As Spain reels from the flash floods which struck the south-east of the country this week, many are wondering why the death toll, which currently stands at over 200, is so high.

Almost all of the deaths confirmed so far have been in the Valencia region on the Mediterranean coast.

Some areas have been particularly devastated: the town of Paiporta, population 25,000, reported at least 62 deaths.

Various factors, including drivers becoming trapped in their cars, poor planning by officials and extreme rainfall being exacerbated by climate change are all likely to have contributed.

The civil protection agency, overseen by the regional government, issued an emergency alert to the phones of people in and around the city of Valencia after 20:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on Tuesday, by which time the flood water was swiftly rising in many areas and in some cases already wreaking havoc.

A large number of those killed were on the roads, in many cases returning from work, when the flash floods struck.

Video footage shows how a first wave of flood water washed through Paiporta as cars were still circulating. Although rainfall was heavier in other areas, such as Utiel and Chiva, Paiporta’s geography, with a ravine running through its centre, made the impact of the flood particularly devastating.

Mayor Maribel Albalat said that the town was ill-prepared in terms of planning, with many ground-floor flats. Six residents of an elderly care home died when the flood water washed into the building when they were still on the ground floor. She also suggested there was an element of complacency.

“In Paiporta we don’t tend to have floods and people aren’t afraid,” she said.

• ‘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

Garages were a particular death trap.

“When it rains people normally go down to their garages to get their cars out in case their garage is flooded,” Ms Albalat said.

That appears to have been the case in the neighbourhood of La Torre, on the outskirts of Valencia, where the bodies of seven people were recovered from the garage of a residential building.

The A3 motorway connecting Valencia to Madrid was one of many roads where motorists were trapped as the water level rose, leaving them unsure whether it was safer to stay in the vehicle or not.

“There are almost certainly more people who have died because the water washed people away who had got out of their cars,” one survivor told the Telecinco TV channel. Another survivor said the water had been up to his chest.

An eye-witness described seeing one driver who had got out of his car who had strapped himself to a lamppost with his belt, to stop himself from being washed away. It is unknown whether he survived.

The mayor of Chiva, Amparo Fort, warned on Thursday that nearby there were still “hundreds of cars turned upside down and they will surely have people inside them”.

On Thursday morning, the Guardia Civil shared advice on how to escape from a car during a flood on social media. People caught in floods are advised to try and escape though their cars’ windows and windscreen.

Other factors also appear to help explain why Valencia was so devastated by the weather event.

Much of the area most heavily affected, in and surrounding the country’s third-largest city, is densely populated.

A lack of rainfall throughout the rest of the year has left the ground in many areas of eastern and southern Spain unable to absorb rainwater efficiently.

Pablo Aznar, a researcher at the Socio-Economic Observatory of Floods and Droughts (Obsis), warned that much of the area affected had undergone what he described as “untrammelled development”, with many areas covered in impermeable materials, which “increases the danger posed by these events”.

The warming climate is also likely to have contributed to the severity of the floods.

In a preliminary report, World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group of international scientists who investigate global warming’s role in extreme weather, found that the rainfall which struck Spain was 12% heavier due to climate change and that the weather event experienced is twice as likely.

Eight people have died after a concrete canopy at a railway station in northern Serbia collapsed, the country’s Interior Minister Ivica Dacic said.

People were sitting on benches under the outdoor overhang at the station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second city, at the time of the collapse around noon local time (11:00 GMT), Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) reported.

Dacic said two people were in hospital, including one man who had his legs amputated.

Rescuers were in contact with two others, including a girl, still under the rubble, he added.

Around 80 rescuers from all over the country were involved in the search, using heavy machinery.

The railway station building was renovated in 2021, and renovated again this year in order to be officially opened on 5 July.

Serbian media quoted Railway Infrastructure of Serbia, the body responsible for the concrete canopy, as saying that it was not reconstructed with the station.

Prime Minister Miloš Vučević said everyone found responsible for the maintenance of the canopy, which was built in 1964, would be held accountable, media reported.

Vučević said Friday was one of the most difficult days in Novi Sad’s post-war history.

“This is a great, terrible tragedy for Novi Sad and for all of Serbia,” he added, sending condolences to the families of the victims and thanking first responders.

A schoolboy who attacked two students and a teacher with a hammer at a boarding school in Devon has been named after a judge lifted an order preventing his identification.

Thomas Wei Huang, 17, from Malaysia, was detained for life to serve a minimum term of 12 years after he tried to kill three people at Blundell’s School in Tiverton.

He attacked two roommates, aged 15 and 16 at the time, as they slept during the early hours of 9 June 2023, leaving them with severe injuries.

He also attacked housemaster Henry Roffe-Silvester, who suffered six wounds to his head.

The teenager, who claimed he was sleepwalking during the attack, was sentenced at Exeter Crown Court in October after being found guilty of three counts of attempted murder.

Huang can be identified after a High Court judge lifted an order preventing publication of his name.

A jury heard Huang, who was aged 16 at the time of the attack, used weapons he had collected to prepare for a zombie apocalypse.

Sentencing, Judge Mrs Justice Cutts said: “You knew the difference between right and wrong and you intended to kill those boys.”

The teenager, who admitted assaulting the two boys and the housemaster, pleaded not guilty to attempted murder by reason of insanity due to his sleepwalking.

The court also heard he had an “unhealthy interest in violence and violent films”, and was struggling with a “cocktail of extreme stress” due to exam and personal life issues.

But the jury rejected the sleepwalking argument.

The two pupils were asleep in cabin-style beds in one of the co-educational school’s boarding houses when Huang climbed up and attacked them shortly before 01:00.

Mr Roffe-Silvester, who was asleep in his own quarters, was woken by noises coming from the boarding house and went to investigate.

When he entered the bedroom where the attack had happened, he saw a silhouetted figure standing in the room, who then turned towards him and repeatedly struck him over the head with a hammer.

The two boys were discovered in their beds a few minutes later and had suffered skull fractures and injuries to their ribs, spleen, a punctured lung and internal bleeding.

The court heard both were living with the “long-term consequences” of the attack but have no memory of it. One boy suffered permanent brain damage, the court heard.

Mr Roffe-Silvester, who received six blows to his head, made a full recovery.

X

It’s hard to see her in the crowd of men. She is the tiny figure towards the back.

