Brat summer might be over as we grapple with how dark it is at 4pm, but the concept of being a brat – “pack of cigs and a Bic lighter”, according to the singer Charli XCX – lives on.

There’s Rosalia gifting Charli XCX a bouquet of cigarettes on her birthday, Addison Rae smoking not one but two at the same time in her music video Aquamarine, and the actor Paul Mescal saying he refused to give up smoking when getting into shape for Gladiator II.

The risks of smoking are well known – it’s still the leading cause of preventable death in the UK and is responsible for nearly 78,000 deaths annually.

GP and cancer specialist Dr Misra-Sharp says even in low quantities, smoking increases the risk of serious diseases like lung cancer, which has a 90% five-year mortality rate.

Despite this, singers, actors and influencers seem to be bringing smoking back into vogue – quite literally, with cigarettes making a return as on the New York Fashion Week runways earlier this year as accessories.

So, why are cigarettes being glamorised again?

Lucy, a 20-year-old university student, says she took up smoking recently because “it’s just what everyone does”.

Almost all her friends also smoke and she says it’s more than just a habit, it’s an aesthetic.

“I definitely think everyone trying to be brat has influenced people to start smoking because Charli herself says you have to have a pack of cigs if you really want to embody the vibe.”

Charli XCX isn’t the only celebrity to inadvertently become a so-called cigfluencer.

There are now Instagram accounts which share snaps of hundreds of celebs like Dua Lipa, Chappell Roan and Anya Taylor-Joy smoking.

The stereotypical image of a smoker may once have been an old, overweight man with rotting teeth, but that’s now been replaced by the young and glamorous celebrities who pout at the camera mysteriously with a Marlboro Gold in hand.

The aesthetic of these smoking celebs is reminiscent of the noughties when the likes of Kate Moss and Jennifer Anniston would step out in low-rise jeans and baby tees with a cigarette on their lips.

Journalist Olivia Petter says the cigarette has become a symbol that represents our nostalgia towards a bygone era of carefreeness, frivolity and hedonism and it’s making an comeback in pop culture.

Emerald Fennell’s seductive and scandalous thriller Saltburn perfectly encapsulated the mid-noughties and reminded us of a time where it was legal to smoke indoors.

Not only were there promo pics for the film of Jacob Elordi’s character smoking topless, but smoking was such an integral part that actor Archie Madekwe (who plays Farleigh) requested cigarette lessons because he had never smoked one before.

According to Truth Initiative, a nonprofit health organisation against smoking, nine out of the 10 films nominated for the Oscars top prize earlier this year featured smoking, which is up from the seven in the year before.

Some of 2024’s biggest songs have also featured tobacco imagery – Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga’s Die With A Smile shows Gaga smoking as she plays the piano and sings.

Jessica, a 26-year-old who works in marketing, says smoking has “become so normalised again”.

“I didn’t know anyone that smoked a few years ago but now it seems like everyone is doing it and you sort of forget how bad it is for you.”

A recent estimate from Cancer Research suggests that around 350 young people still take up smoking each day in the UK and nearly one in 10 15-year-olds say they sometimes smoke.

But, overall, the number of young people smoking is declining – official estimates show that fewer than one out of every 10 young adults in the UK smoke cigarettes – a steep drop from a quarter of 18-24-year-olds 12 years ago.

Although the number of young people smoking is in decline, vaping has soared in popularity – one out of every seven 18-24-year-olds who never regularly smoked now use e-cigarettes.

Jessica used to vape but says “now everyone does it, it’s just not cool any more” – and it seems the normality of vaping is causing some people to switch to cigarettes.

In a recent video posted on TikTok, singer Addison Rae responded to a question about vaping by saying: “Ew, I hate vaping. Smoke a cigarette!”

US-based doctor James Hook tells the BBC he has seen cases of young people taking up smoking after vaping.

He thinks the way smoking is glamorised by celebrities means cigarettes “give young people a certain credibility those older than them do not have to work as hard for”.

He adds that many of them are “emulating older people that are considered sophisticated, trendy or appealing”.

Dr Hook also says that UK authorities taking a tougher stance on smoking might be encouraging people to rebel.

