.

He also says he clashed with his grandfather over how to run the company.

“But one day I realised that I was being arrogant, trying to convince someone 60 years senior,” he says.

“After about a year, my grandfather told me to run the company as I see fit – that he will leave it up to me.”

The new boss’s revamp of the business has been paying off so far.

Within two years of the younger Tsuji becoming chief executive, Sanrio was profitable again, in what analyst Mr Yoshioka calls “a beautiful V-shaped recovery”.

Its share price has risen tenfold since 2020 and the company now has a stock market valuation of more than a trillion yen ($6.5bn; £5bn).

Away from the boardroom and stock market, there was also an intriguing incident earlier this year.

While Hello Kitty’s true identity is relatively well-known in Japan, some overseas fans were shocked by comments from a Sanrio executive in July.

Speaking on US television, retail business development director Jill Koch told viewers that “Hello Kitty is not a cat” and is in fact a British schoolgirl.

Her comments sparked a flurry of social media posts, with fans expressing their shock and confusion about the revelation.

“Hello Kitty is Hello Kitty and she can be whoever you want her to be – she can be your sister, your mother, it can be another you,” Mr Tsuji says.

Pushed on whether he has any idea why his grandfather decided not to make her Japanese, Mr Tsuji concludes: “London is an amazing city and it was the envy of many Japanese girls, so that may be one of the reasons they decided that she’s from London.”

It may not be the definitive answer her fans are looking for – but after all, Hello Kitty was created 14 years before the younger Tsuji was even born. Half a century since her creation, it is possible that the beloved character’s origin story will continue to be shrouded in mystery for years to come.

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 – as state news agency Tass has highlighted – it is rapidly increasing all the time.

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.

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.

US rapper Young Thug was released from jail Thursday evening after pleading guilty to gang, drug and gun charges, in a dramatic twist that ended the longest criminal trial in Georgia history.

The 33-year-old Grammy winner, born Jeffery Lamar Williams, has spent more than 900 days behind bars since his arrest on racketeering and gang-related charges.

In May 2022, prosecutors alleged the rap label he founded was a front for an organised crime syndicate responsible for “75 to 80% of violent crime” in Atlanta.

He was sentenced on Thursday to time served and 15 years of probation, and jail records show he was released later that night.

“I take full responsibility for my crimes, for my charges,” Mr Williams told the court.

“To really everybody that has got something to do with this situation, I want to say sorry.”

In a five-minute speech, he described himself as “a good guy with a good heart” who found himself “in a lot of stuff because I was just nice or cool”.

“And I understand that you can’t be that way when you reach a certain height because it could end bad… and it could fall on you.”

Prosecutors had planned to recommend a sentence of 45 years, including 25 in custody and 20 on probation.

But the plea negotiations were unsuccessful, and Superior Court Judge Paige Whitaker instead chose his punishment, commuting his sentence to the time he has already served, paving the way for his release.

“I want you to try to be more of the solution and less of the problem,” Judge Whitaker told him.

As part of the deal, Mr Williams pleaded guilty to one gang charge, three drug charges and two gun charges.

He also entered a no-contest plea to leading a gang and violating the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act, meaning that he decided not to contest those charges and accepts punishment for them.

Judge Whitaker additionally stipulated 100 hours of community service, a ban on contact with gang members or former co-defendants, and a prohibition from remaining in the metropolitan Atlanta area for the first 10 years of his 15-year probation period except under special circumstances – including weddings, funerals and the anti-gang and anti-gun presentations he is required to host four times a year.

Thursday’s change of plea brings an end to a multi-defendant case that was plagued by multiple delays, courtroom disturbances and motions for mistrial.

When the man known to his fans as “Thugger” was arrested in May 2022, prosecutors charged him and 27 associates at his rap label – Young Stoner Life (YSL) Records – with conspiracy to violate the Rico Act, famously used in mafia prosecutions.

Arguing that YSL in fact stands for a criminal gang called Young Slime Life, they tied the men – including fellow rap superstar Gunna – to a series of felony offences, including murder, armed robbery and carjacking in the streets of Atlanta.

But the indictment drew widespread outrage over prosecutors’ use of YSL rap lyrics as evidence of the gang’s actions and criminal intent. Critics argued the charges violated the rappers’ freedom of speech and were part of a growing assault on a black-dominated art form.

Several of Mr Williams’s co-defendants took plea deals or had their cases severed, and one even had his charges dropped after an unrelated murder conviction – and, by the time the trial began, only six defendants remained.

Jury selection began in January 2023 and lasted nearly 10 months.

In July this year, the trial was put on hold indefinitely after Mr Williams’s lawyers asked a previous judge to recuse himself over misconduct allegations.

The lawyers said Fulton County Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville held an “improper” meeting on 10 June when he met privately with prosecutors and a key witness.

They claimed Judge Glanville sought to pressure the witness into testifying and the lawyers pressed him to recuse himself, motions which the judge had denied.

Mr Williams’s lead attorney, Brian Steel, was also found in criminal contempt in June this year after refusing to reveal how he got to know about the meeting.

The trial also saw a number of unusual incidents, including the arrest of a Fulton County deputy for allegedly attempting to smuggle contraband to a defendant.

In another instance, the court’s Zoom account was hacked into by an apparent supporter of Mr Williams who yelled “free Thug!”.