The soldiers have ordered the men to strip to their underwear. Even some of the elderly ones. They gaze up at whoever is taking the photograph. It is almost certainly an Israeli soldier.

The image appears to have first been published on the Telegram account of a journalist with strong sources in the Israel Defence Forces.

The men look abject, fearful and exhausted. The little girl, who was noticed in the picture by a BBC producer, is looking away. Maybe something out of sight of the camera has caught her attention. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to look at the soldiers and their guns.

The military have told the people to stop here. Bomb-blasted buildings stretch off into the distance behind them. They are checking the men, for weapons, documents, any sign they might be linked to Hamas.

So often the suffering of this war is found in the detail of individual lives. The child’s presence, her expression as she looks away, is a detail that poses so many questions.

Foremost, who was she? What happened to her? The photo was taken a week ago.

A week of hundreds killed, many wounded, and thousands uprooted from their homes. Children died under the rubble of air strikes or because there wasn’t the medicine or medical staff to treat them.

Working with BBC Arabic Gaza Today programme we began searching for the child. Israel does not allow the BBC or other international media access to Gaza to report independently, so the BBC depends on a trusted network of freelance journalists. Our colleagues approached their contacts with aid agencies in the north, showing the photograph in places where the displaced had fled.

Within 48 hours word came back. The message on the phone read: “We have found her!”

Julia Abu Warda, aged three, was alive. When our journalist reached the family in Gaza City – where many from Jabalia have fled – Julia was with her father, grandfather and mother.

She was watching a cartoon of animated chickens singing, difficult to hear because of the ominous whine of an Israeli drone overhead.

Julia was surprised to suddenly be the focus of a stranger’s attention.

“Who are you?” her father asked, playfully.

“Jooliaa” she replied, stretching the word for emphasis.

Julia was physically unscathed. Dressed in a jumper and jeans, her hair in buns held by bright blue floral bands. But her expression was wary.

Then Mohammed began to tell the story behind the photograph.

Five times the family was displaced in the last 21 days. Each time they were running from air strikes and gunfire.

On the day the photo was taken they heard an Israeli drone broadcasting a warning to evacuate.

This was in the Al-Khalufa district where the IDF was advancing against Hamas.

“There was random shellfire. We went toward the centre of Jabalia refugee camp, on the road to the checkpoint.”

The family carried their clothes, some cans of tinned food, and a few personal possessions.

At first everybody was together. Julia’s dad, her mother Amal, her 15-month-old brother Hamza, a grandfather, two uncles and a cousin.

But in the chaos, Mohammed and Julia were separated from the others.

“I got separated from her mother due to the crowd and all the belongings we were carrying. She was able to leave, and I stayed in place,” Mohammed said.

Father and daughter eventually moved on with the flow of people heading out. The streets reeked of death. “We saw destruction and bodies scattered on the ground,” Mohammed said. There was no way to stop Julia seeing at least some of it. After more than a year of war, children have become familiar with the sight of those who have died violent deaths.

The group reached an Israeli checkpoint.

“There were soldiers on the tanks and soldiers on the ground. They approached the people and started firing above their heads. People were pushing against each other during the shooting.”

The men were ordered to strip to their underwear. This is routine procedure as the IDF searches for concealed weapons or suicide bombers. Mohammed says they were held at the checkpoint for six to seven hours. In the photograph Julia appears calm. But her father recalled her distress afterwards.

“She started screaming and told me she wanted her mother.”

The family was reunited. The displaced are packed into small areas. Bonds of family are tight. Word travels fast in Gaza City when kin arrive from Jabalia. Julia was comforted by the people who loved her. There were sweets and potato chips, a treat that had been stored away.

Then Mohammed disclosed to our colleague the deep trauma Julia had suffered, before that day of their flight from Jabalia to Gaza City. She had a favourite cousin. His name was Yahya and he was seven years old. They used to play together in the street. About two weeks ago Yahya was in the street when the Israelis launched a drone strike. The child was killed.

“Life used to be normal. She would run and play,” he said. “But now, whenever there’s shelling, she points and says, ‘plane!’ While we are trapped she looks up and points towards the drone flying over us.”

According to Unicef – the United Nations children’s agency -14,000 children have been reportedly killed in the war.

“Day after day children are paying the price for a war they did not start,” said Unicef spokesman, Jonathan Crickx.

“Most of the children I have met have lost a loved one in often terrible circumstances.”

The UN estimates that nearly all children in the Gaza Strip – nearly one million – need mental health support.

It is hard to call a child like Julia lucky. When you think of what she has seen and lost and where she is trapped. Who knows what will return in dreams and memories in the days ahead. By now she knows that life can end with terrible suddenness.

Her good fortune is in the family that will do whatever is humanly possible – in the face of air strikes, gun battles, hunger and disease – to protect her.

A drug trafficking-related shooting in the western French city of Poitiers escalated into a brawl on Thursday night, potentially involving up to 600 people, French authorities say.

Five people were seriously injured in a drive-by shooting at a restaurant in the city, including a 15-year-old boy who was left in critical condition after being shot in the head, police sources told the AFP news agency.

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau described the incident as an alarming sign of drug-related violence escalating in the country.

It follows a shooting in the north-western city of Rennes last week which killed a five-year-old boy.

“These shootings are not happening in South America, they are happening in Rennes, in Poitiers, in this part of western France once known for its tranquility,” Retailleau told broadcaster BFMTV.

“We are at a tipping point and the choice we have today is a choice between general mobilisation or the Mexicanisation of the country,” he said, alluding to Mexico’s widespread issues with street crime and violence perpetrated by drug cartels.

The mayor of Poitiers called it “a new episode of violence unacceptable for the neighbourhood”.

Shots were fired from a passing car, injuring several young people, police sources said.

Two 16-year-olds were treated for minor wounds.

Pictures from the scene in Place Coimbra, an area of the city known for drug-related crimes, showed the restaurant’s facade riddled with bullet holes.

The shooting then triggered fighting between rival gang groups in the area, according to police.

“Tensions between groups broke out, requiring the intervention of the police and the gendarmerie,” Vienne regional police said in a statement.

Retailleau said “400 to 600” people were at the scene, though it is not clear how many of those were directly involved.