“There will always be individuals who challenge the status quo so it should come as no surprise a ban on something only adds fuel to the fire of rebellion and a threat to a person’s sense of independence.”

The government is planning one of the toughest smoking laws in the world which would eventually ban the sale of cigarettes in the UK as the new law will effectively raise the legal age people can buy cigarettes by one year every year.

With the government’s intent on stamping out the deadly habit, the resurgence of the cigarette – and the cigfluencers – may be more of a passing trend than a lasting cultural shift, particularly as its appeal is less about the act itself and more about the aesthetic and symbolism it represents.

Moldovans are going to the polls in the second round run-off of a presidential election seen as a choice between a European future or a return to Russian influence.

Pro-European President Maia Sandu faces Alexandr Stoianoglo, a man she fired as chief prosecutor, who has promised to balance foreign policy between the West and Russia and has the backing of the pro-Russian Party of Socialists.

Sandu and Moldova’s authorities have warned that a fugitive oligarch now based in Russia is trying to buy the election for Moscow.

The Kremlin has denied interfering in the vote, much as it did during last weekend’s disputed elections in Georgia, whose president described the vote as a “Russian special operation”.

“We resolutely reject any accusations that we are somehow interfering in this. We are not doing this,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Sandu won the first round of the vote two weeks ago with 42.4%, well ahead of Alexandr Stoianoglo on 26%, but short of the 50% she needed to win outright. His vote is likely to increase because of the votes of candidates who failed to reach the run-off.

After voting, Sandu warned Moldovans that “thieves” wanted to buy their vote and their country and she called on them to preserve their country’s independence.

Stoianoglo, who promises to be an “apolitical president” for everyone, told reporters he had voted for “a Moldova that should develop in harmony with both the West and the East”.

But commentators and politicians have warned that a Stoianoglu victory could radically change the political landscape in the Danube and Black Sea region, not because he is some kind of “Trojan horse”, but rather because Russia has thrown its weight behind him.

By 16:00 (14:00 GMT) 43% of Moldovans had voted, and big queues were reported in Moscow and Belarus as well as at polling stations in Romania, France and Italy.

Moldova’s election commission said it was aware of reports of organised and illegal transports of voters by air and land in Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan and Turkey, and appealed to the public to report further violations.

Former Moldovan Defence Minister Anatol Salaru said the election would decide whether Moldova would “continue the process of European integration or return to the Russia fold”.

A former Soviet republic flanked by Ukraine and Romania and one of Europe’s poorest countries, Moldova has a population of 2.5 million. It also has a large expat population of 1.2 million, whose votes could prove key to Maia Sandu in the run-off.

Moldova has opened talks on joining the European Union, and on the same day of the first round Moldovans voted by a whisker to back a change to the constitution embracing the commitment to join the EU.

The tiny margin in favour came as a surprise, although Maia Sandu said there was clear evidence of attempts to buy 300,000 votes.

The BBC spoke to one voter who said she and others had sold their votes for up to 1,000 roubles (£8).

Among the 1,988 polling stations open in Moldova until 21:00 (19:00G) on Sunday, 30 have been opened for voters from the mainly Russian-speaking breakaway region of Transnistria, which borders Ukraine and is home to a Russian military base with 1,500 troops and a huge arms depot.

Voters have to cross the River Dniester into Moldovan-controlled territory and local media showed images of cars streaming over a bridge to vote in the eastern town of Rezina.

Whatever Russia’s role behind the scenes, police said fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor had moved $39m (£30m) over two months from Moscow into Moldovan bank accounts in September and October, benefiting at least 138,000 voters.

Shor denies wrongdoing but did promise cash handouts to people prepared to back his call for a “firm No” to the EU. He faces a lengthy jail sentence in Moldova for money laundering and embezzlement.

Stoianoglo denies links to Ilan Shor but he does have the backing of the opposition pro-Russian Party of Socialists, led by ex-president Igor Dodon.

A populist ex-mayor who came third has refused to back either him or Maia Sandu, criticising both in equal measure.

“Do what you see fit. You must decide on your own,” Renato Usatii told his supporters, blowing the race wide open.

Unprecedented air pollution in the Pakistani city of Lahore has forced authorities to close all primary schools for a week.