Earlier this week, three of Mr Williams’s co-defendants in the case took plea deals.

The remaining two defendants in the case, Shannon Stillwell and Deamonte Kendrick, reportedly plan to move ahead with their trials.

Two separate Hezbollah rocket attacks have killed seven people in northern Israel, authorities say – the deadliest day of such strikes in months.

An Israeli farmer and four foreign agricultural workers were killed when rockets landed near Metula, a town on the border with Lebanon, Foreign Minister Israel Katz said.

Later, an Israeli woman and her adult son were killed in an olive grove near Kibbutz Afek, on the outskirts of the coastal city of Haifa.

Hezbollah said it had fired barrages of rockets towards the Krayot area north of Haifa and at Israeli forces south of the Lebanese town of Khiam, which is across the border from Metula.

The Israeli military identified two projectiles crossing from Lebanon and falling in an open area near Metula on Thursday morning.

The Israeli farmer who was killed was named by local media as Omer Weinstein, a 46-year-old father-of-four from nearby Kibbutz Dafna.

According to Haaretz, four foreign workers who were killed were all Thai nationals.

A fifth foreign worker was seriously injured by shrapnel. Videos posted online showed them being transferred by helicopter to the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa.

Haaretz said Mr Weinstein and the foreign workers were in an agricultural field near the border fence at the time of the attack.

It cited a member of the local emergency response team as saying the Israeli military had permitted them to enter the area despite Metula being inside a closed military zone.

The military established the zone at the end of September, just before it launched a ground invasion of Lebanon with the aim of destroying Hezbollah weapons and infrastructure.

Thursday’s second rocket attack reportedly hit an agricultural area near Kibbutz Afek, which is about 65km (40 miles) south-west of Metula and 28km from the Lebanese border.

The military said a total of 55 projectiles were fired towards the Western Galilee region, where the kibbutz is located, as well as the Central Galilee and Upper Galilee in the early afternoon. Some of the projectiles were intercepted and others fell in open areas, it added.

According to Haaretz, 60-year-old Mina Hasson and her 30-year-old son, Karmi, were killed by a rocket that hit an olive grove where they were picking olives.

A 70-year-old man was also lightly injured by shrapnel and taken to Rambam hospital, according to the Magen David Adom ambulance service.

“We were called to the olive grove and saw a man in his 30s lying on the ground, unconscious,” MDA paramedics Mazor and Yishai Levy told the Jerusalem Post.

“We began resuscitation efforts while conducting further searches, during which we located another casualty, also in critical condition with multi-system injuries. We provided her with medical treatment and performed resuscitation, but unfortunately, we had to pronounce both of them dead,” they said.

Meanwhile, the head of the Irish military said a UN peacekeeping base in southern Lebanon that houses Irish troops was hit by a rocket fired towards Israel on Wednesday night.

The rocket landed inside an unoccupied area of Camp Shamrock, which is 7km (4 miles) from the Israeli border, causing minimal damage on the ground and no casualties, Lt Gen Sean Clancy said.

Irish premier Simon Harris said: “Thankfully everyone is safe but it is completely unacceptable that this happened. Peacekeepers are protected under international law and the onus is on all sides to ensure that protection.”

• US envoys in push for Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire

The deadly rocket attacks in northern Israel came as two US special envoys met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem to discuss a possible ceasefire deal to end the war with Hezbollah.

Netanyahu told Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk that the main issue was what he called Israel’s ability to “thwart any threat to its security from Lebanon in a way that will return our residents safely to their homes”, his office said in a statement.

Israel went on the offensive against Hezbollah – which it proscribes as a terrorist organisation – after almost a year of cross-border fighting sparked by the war in Gaza.

It said it wanted to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents of northern Israeli border areas displaced by rocket attacks, which Hezbollah launched in support of Palestinians the day after its ally Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

More than 2,800 people have been killed in Lebanon since then, including 2,200 in the past five weeks, and 1.2 million others displaced, according to Lebanese authorities.

Israeli authorities say more than 60 people have been killed by Hezbollah rocket, drone, and missile attacks in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights.

Earlier on Thursday, the Israeli military said troops were continuing operations inside southern Lebanon and that aircraft had struck dozens of Hezbollah targets throughout the country.

Lebanon’s health ministry meanwhile said Israeli strikes had killed six paramedics in three southern towns.

Four from the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Society’s Civil Defence branch, which provides emergency services, were killed when Israeli forces targeted a gathering point at Derdghaya junction, it said.

A fifth IHS paramedic was killed in an air strike on a vehicle in Deir al-Zahrani, while a strike in Zefta killed a paramedic from the Islamic Risala Scout Association, which is affiliated to the Hezbollah-allied Amal movement, according to the ministry.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. But dozens of paramedics and other emergency workers have been killed and injured since it intensified its air campaign against Hezbollah five weeks ago.

The military has previously accused Hezbollah of using ambulances to transport weapons and fighters. The IHS has denied having ties to military operations.

There were also fresh Israeli strikes near Baalbek, in the eastern Bekaa Valley, a day after the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of the entire city and two neighbouring towns.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) reported that a woman was killed in a strike in the Kayyal area.

Another six people were killed when a house was bombed in Maqna, which is 5km north-east of Baalbek but was not included in the evacuation zone, it said.