He was scheduled to visit Rennes, the capital of Brittany, on Friday following the shooting on 26 October, in which a five-year-old boy sitting in a car was shot in the head. Authorities confirmed the shooting was also drug-related.

The drug trade in France has long been viewed as centred in the southern port city of Marseille, where at least 17 drug-related killings have been reported since the start of the year.

But researchers say the influence of drug trafficking in France in recent years has spread beyond the main hubs of Marseille and Paris to medium-sized towns and even rural areas.

Two former police officers have been jailed in Brazil for the murder of Marielle Franco, a prominent left-wing politician killed in a drive-by shooting in 2018.

Anderson Gomes, Franco’s driver, was also killed in the attack but her press officer Fernanda Chaves, who was in the car, survived.

Ronnie Lessa confessed to firing the shots and was sentenced to 78 years and nine months, while Élcio de Queiroz received 59 years and eight months for being behind the wheel.

Franco, a gay Black woman, was an emerging light in Brazil’s socialist party, with her death at the age of 38 sparking nationwide protests.

Speaking to the court from prison by video-link, Lessa said he was “blinded” and “driven crazy” by the prospect of a million-dollar reward for the murder.

In March 2024, Brazil’s Justice Minister Ricardo Lewandowski said the homicide was “evidently politically motivated”.

He said Franco wanted to convert property into housing for the poor, while others wanted to use it for commercial use.

Both defendants signed plea bargains, leading to the arrest of politician Chiquinho Brazão and his brother Domingos in March on suspicion of ordering the hit.

Lessa said the brothers told him Rivaldo Barbosa, the state’s chief of police at the time, had signed off the killing. Barbosa was arrested the same month.

After the sentencing, Franco’s father Antônio da Silva Neto said his family would continue their fight for justice.

“It doesn’t end here because there were masterminds [of the crime]. The question we’re asking now is: when will the masterminds be convicted?”

Life sentences do not exist under Brazilian law and each defendant is expected to serve a maximum of 30 years.

The two were ordered to pay together 706,000 reais (£93,000; $120,000) in damages to Franco’s mother, partner and daughter, and to Gomes’ wife.

They were also ordered to pay a pension to Gomes’ son Arthur until he is 24.

Chaves, who survived the shooting, told the court how the night unfolded and “completely changed” her life.

Shortly after the attack, Chaves and her family fled the country and she was not able to attend Franco’s funeral or memorial service. She has since moved back to Brazil.

Speaking to court via video-link, she said those responsible for Franco’s murder would spend the rest of their lives hearing Franco’s name and seeing her “face in walls across the world”.

“They took Marielle from us, but they couldn’t take away what Marielle means”, she added.

In court, families and friends clapped and chanted “Marielle is here! Anderson is here!” after the verdict was announced, a phrase popularised in nationwide protests after their deaths in 2018.

Anielle Franco, minister of racial equality, said her sister’s legacy would be “evidence that women, black people from the favelas, when they get to positions of power, they deserve to remain alive”.

“While there is blood running through our veins, while we are alive, we will keep defending the legacy and memory of Marielle and Anderson”, she added.

Pastor Henrique Vieira, a federal congressman, said: “I didn’t want her to be a flag, a slogan. She is missed and we really miss Mari’s joy, strength, bravery, brilliance.”

Investigations continue into Barbosa and the Brazão brothers who are alleged to have been involved in the ordering and planning of the attack.

They deny any involvement with the killing or with militias.

Jobs growth in the US slowed sharply in October as hurricanes and strikes disrupted the economy.

Employers added 12,000 jobs last month, much lower than the 223,000 created in September, according to the Labor Department.

But while hiring slowed, the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%.

The closely watched figures, which give an indication about the strength of the US economy, are the last to be released before Americans head to the polls on Tuesday to elect the country’s next president.

The Labor Department said healthcare and government roles continued their rising trend last month, but fewer new manufacturing jobs were added due to strikes.

Some 30,000 workers at aerospace giant Boeing have been on strike since 13 September, leading to a dramatic slowdown in the production of aircraft. Workers at Textron, another aircraft company, have also been taking industrial action.

Manufacturing employment decreased by 46,000 in October, which the department said reflected “a decline of 44,000 in transportation equipment manufacturing that was largely due to strike activity”.

Employment showed little or no change over the month in other major industries.

The 12,000 jobs added to payrolls is much lower than expected. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast payrolls rising by 113,000.

But workers staging walkouts were not included in last month’s jobs data, which contributed to the overall non-farm payrolls being lower.

“At face value the 12k increase is obviously a weak number but it follows a very robust increase in September and was affected by strikes and possibly by the hurricanes,” said Brian Coulton, chief economist at Fitch Ratings.

Hurricane Helene devastated the south east of the US in late September, with Hurricane Milton hitting Florida a week later. A total of 512,000 people said they could not go to work because of extreme weather.

Despite the greater-than-expected slowdown, expectations remain that interest rates will be cut by 0.25 percentage points next week by the US central bank, the Federal Reserve.

“Markets can likely park the October jobs report to the side. Quite clearly, the hurricane has taken a heavy toll on the numbers, clouding the picture of labour market strength, and so should not impact the Fed’s policy rate path,” said Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management.

Lindsay Rosner from Goldman Sachs Asset Management added: “Stormy numbers but sky clearing for November 25 bp [base point] cut.”

The Labor Department said it was likely the lower-than-expected jobs added were affected by the hurricanes because its survey is not designed to “isolate effects from extreme weather events”, adding it was difficult to quantify the full impact.

Over the past year, job growth has also slowed and the unemployment rate has been edging higher, though it remains at historically low levels. Average hourly earnings have increased 4% in the last 12 months.

Last month the US Fed cut interest rates by a bigger-than-usual 0.5 percentage points, saying it wanted to avoid any further weakening in the labour market.

The man caring for an internet-famous squirrel named Peanut is pleading with New York authorities to return it after it was seized by authorities.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) raided the home of Mark Longo on Wednesday following complaints of potentially unsafe housing for the animal.

“To the group of people who called DEC, there’s a special place in hell for you,” Mr Longo said in an Instagram post announcing the seizure, adding that he did not know if the ash-coloured rodent had been euthanised.

A petition for the animal’s return had more than 20,000 signatures on Friday morning.