From Monday, 50% of office workers will also work from home, as part of a “green lockdown” plan. Other measures include bans on engine-powered rickshaws and vendors that barbecue without filters.

“This smog is very harmful for children, masks should be mandatory in schools,” Punjab Senior Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said.

Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city, topped the world list of cities with the most polluted air for a second time on Sunday.

The air quality index, which measures a range of pollutants, exceeded 1,000 on Saturday, well above the benchmark of 300 considered “dangerous” by the World Health Organization, according to data from IQAir.

The level of fine particulate matter in the air, the most damaging to health, also soared well into hazardous levels.

Raja Jehangir Anwar, a senior environment official, said the “biggest headache” causing the smog was the practice of burning crop waste, known as stubble, across the Indian border.

Aurangzeb said the fumes were “being carried by strong winds into Pakistan”.

“This cannot be solved without talks with India,” she said, adding that the provincial government would initiate such discussions through the foreign ministry.

The government is urging people to stay indoors and avoid unnecessary travel.

Vehicles equipped with pumps are spraying water into the air to help control the smog level. Construction work has been halted in certain areas.

The situation will be assessed again next Saturday to establish whether schools should remain shut.

Inhaling toxic air can have catastrophic health consequences, including strokes, heart disease, lung cancer and some respiratory diseases, according to the WHO.

Last month pupils were banned from outdoor exercise until January and school hours were adjusted to prevent children from travelling when pollution levels are the highest.

“As a mother, I am full of anxiety,” 42-year-old Lilly Mirza told AFP news agency.

“Last year was not this bad… Somebody needs to tell us what has happened. Did a pollution bomb explode somewhere?”

The smog crisis is worse in winter, when cold, denser air traps pollutants closer to the ground.

Just over three months ago, Vice-President Kamala Harris walked up to a microphone to make a speech that would define both her past and her future.

A day before, President Joe Biden had dropped out of the election race and endorsed her to succeed him as Democratic candidate. With only a short period of campaigning ahead of her, Harris had no time to waste.

There is a saying in politics: define yourself or be defined by your opponent. And in that moment, when Harris made her first pitch to the American people, she defined herself not just in terms of her record in the White House or as a US senator, but the years she spent as a California prosecutor.

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds – predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said of her Republican challenger.

The line has been repeated often at her campaign rallies and stump speeches, as the 60-year-old has sought to frame this election as a contest between a hard-bitten prosecutor and a convicted felon, constantly reminding voters of Trump’s legal troubles.

• How Donald Trump came back from the political abyss

But a look back at Harris’s time in and out of California’s courtrooms reveals her enduring struggle to define herself, what her opponents say is a history of pivoting on issues depending on the political weather, as well as her uncanny ability to seize the moment when others have counted her out.

Harris’s time in law enforcement began just out of law school in Alameda County, California – which includes the cities of Berkeley and her hometown of Oakland.

During the 1990s, in the midst of the government’s “war on drugs”, Oakland struggled with violent crime.

For a junior prosecutor, the job was daunting. But the severity of the cases you had to deal with meant it was considered a top job for a young and ambitious attorney, said Teresa Drenick, who worked with Harris at the time.

“It was like a potboiler of an atmosphere. The amount of grief and agony you ingested every day was hard to process. For us, it was intense. The stakes being high, the crimes being so serious,” she told the BBC.

“It was near the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic. There were gang murders, street corner murders taking place. There was a lot going on in Oakland that enabled you as a prosecutor to handle some of the most serious cases that a prosecutor is ever going to handle.”

Ms Drenick and Harris were on the same trial team together. She admired Harris’s confidence in front of a jury, and her respect for her colleague only grew when Harris was transferred to a different team in the same courthouse focused on child sexual assault.

“She was very, very caring of victims of child abuse. She was able to speak to them in a way that allowed them to open up to her,” she said.

It was at this time that Harris dated Willie Brown, a local political kingmaker and speaker of the California State Assembly who helped launch the careers of some of the state’s other most prominent political leaders, including Gavin Newsom, the current governor, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed.