In subsequent posts on Instagram on Thursday, Mr Longo said he was raising money for legal fees against the DEC.

A DEC statement said an investigation had been launched after receiving “multiple reports from the public about the potentially unsafe housing of wildlife that could carry rabies and the illegal keeping of wildlife as pets”.

The squirrel’s current condition was not made clear by the DEC.

Mr Longo took Peanut in seven years ago after he spotted the baby squirrel by his mother who had been hit by a car.

He cared for Peanut until he was strong enough to be released, but said he found Peanut back on his porch the following morning with “a chunk of his tail missing”.

Peanut’s Instagram account has amassed more than 500,000 followers in the time since.

The account features videos of Peanut playing out skits with Mr Longo, occasionally dressed in hats, often climbing over him or being hugged, and regularly eating waffles.

During the raid, the DEC also seized a raccoon Mr Longo had acquired in recent months and named Fred.

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 an assassination attempt during the campaign.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: When is the US election and how does it work?
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: Vote weighs on minds of Ukraine’s frontline soldiers
• PATH TO 270: The states they need to win – and why
• 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.

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 in the South East Asian nation 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.”

Unicef nutrition officer for the Philippines, Alice Nkoroi, says a lack of local, government regulation also 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 Nkoroi 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.

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?

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.

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?
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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.”

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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.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: When is the US election and how does it work?
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• PATH TO 270: The states they need to win – and why
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

Human-caused climate change made the ten deadliest extreme weather events of the last 20 years more intense and more likely, according to new analysis.

The killer storms, heatwaves and floods affected Europe, Africa and Asia killing more than 570,000 people.

The new analysis highlights how scientists can now discern the fingerprint of climate change in complex weather events.

The study involved reanalysing data for some of the extreme weather events and was carried out by scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group at Imperial College London.

“This study should be an eye-opener for political leaders hanging on to fossil fuels that heat the planet and destroy lives”, said Dr Friederike Otto, co-founder and lead of WWA.

“If we keep burning oil, gas and coal, the suffering will continue,” she said.

The researchers focused on the 10 deadliest weather events registered in the International Disaster Database since 2004. That was when the first study was published linking a weather event – a heatwave in Europe – with our changing climate.

The deadliest event of the last two decades was a drought in Somalia in 2011 which is reckoned to have killed more than 250,000 people. The researchers found the low rainfall that drove the drought was made more likely and more extreme by climate change.

The list includes the heatwave that hit France in 2015 killing more than 3,000 people, where researchers say high temperatures were made twice as likely because of climate change.

It also contains the European heatwaves of 2022, when 53,000 people died, and 2023, which led to 37,000 people losing their lives. The latter would have been impossible without climate change, the study finds.

It says the deadly tropical cyclones that hit Bangladesh in 2007, Myanmar in 2008 and the Philippines in 2013 were all made more likely and intense by climate change. That was also the case with the floods that hit India in 2013.

The researchers say the real death toll from these events is likely to be significantly higher than the figures they quote.

That is because fatalities linked to heatwaves do not tend to be recorded as such in much of the world, especially in poorer nations which are most vulnerable.

The study was carried out before the storms in Spain left dozens dead this week.

The link between climate change and weather events is only possible because the two scientists who founded the WWA – Dr Otto and a Dutch climatologist called Geert Jan van Oldenborgh – pioneered a way to track global warming in catastrophic weather events.

They knew that weather records showed that extreme weather events were becoming more intense. What’s more, a huge body of peer-reviewed science explained how warming the atmosphere can intensify extreme weather. What was missing was the link between a single event to rising global temperatures.

‌For years forecasters have been using atmospheric models to predict future weather patterns. Otto and Oldenborgh repurposed the models to run repeated simulations to work out how likely a weather event was in the current climate.

‌They also created parallel simulations which explored how likely the same event was in a world in which the industrial revolution had never happened. These computer models stripped out the effects of the billions of tonnes of CO2 that humans have pumped into the atmosphere.

‌The calculations meant they could compare how likely the same event was with and without the 1.2C of global warming that the world has already experienced since the industrial revolution.

“The massive death tolls we keep seeing in extreme weather shows we are not well prepared for 1.3°C of warming, let alone 1.5°C or 2°C”, said Roop Singh, of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre which supports the WWA.

She said today’s study showed the need for all countries to build their resilience to climate change and warned: “With every fraction of a degree of warming, we will see more record-breaking events that push countries to the brink, no matter how prepared they are.”

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While much attention is on the race for the White House, on 5 November American voters will also determine who will control each chamber of Congress.

All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 34 seats in the Senate will be up for grabs.

Republicans currently hold a majority in the House, while Democrats control the Senate, both by slim margins.

Polls suggest the two parties could switch control of each chamber, with Democrats winning back the House and Republicans retaking the Senate.

The two parties are fighting over a handful of seats that could make the difference in how much power they hold in Washington in the new year.

Here is a guide to the crucial contests to keep an eye on.

With Republicans all but assured of flipping an open seat in West Virginia, Montana might cement the party’s path back to a Senate majority – if they can oust three-term Democrat Jon Tester.

Tester, 68, is a third-generation dirt farmer re-elected twice on a pledge to be an independent voice willing to buck his own party. But critics argue he has been the deciding vote for much of President Joe Biden’s agenda and, as Montana has lurched rightward, his days in Washington could be numbered.

His opponent, Tim Sheehy, is an ex-Navy Seal who ran an aerial fire-fighting business that helps put out wildfires across the state. But the political novice has faced scrutiny over his background, including lying that the bullet in his arm is a wound from Afghanistan when he had in fact accidentally shot himself on a hike.

Sheehy, 38, has largely avoided the media but his embrace of Donald Trump may be enough to get him over the line.

Democratic efforts to oust Senator Ted Cruz six years ago fell short by some 200,000 votes. They now have another chance at defeating the Texan senator – with a new challenger.

Colin Allred, 41, is a former National Football League (NFL) player turned civil rights lawyer who served in the Barack Obama administration and is currently serving in the US House. He has attacked Cruz for vacationing in Mexico during a historic winter storm in 2021, and for voting to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat.

Reproductive rights and Texas’s near-total abortion ban are also shaping the race, with Kamala Harris recently making a rare campaign trip to the state alongside Houston native Beyoncé.