Brown appointed her to two state boards and introduced her to some of San Francisco’s highest-profile Democratic donors. The short-lived romance ended by the time Brown was elected as the city’s mayor in 1995. Three years later, Harris took a job at the San Francisco district attorney’s office.

During her relationship with Brown, who was 30 years her senior, Harris had begun mingling with some of the city’s political heavyweights.

San Francisco’s political machine, which Harris has described as “a bare-knuckled sport”, has launched the careers of some of the nation’s biggest political stalwarts including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the late Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Harris forged relationships with both of them, rising alongside contemporaries like Newsom, as she found her feet in the political world.

Her swift rise through San Francisco’s rough-and-tumble politics were defined by days in courtrooms representing victims and nights at glitzy political galas.

This was also around the time that Harris met one of her closest friends – and most significant donors – Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Jobs donated $500 to Harris’s 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney, which she won, toppling the man who had hired her. Twenty years later, the billionaire philanthropist donated nearly $1m to the Biden-Harris re-election campaign, according to Fortune Magazine. It’s not known how much she has directly contributed to Harris’s bid for the presidency, but the amount is considered substantial.

On the day before Easter in 2004, just four months into Kamala Harris’s tenure as the district attorney of San Francisco, a gang member brandishing an AK-47 rifle fatally shot a 29-year old police officer named Isaac Espinoza.

The slaying stunned the city, with many politicians and prominent members of the police calling for the death penalty.

But Harris, who had made opposition to capital punishment a key part of her political campaign to become the city’s top prosecutor, instead decided to pursue a life sentence without parole. She made her decision public just 48 hours after the murder, without informing the widow first.

“She did not call me,” Espinoza told CNN in 2019. “I don’t understand why she went on camera to say that without talking to the family. It’s like, you can’t even wait till he’s buried?”

The backlash was swift. Speaking at the officer’s funeral, Senator Feinstein demanded his killer “pay the ultimate price”. While walking out of the church service, she told reporters that had she known Harris was against the death penalty, she probably wouldn’t have endorsed her.

“[T]here can be no exception to principle,” Harris later wrote in an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, defending her decision.

Long-time civil rights attorney John Burris, who supported Harris’s decision at the time, said he thought it was “politically was not wise for her, but it was a philosophical position she took”.

“She was pretty bold in her position and she did take a lot of heat for it,” he told the BBC. “That was a pretty progressive stand.”

The incident could have been the end of her political ambitions, but Harris, who had grown up with a single mother in the working-class city of Oakland, carried on.

“Is she a political animal? Absolutely not. Is she naturally skilled? Yes,” said Brian Brokaw, who managed Harris’s two successful campaigns for California attorney general in 2010 and 2014. “For her, politics is the means to the end. She is focused on the end result and the impact she can have on people’s lives less than the process.”

Harris seemed to absorb some lessons from her first major decision as San Francisco district attorney. Four years later, she again declined to pursue the death penalty after a dramatic killing, but this time, she better understood how her decision would reverberate.

Tony Bologna had been driving in San Francisco with his three sons when their vehicle was barraged by gunfire. Bologna and two of his sons were killed; his third son was critically injured.

Shortly after the killing, police arrested Edwin Ramon Umaña, an undocumented member of the MS-13 gang who had evidently mistaken the 49-year old Bologna for a sworn enemy.

This time, Harris opted to deliver the difficult news about her prosecutorial decision to Bologna’s widow Danielle herself, recalls Matt Davis, who was representing Danielle Bologna in a civil suit against the city at the time.

“It was no surprise that Danielle had a very strong, negative reaction to the news,” Mr Davis told the BBC in a recent interview. “She made it clear that she was upset, and Kamala listened to her and expressed her sympathies but stayed pretty firm.”

The meeting left an indelible impression on Davis. He had befriended Harris in law school in San Francisco, and when she had first revealed her plans to run for D.A., he remembers thinking she didn’t have a chance.

But he says that painful conversation made him realise he had underestimated her.

“That was not an easy thing to do,” Mr Davis said.

Over the span of her law enforcement career, Harris’s allies sought to paint her as a “progressive prosecutor” committed to criminal justice reform but also tough on crime.

It was a fine line to walk in a liberal city in the country’s largest left-leaning state, and one that critics on both sides of the political aisle say she did not stick to.