Cruz, meanwhile, has vowed to “keep Texas, Texas” and extend Democrats’ three-decade lockout from state-wide office.

Two months ago, Tammy Baldwin was coasting to re-election with a comfortable lead in the polls, money in the bank and Kamala Harris reinvigorating the Democratic ticket. But the first-ever openly gay US senator has seen her polling lead evaporate.

Republican Eric Hovde, 60, has dumped $20m (£15m) of his own wealth into the contest, endeared himself to Trump voters by leaning into the culture wars and blanketed the airwaves with negative ads tying Baldwin, 62, to inflation and illegal immigration.

If elected, the former banking executive and real estate mogul would be near the top of the Senate’s rich list and Democrats have cast him as making an opportunistic bid for office despite an inability to relate to working-class Wisconsinites.

But, in this crucial swing state, the flood of Republican cash is hurting both Baldwin and Harris – and twin defeats here could be a major blow for Democrats.

As with Jon Tester in Montana, the ground has been shifting right throughout Senator Sherrod Brown’s three terms representing Ohio and he is currently the lone Democrat holding state-wide elected office.

But Brown, 71, has long been supported by Ohio union workers and blue-collar labourers, and he has stuck close to this voting bloc – which includes many Trump supporters – in his campaign for re-election.

Opposing him in what is now believed to be the most expensive Senate race in US history is Bernie Moreno, a Colombian immigrant and former auto sales magnate who portrays the veteran progressive lawmaker as “too liberal for Ohio”.

The 57-year-old inadvertently centred abortion access as a race-defining issue when he joked in September that “it’s a little crazy” for older women to care about the issue. Polls suggest it is hurting Moreno with suburban women.

Half a dozen suburban swing districts in New York state likely hold the key to control of the US House next year.

Five of these districts are held by first-term Republicans, who carved out upset victories in the 2022 midterm elections on the back of voter concerns over crime, inflation and immigration.

But after facing criticism over party in-fighting and electoral infrastructure, Democratic leaders have invested millions into their New York operation this time around and are banking on high presidential election-year turnout.

Their candidates have, however, had to balance their messaging between offering solutions and acknowledging both the rising cost of living and high numbers of undocumented migrants that has cost taxpayers $2.4bn (£1.8bn) this year.

Democrats need to flip only four seats to win back a House majority. If they prevail, Hakeem Jeffries will become the first black House Speaker in history – and the first from New York since 1869.

During the Joe Biden administration, no Democrats voted more out of step with their party leader than the so-called “Blue Dogs” – a cadre of 11 pro-worker populist House members.

From Jared Golden in Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington state to Henry Cuellar in Texas and Mary Peltola in Alaska, this working-class caucus of lawmakers has regularly backed away from party priorities.

They have worked across the aisle to build bipartisan consensus, including helping craft a package earlier this year to provide funding for border security as well as aid to Ukraine and Israel. Senate Republicans tanked the bill after facing pressure from Donald Trump.

Democrats have been bleeding support in rural America for years, but successful re-election bids by the Blue Dogs could prove key for the party.

Four-term Nebraska congressman Don Bacon, 61, is part of a dying breed of moderate Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Donald Trump campaigned to replace Bacon two years ago.

But in May, he defeated a primary opponent who argued he was not adequately supportive of Trump. And though Bacon now has Trump’s endorsement, he supported Nikki Haley in the presidential primary race.

Bacon’s district also holds outsized importance in the presidential race. Unlike most other states, Nebraska splits its Electoral College votes by congressional district. Trump won the district in 2016, but lost it in 2020 and polls suggest he will lose it again this year.

Facing off against Bacon in a rematch of their 2022 contest is state Senator Tony Vargas, 40. New district lines and an influx of new voters since then, as well as millions of dollars in Democratic spending, all favour Vargas – and therefore Kamala Harris.

The fight to represent Alabama’s second congressional district is particularly interesting.

The district has been dominated by Republicans for the past six decades – but the US Supreme Court ordered it to be redrawn last year. In its ruling, the nation’s top court concluded that the southern state’s congressional map had likely been drawn in a discriminatory manner, concentrating black voters into just one of its seven districts.

The redrawn district is now majority black and it has set the stage for a highly competitive race between two lawyers and political newcomers – Democrat Shomari Figures and Republican Caroleene Dobson.

Polls currently suggest Figures has the edge.

• 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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But many Palestinians see little hope in either candidate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 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.”

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• Moscow had high hopes for Trump in 2016. It’s more cautious this time

Elon Musk can continue to give away cash to registered voters – for now, a Pennsylvania state judge has said.

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

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

At a hearing on Thursday, Judge Angelo Foglietta said the lawsuit will be put on hold while a federal court decides whether to take up the case.

If the federal court chooses not to rule on the matter, the case will go back to the state court.

In a post on X, the platform Musk owns, he said the ruling was “American Justice FTW (for the win)”.

It is unlikely the case will be resolved before Tuesday’s election.

“We will proceed to federal court and we will address the issues there and seek to have the matter remanded back to the state court,” John Summers, a lawyer working with Mr Krasner, told reporters after the hearing.

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

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• Is Musk’s giveaway legal?
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Musk did not appear at a Philadelphia court for the hearing.

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

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

Yet another winner was announced on Thursday. Musk’s America PAC said Dacey from Fremont, North Carolina had won a $1m check.

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

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

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

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

But Musk’s lawyers have argued otherwise.

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

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

Just a day before Judge Foglietta’s ruling, the district attorney’s team asked for enhanced security for the hearing after Musk retweeted a post insulting Krasner that led to threats against him.

“It immediately triggered an avalanche of posts from Musk’s followers. Many made antisemitic attacks on Krasner,” Krasner’s team wrote in a legal filing.

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

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

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

Musk could face a $10,000 fine and up to five years in prison if a court finds he broke the law.

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

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

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

Cyclists using a mobile phone while riding in Japan could face up to six months jail under strict new rules introduced Friday.

Those who breach the revised road traffic law can be punished with a maximum sentence of six months in prison, or a fine of 100,000 yen ($655; £508).

The number of accidents involving cyclists started climbing in 2021, as more people opted to cycle instead of using public transport during the pandemic, according to local media. Authorities are now racing to regulate riders.

Besides cracking down on phone usage, the new rules also target cyclists riding under the influence of alcohol, with a penalty of up to three years in prison or a fine of 500,000 yen ($3,278; £2,541).