As district attorney, she adopted a so-called “smart-on-crime” philosophy, which included initiatives to keep non-violent offenders out of prison by steering them into job training programs and ensuring young offenders remained in school.

Niki Solis, an attorney in the San Francisco public defender’s office who worked opposite Harris in the early 2000s, said she had been receptive to her concerns about how young victims of sex trafficking were being charged with prostitution, as opposed to being treated as victims.

“I realised that she understood issues that a lot of her predecessors and a lot of [district attorneys] up and down the state failed to understand or even acknowledge,” said Ms Solis.

Trump and his allies on the right have sought to play up this time in her career, depicting her as part of a “San Francisco liberal elite”. But on the left of politics, she has been accused of not being reform-minded enough, with some on social media nicknaming her “Kamala the cop”.

But by the time Harris was elected as California’s attorney general, in 2010, her progressive tendencies appeared to have given way to political pragmatism.

“She was seeking more of a national profile. She wanted to make a mark. There was definitely an expectation of an interesting future to come,” said Gil Duran, who worked for Harris in the attorney general’s office for a few months.

“The attorney general – usually a sleepy backwater of an office – was now home to a rising star.”

On the national stage, Harris began to make her mark. In 2012, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Harris threatened to walk away from negotiations on a financial settlement between state attorneys general and five US banks. California was set to receive around $4 billion in the initial deal, and Harris eventually secured $18 billion for the state.

The Harris campaign has highlighted this case on the campaign trail as more proof she’s willing to stand up to powerful interests.

But more recent reporting shows that only $4.5 billion of the settlement ended up going towards California homeowners who had been ripped off by lenders.

In moves that angered some liberals, she implemented a school truancy program state-wide, which some county prosecutors used to arrest parents. And she defied a Supreme Court order to reduce overcrowding in the state’s prisons.

She also reversed her previous position on the death penalty in 2014 when, as attorney general, she appealed a lower court’s ruling that found it was unconstitutional. Now, the prosecutor who once refused to sentence violent murderers to death on the basis that “there is no exception to principle” was defending the state’s right to do just that.

Hadar Aviram, a criminal justice and civil rights professor who petitioned Harris to leave the decision in place, was one of many critics of her stance.

“You are not under any obligation to defend things that are morally unjust,” she told CNN in 2019 of the episode. “If you truly believe that they’re morally unjust and you have an opportunity to take a stand, I think it’s an imperative to do so.”

Former San Francisco city attorney Louise Renne, who worked with Harris when she first left Oakland, said the torrent of criticism she faced over her support for the death penalty was unfair.

“The thing is when you’re state attorney general, you have to defend the law. That’s your obligation,” she told the BBC. “ I don’t regard that as a weakness or a valid criticism at all.”

But Harris was selective about which laws she enforced. In 2004, when Gavin Newsom, then San Francisco’s mayor, decided to allow same-sex weddings, in violation of state law, Harris helped officiate a few of the ceremonies, calling it “one of the most joyful” moments of her career.

Her long record as a prosecutor would prove tricky when, after being elected to the US Senate in 2016, Harris decided to run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

She chose to kick off her 2020 presidential run just blocks away from the Alameda County Courthouse, the same place where she first uttered the words, “for the people” – which would become part of her campaign slogan.

But in the midst of her campaign, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was murdered by a police officer during an arrest, igniting a nationwide racial reckoning and demand for criminal justice reform. Her past defence of the death penalty, and resistance to prison reform, earned her criticism from her party’s left-flank.

She dropped out of the presidential race before the primary contests to choose a Democratic contender had even begun.

Now, as Harris campaigns for president against Donald Trump, she is again calling attention to her prosecutorial bona-fides, but reframed in a new political atmosphere.

While many cities, including San Francisco, experimented with progressive police reform after Floyd’s murder, a spike in crime and homelessness during the pandemic has triggered a public backlash against so-called “soft on crime” policies. Republicans have also heavily focused on political messaging around crime and public safety in recent years.

Harris’s past as a prosecutor is no longer such a liability, and in a race against the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes, the narrative aligns with the political moment.