Hours after the new laws came into effect, Osaka authorities confirmed on Friday that they had already recorded five violations, including two men who were caught riding bicycles while drunk. One of the men had collided with another cyclist, but no injuries were reported.

Under the new rules, cyclists who cause accidents can be fined up to 300,000 yen ($2,000; £1,500 ) or jailed up to a year.

The total number of traffic accidents across Japan may be declining, but bicycle accidents are on the rise. More than 72,000 bicycle accidents were recorded in Japan in 2023, accounting for over 20% of all traffic accidents in the country, according to local media.

In the first half of 2024 there was one fatality and 17 serious injuries from accidents involving cyclists using their phones — the highest number since the police started recording such statistics in 2007.

Between 2018 and 2022 there were 454 accidents caused by cyclists using phones, according to police — a 50% increase from the previous five-year period.

The latest rules come amid a series of safety regulations aimed at protecting the safety of riders and pedestrians.

Last year, authorities made it compulsory for cyclists to wear helmets. In May, Japan’s parliament passed a bill allowing police to fine cyclists for traffic violations.

Unlike in many other countries, cycling on pavements is legal in Japan, and is a common practice.

Two Australian mathematicians have called into question an old adage, that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Known as the “infinite monkey theorem”, the thought-experiment has long been used to explain the principles of probability and randomness.

However, a new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.

Which means that while mathematically true, the theorem is “misleading”, they say.

As well as looking at the abilities of a single monkey, the study also did a series of calculations based on the current global population of chimpanzees, which is roughly 200,000.

The results indicated that even if every chimp in the world was enlisted and able to type at a pace of one key per second until the end of the universe, they wouldn’t even come close to typing out the Bard’s works.

There would be a 5% chance that a single chimp would successfully type the word “bananas” in its own lifetime. And the probability of one chimp constructing a random sentence – such as “I chimp, therefore I am” – comes in at one in 10 million billion billion, the research indicates.

“It is not plausible that, even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works,” the study says.

The calculations used in the paper are based on the most widely accepted hypothesis for the end of the universe, which is the heat death theory.

Despite its name, the so-called heat death would actually be slow and cold.

In short, it’s a scenario in which the universe continues to both expand and cool – while everything within it dies off, decays, and fades away.

“This finding places the theorem among other probability puzzles and paradoxes… where using the idea of infinite resources gives results that don’t match up with what we get when we consider the constraints of our universe,” Associate Prof Woodcock said in a statement about the work.

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.

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”.

Striking Boeing workers are set to vote on a new offer from the aviation giant, which includes a 38% pay rise over the next four years.

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) union, which represents more than 30,000 striking workers, has endorsed the offer and says it will hold a ballot of its members on Monday.

The walkout started on 13 September, leading to a dramatic slowdown in production and deepening a crisis at the firm.

The union had previously called for a 40% pay increase and workers have rejected two previous offers, including the last offer of a 35% rise.

As well as the proposed pay rise, the latest offer includes a $12,000 (£9,300) bonus for the workers if a deal is reached, up from $7,000.

“It is time for our members to lock in these gains and confidently declare victory,” an IAM social media post said.

“We believe asking members to stay on strike longer wouldn’t be right as we have achieved so much success.”

Boeing said the offer would see average annual pay rise to $119,309 over the next four years.

“We encourage all of our employees to learn more about the improved offer and vote on Monday, November 4,” Boeing said in a statement.

The new offer also includes changes to workers’ retirement plans.

Boeing shares rose 2.7% in extended trading in New York after the proposed deal was announced.

Boeing has been trying to end the strike, which has now cost it nearly $10bn according to consulting firm Anderson Economic Group, and shore up its finances.

Last week, its commercial aircraft business reported operating losses of $4bn for the three months to the end of September.

The company also launched a share sale to raise more than $20bn earlier this week.

It came after warnings that a prolonged strike could lead to downgrades to Boeing’s credit rating, which would make it more expensive for it to borrow money.

The firm is also moving ahead with plans to lay off around 17,000 workers, with the first redundancy notices expected to be issued in mid-November.

The latest crisis at Boeing erupted in January with a dramatic mid-air blowout of a piece of one of its passenger planes.

Its space business also suffered a reputational hit after its Starliner vessel was forced to return to Earth without carrying astronauts.

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.

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

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 an assassination attempt during the campaign.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: When is the US election and how does it work?
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: Vote weighs on minds of Ukraine’s frontline soldiers
• PATH TO 270: The states they need to win – and why
• 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.

Eight people have died after a concrete canopy at a railway station in northern Serbia collapsed, the country’s Interior Minister Ivica Dacic said.

People were sitting on benches under the outdoor overhang at the station in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second city, at the time of the collapse around noon local time (11:00 GMT), Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) reported.

Dacic said two people were in hospital, including one man who had his legs amputated.

Rescuers were in contact with two others, including a girl, still under the rubble, he added.

Around 80 rescuers from all over the country were involved in the search, using heavy machinery.

The railway station building was renovated in 2021, and renovated again this year in order to be officially opened on 5 July.

Serbian media quoted Railway Infrastructure of Serbia, the body responsible for the concrete canopy, as saying that it was not reconstructed with the station.

Prime Minister Miloš Vučević said everyone found responsible for the maintenance of the canopy, which was built in 1964, would be held accountable, media reported.

Vučević said Friday was one of the most difficult days in Novi Sad’s post-war history.

“This is a great, terrible tragedy for Novi Sad and for all of Serbia,” he added, sending condolences to the families of the victims and thanking first responders.

It’s hard to see her in the crowd of men. She is the tiny figure towards the back.

The soldiers have ordered the men to strip to their underwear. Even some of the elderly ones. They gaze up at whoever is taking the photograph. It is almost certainly an Israeli soldier.

The image appears to have first been published on the Telegram account of a journalist with strong sources in the Israel Defence Forces.

The men look abject, fearful and exhausted. The little girl, who was noticed in the picture by a BBC producer, is looking away. Maybe something out of sight of the camera has caught her attention. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to look at the soldiers and their guns.

The military have told the people to stop here. Bomb-blasted buildings stretch off into the distance behind them. They are checking the men, for weapons, documents, any sign they might be linked to Hamas.

So often the suffering of this war is found in the detail of individual lives. The child’s presence, her expression as she looks away, is a detail that poses so many questions.

Foremost, who was she? What happened to her? The photo was taken a week ago.

A week of hundreds killed, many wounded, and thousands uprooted from their homes. Children died under the rubble of air strikes or because there wasn’t the medicine or medical staff to treat them.

Working with BBC Arabic Gaza Today programme we began searching for the child. Israel does not allow the BBC or other international media access to Gaza to report independently, so the BBC depends on a trusted network of freelance journalists. Our colleagues approached their contacts with aid agencies in the north, showing the photograph in places where the displaced had fled.

Within 48 hours word came back. The message on the phone read: “We have found her!”

Julia Abu Warda, aged three, was alive. When our journalist reached the family in Gaza City – where many from Jabalia have fled – Julia was with her father, grandfather and mother.

She was watching a cartoon of animated chickens singing, difficult to hear because of the ominous whine of an Israeli drone overhead.

Julia was surprised to suddenly be the focus of a stranger’s attention.

“Who are you?” her father asked, playfully.

“Jooliaa” she replied, stretching the word for emphasis.

Julia was physically unscathed. Dressed in a jumper and jeans, her hair in buns held by bright blue floral bands. But her expression was wary.

Then Mohammed began to tell the story behind the photograph.

Five times the family was displaced in the last 21 days. Each time they were running from air strikes and gunfire.

On the day the photo was taken they heard an Israeli drone broadcasting a warning to evacuate.

This was in the Al-Khalufa district where the IDF was advancing against Hamas.

“There was random shellfire. We went toward the centre of Jabalia refugee camp, on the road to the checkpoint.”

The family carried their clothes, some cans of tinned food, and a few personal possessions.

At first everybody was together. Julia’s dad, her mother Amal, her 15-month-old brother Hamza, a grandfather, two uncles and a cousin.

But in the chaos, Mohammed and Julia were separated from the others.

“I got separated from her mother due to the crowd and all the belongings we were carrying. She was able to leave, and I stayed in place,” Mohammed said.

Father and daughter eventually moved on with the flow of people heading out. The streets reeked of death. “We saw destruction and bodies scattered on the ground,” Mohammed said. There was no way to stop Julia seeing at least some of it. After more than a year of war, children have become familiar with the sight of those who have died violent deaths.

The group reached an Israeli checkpoint.

“There were soldiers on the tanks and soldiers on the ground. They approached the people and started firing above their heads. People were pushing against each other during the shooting.”

The men were ordered to strip to their underwear. This is routine procedure as the IDF searches for concealed weapons or suicide bombers. Mohammed says they were held at the checkpoint for six to seven hours. In the photograph Julia appears calm. But her father recalled her distress afterwards.

“She started screaming and told me she wanted her mother.”

The family was reunited. The displaced are packed into small areas. Bonds of family are tight. Word travels fast in Gaza City when kin arrive from Jabalia. Julia was comforted by the people who loved her. There were sweets and potato chips, a treat that had been stored away.

Then Mohammed disclosed to our colleague the deep trauma Julia had suffered, before that day of their flight from Jabalia to Gaza City. She had a favourite cousin. His name was Yahya and he was seven years old. They used to play together in the street. About two weeks ago Yahya was in the street when the Israelis launched a drone strike. The child was killed.

“Life used to be normal. She would run and play,” he said. “But now, whenever there’s shelling, she points and says, ‘plane!’ While we are trapped she looks up and points towards the drone flying over us.”

According to Unicef – the United Nations children’s agency -14,000 children have been reportedly killed in the war.

“Day after day children are paying the price for a war they did not start,” said Unicef spokesman, Jonathan Crickx.

“Most of the children I have met have lost a loved one in often terrible circumstances.”

The UN estimates that nearly all children in the Gaza Strip – nearly one million – need mental health support.

It is hard to call a child like Julia lucky. When you think of what she has seen and lost and where she is trapped. Who knows what will return in dreams and memories in the days ahead. By now she knows that life can end with terrible suddenness.

Her good fortune is in the family that will do whatever is humanly possible – in the face of air strikes, gun battles, hunger and disease – to protect her.

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.

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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.”

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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.

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As Spain reels from the flash floods which struck the south-east of the country this week, many are wondering why the death toll, which currently stands at over 200, is so high.

Almost all of the deaths confirmed so far have been in the Valencia region on the Mediterranean coast.

Some areas have been particularly devastated: the town of Paiporta, population 25,000, reported at least 62 deaths.

Various factors, including drivers becoming trapped in their cars, poor planning by officials and extreme rainfall being exacerbated by climate change are all likely to have contributed.

The civil protection agency, overseen by the regional government, issued an emergency alert to the phones of people in and around the city of Valencia after 20:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on Tuesday, by which time the flood water was swiftly rising in many areas and in some cases already wreaking havoc.

A large number of those killed were on the roads, in many cases returning from work, when the flash floods struck.

Video footage shows how a first wave of flood water washed through Paiporta as cars were still circulating. Although rainfall was heavier in other areas, such as Utiel and Chiva, Paiporta’s geography, with a ravine running through its centre, made the impact of the flood particularly devastating.

Mayor Maribel Albalat said that the town was ill-prepared in terms of planning, with many ground-floor flats. Six residents of an elderly care home died when the flood water washed into the building when they were still on the ground floor. She also suggested there was an element of complacency.

“In Paiporta we don’t tend to have floods and people aren’t afraid,” she said.

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Garages were a particular death trap.

“When it rains people normally go down to their garages to get their cars out in case their garage is flooded,” Ms Albalat said.

That appears to have been the case in the neighbourhood of La Torre, on the outskirts of Valencia, where the bodies of seven people were recovered from the garage of a residential building.

The A3 motorway connecting Valencia to Madrid was one of many roads where motorists were trapped as the water level rose, leaving them unsure whether it was safer to stay in the vehicle or not.

“There are almost certainly more people who have died because the water washed people away who had got out of their cars,” one survivor told the Telecinco TV channel. Another survivor said the water had been up to his chest.

An eye-witness described seeing one driver who had got out of his car who had strapped himself to a lamppost with his belt, to stop himself from being washed away. It is unknown whether he survived.