Notably, at the Democratic National Convention this summer, abolishing the death penalty was dropped from the party platform.

And while in 2020, Harris was trying to win over left-leaning Democrats, she is now explicitly making a pitch for moderate Republicans who may be fed up with Trump. To do that, she has shifted a number of her positions – from border security to single-payer health care – to the centre.

This has led to accusations from her opponents that she is a flip-flopper.

She’s “a chameleon”, Trump’s running mate and Ohio Senator JD Vance told CNN in August. “She pretends to be one thing in front of one audience and she pretends to be something different in front of another audience.”

But Mr Duran, Harris’s former colleague in the attorney general’s office, sees it less as a matter of political scrupulousness and more simply a sign of her political pragmatism.

“I think she does have conviction but it’s really hard to run a campaign on your convictions alone, for the most part,” he said. “The Kamala Harris we’re seeing now is very much poll and focus-group driven.”

What Harris really stands for has been a question that has dogged her throughout her career – and continues to follow her on her bid for the Oval Office. But to Mr Brokaw, her former campaign manager, she has always operated on her own terms.

“She has carved her own path and left a whole bunch of people behind who counted her out and underestimated her,” he said.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: When is the US election and how does it work?

• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power

• REAL STORIES: The moment these Americans decided who to vote for

• 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?

Meet Gabriela. She’s in her forties, Latina, and lives in Miami. She’s not that into politics, but she does care about the economy – and abortion rights. And she doesn’t know if she’ll vote – or who for. The only catch? She’s not real.

Gabriela’s one of five fictional characters I created in 2022 to monitor how different people, with different political views, are targeted by content on social media. She’s been part of an ongoing experiment for the BBC’s Americast podcast, investigating how social media algorithms may be influencing people’s vote.

With election day fast approaching, it’s the undecided and disillusioned voters who the two main presidential candidates are making last ditch attempts to win over. How is the battle unfolding over their different social media feeds?

While some of these “undercover voters”, as we call them, were created to represent a certain political point of view based on data from the Pew Research Centre, Gabriela began by essentially expressing no interest in politics at all on her social media feeds. But over the past two years her feeds have morphed as I’ve watched and followed the content she’s recommended.

How do you create an undercover voter? First, I made her profiles across the major social media sites – X, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. I kept her account private, and, since she wasn’t political, had her follow and engage with content that had nothing to do with politics – coupon pages, dance videos, community groups and other Spanish-language content.

All five characters have private accounts, and no friends.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?

These social media profiles can’t offer an exhaustive view into what every voter is being pushed online, but they can offer an insight into the impact of social media sites this election.

Whenever she was recommended content on any of the platforms, I engaged with it – whether it was watching the latest TikTok dance or following a Facebook page about saving at the supermarket – to see what the algorithms would recommend to Gabriela next.

Soon, she was being recommended political content, too.

Now there’s a war raging inside her feeds between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris – and who appears to have the upper hand is different depending on which social media site she looks at.

Gabriela’s feed on X is dominated by stand-out moments from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, mainly from profiles that have purchased blue ticks on the site.

One popular meme, for example, featured four images from Trump’s campaign, from his mugshot to his recent photo-op riding in a garbage truck. Alongside the photos are maps of the US showing states switching to red for the Republicans.

“Seems accurate” reads the cation. The message was clear: Trump is making a comeback.

Content created and shared by Trump’s very active supporters on X rack up tens of millions of views. While there are also groups of accounts supporting Harris, they didn’t make it to Gabriela’s feed as often. Posts about Trump also tended to focus on him as a person – when policy was mentioned, it was usually about immigration or the economy.

A major change occurred at X after I set up Gabriela’s profile in August 2022: Elon Musk bought the social media company. Since his takeover of Twitter in October 2022, Mr Musk has made a number of changes – from renaming it X to offering a paid-for premium service.

There have also been changes to the algorithm, affecting what kinds of content gets the most traction.

Now, almost every time I open Gabriela’s feed on X, I see a post from Mr Musk himself close to the top. He repeatedly posts in support of Trump, and in recent days he’s re-shared some unfounded claims of election fraud. This is very different from what her feed looked like when she first created her account.