The mayor of Chiva, Amparo Fort, warned on Thursday that nearby there were still “hundreds of cars turned upside down and they will surely have people inside them”.

On Thursday morning, the Guardia Civil shared advice on how to escape from a car during a flood on social media. People caught in floods are advised to try and escape though their cars’ windows and windscreen.

Other factors also appear to help explain why Valencia was so devastated by the weather event.

Much of the area most heavily affected, in and surrounding the country’s third-largest city, is densely populated.

A lack of rainfall throughout the rest of the year has left the ground in many areas of eastern and southern Spain unable to absorb rainwater efficiently.

Pablo Aznar, a researcher at the Socio-Economic Observatory of Floods and Droughts (Obsis), warned that much of the area affected had undergone what he described as “untrammelled development”, with many areas covered in impermeable materials, which “increases the danger posed by these events”.

The warming climate is also likely to have contributed to the severity of the floods.

In a preliminary report, World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group of international scientists who investigate global warming’s role in extreme weather, found that the rainfall which struck Spain was 12% heavier due to climate change and that the weather event experienced is twice as likely.

A man has been arrested following a burglary at the home of England cricket captain Ben Stokes.

Stokes, who was in Pakistan for the recent Test series, said his wife and two children were at the property in Castle Eden, County Durham, when a masked gang broke in on 17 October.

Durham Police said a 32-year-old man from North Yorkshire was arrested overnight on suspicion of burglary.

He has been released on bail while the investigation continues, the force added.

Stokes, 33, said his family did not come to “any physical harm” but a number of “sentimental” items were taken, including the medal for his OBE, which he received in 2020 for helping England win the World Cup the year before.

He posted pictures of the missing items on social media, which also included three necklaces, a ring and a designer bag.

The all-rounder, who also plays for Durham, said his “sole motivation” for sharing the images was “not the recovery of material items”, but “to catch the people who did this”.

A Durham Constabulary spokesperson said: “Officers continue to appeal for information and anyone who can help is asked to call 101, quoting incident number 543 of 17 October.”

Two Australian mathematicians have called into question an old adage, that if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Known as the “infinite monkey theorem”, the thought-experiment has long been used to explain the principles of probability and randomness.

However, a new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.

Which means that while mathematically true, the theorem is “misleading”, they say.

As well as looking at the abilities of a single monkey, the study also did a series of calculations based on the current global population of chimpanzees, which is roughly 200,000.

The results indicated that even if every chimp in the world was enlisted and able to type at a pace of one key per second until the end of the universe, they wouldn’t even come close to typing out the Bard’s works.

There would be a 5% chance that a single chimp would successfully type the word “bananas” in its own lifetime. And the probability of one chimp constructing a random sentence – such as “I chimp, therefore I am” – comes in at one in 10 million billion billion, the research indicates.

“It is not plausible that, even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works,” the study says.

The calculations used in the paper are based on the most widely accepted hypothesis for the end of the universe, which is the heat death theory.

Despite its name, the so-called heat death would actually be slow and cold.

In short, it’s a scenario in which the universe continues to both expand and cool – while everything within it dies off, decays, and fades away.

“This finding places the theorem among other probability puzzles and paradoxes… where using the idea of infinite resources gives results that don’t match up with what we get when we consider the constraints of our universe,” Associate Prof Woodcock said in a statement about the work.

A drug trafficking-related shooting in the western French city of Poitiers escalated into a brawl on Thursday night, potentially involving up to 600 people, French authorities say.

Five people were seriously injured in a drive-by shooting at a restaurant in the city, including a 15-year-old boy who was left in critical condition after being shot in the head, police sources told the AFP news agency.

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau described the incident as an alarming sign of drug-related violence escalating in the country.

It follows a shooting in the north-western city of Rennes last week which killed a five-year-old boy.

“These shootings are not happening in South America, they are happening in Rennes, in Poitiers, in this part of western France once known for its tranquility,” Retailleau told broadcaster BFMTV.

“We are at a tipping point and the choice we have today is a choice between general mobilisation or the Mexicanisation of the country,” he said, alluding to Mexico’s widespread issues with street crime and violence perpetrated by drug cartels.

The mayor of Poitiers called it “a new episode of violence unacceptable for the neighbourhood”.

Shots were fired from a passing car, injuring several young people, police sources said.

Two 16-year-olds were treated for minor wounds.

Pictures from the scene in Place Coimbra, an area of the city known for drug-related crimes, showed the restaurant’s facade riddled with bullet holes.

The shooting then triggered fighting between rival gang groups in the area, according to police.

“Tensions between groups broke out, requiring the intervention of the police and the gendarmerie,” Vienne regional police said in a statement.

Retailleau said “400 to 600” people were at the scene, though it is not clear how many of those were directly involved.

He was scheduled to visit Rennes, the capital of Brittany, on Friday following the shooting on 26 October, in which a five-year-old boy sitting in a car was shot in the head. Authorities confirmed the shooting was also drug-related.

The drug trade in France has long been viewed as centred in the southern port city of Marseille, where at least 17 drug-related killings have been reported since the start of the year.

But researchers say the influence of drug trafficking in France in recent years has spread beyond the main hubs of Marseille and Paris to medium-sized towns and even rural areas.

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 in the South East Asian nation 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.”

Unicef nutrition officer for the Philippines, Alice Nkoroi, says a lack of local, government regulation also 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 Nkoroi 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.

A man has been arrested following a burglary at the home of England cricket captain Ben Stokes.

Stokes, who was in Pakistan for the recent Test series, said his wife and two children were at the property in Castle Eden, County Durham, when a masked gang broke in on 17 October.

Durham Police said a 32-year-old man from North Yorkshire was arrested overnight on suspicion of burglary.

He has been released on bail while the investigation continues, the force added.

Stokes, 33, said his family did not come to “any physical harm” but a number of “sentimental” items were taken, including the medal for his OBE, which he received in 2020 for helping England win the World Cup the year before.

He posted pictures of the missing items on social media, which also included three necklaces, a ring and a designer bag.

The all-rounder, who also plays for Durham, said his “sole motivation” for sharing the images was “not the recovery of material items”, but “to catch the people who did this”.

A Durham Constabulary spokesperson said: “Officers continue to appeal for information and anyone who can help is asked to call 101, quoting incident number 543 of 17 October.”