One recent post Mr Musk re-shared, which her profile was recommended, spread unfounded rumours about election officials in Colorado being possibly complicit in voter fraud.

The post Mr Musk re-shared referred to an employee error exposing passwords for some election equipment.

According to officials in the state, though, the “vote counting equipment requires two passwords to access, and those passwords are kept separately” which they say means “election system remains completely secure” following the error.

I spent time this summer with election officials in a centre where the votes are counted in Jefferson county, Colorado.

One IT worker called Cuong told me how since 2020, he and his colleagues have been repeatedly “targeted with harassment, accusations of us doing nefarious things”, triggered by unfounded allegations of – for example – hacked or broken voting machines.

Gabriela’s feed on TikTok, on the other hand, is frequently recommended montages of Kamala Harris, often speaking at rallies. These are created by supporters and similar to the kinds of posts users create to support their favourite celebrity or musician.

One reads “America is ready for Kamala Harris” from an account called Latinos for Harris.

The clips tend to focus on Harris as a person, rather than her policies – although several do reference the topic of abortion rights and the issue of personal freedom.

When a comedian at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage”, it sparked backlash from many in the Latino community.

Gabriela’s TikTok feed has featured some video clips of that moment, or commentary on that moment, frequently with Spanish captions taking offence to those comments.

The algorithm pushed content highly relevant to Gabriela’s identity as a Latina voter.

There’s some content from the official accounts belonging to both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s campaigns on her feed too.

One campaign video shows Harris alongside Michelle Obama in front of an American flag declaring this election is “going to be close”, with 7.7 millions views.

Another shows Donald Trump dancing alongside popular streamer Adin Ross. That has 67.1 million views – showing how his content is having a huge reach, even if not so much on Gabriela’s feed.

While TikTok prohibits political ads, it’s not the same on YouTube, where Gabriela has been targeted by several about both of the main candidates. The paid-for ads she receives tend to focus on the economy. A video from Harris’s campaign team saying she will “cut taxes for 100 million working Americans”. Another advert from Trump’s team declares “there’s no time to waste! Make a plan, get to the polls & vote Trump”.

A lot of this content, whether ads or posts from the campaigns and supporters, seems focused on motivating people to actually go out and vote, rather than change their minds about a topic.

Like her TikTok feed, Gabriela’s YouTube leans towards partisan political content, opinions and campaign messages. But I’ve not seen the same kinds of posts pushing unsupported claims of voter fraud that I’ve spotted on Gabriela’s X feed. Her X feed has been overtaken by almost entirely political posts.

Her Instagram and Facebook accounts have remained fairly apolitical. Meta, which owns both of the social media companies, decided to stop recommending political content from accounts that users don’t already follow earlier this year.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: All you need to know about the vote
• 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
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

The biggest changes I’ve spotted on Gabriela’s social media feeds over the two years I’ve been running her profile have happened on X.

In recent weeks, Mr Musk has been very vocal about his support for Trump, which he’s entitled to do as a private citizen. He has also accused Twitter of old – as well as other social media sites – of suppressing right-wing view points. And he has previously said he believes X is a space for all political opinions.

But Gabriela’s feed shows how, at least to one originally neutral viewer, the site skewered in Trump’s favour – which appears to be in part because of changes to how the site works under Mr Musk’s tenure.

Last month, X also changed its rules so accounts can make money according to engagement from premium accounts – likes, shares and comments – rather than the ads that pop up under their posts.

I investigated how these changes helped some users make thousands of dollars, they say, from sharing content that included election misinformation, AI-generated images and unfounded conspiracy theories.

X’s user base is smaller than lots of other sites. But it is the home of politicians, activists and journalists and screengrabs from its site can migrate onto larger platforms.

Another significant but less extreme shift has occurred on Gabriela’s TikTok feed.

Before she didn’t see much about the Democrats, but after Joe Biden announced he was no longer running to be President her feed has been increasingly flooded with pro-Kamala Harris videos.

Because Gabriela isn’t real, it’s impossible to know how much she would react to any of these social media posts. Plenty of factors beyond the online world could shape her decision.

One thing’s for sure, though, my previously apolitical voter has not been able to avoid the deluge of politics – and algorithms on the sites, which appear to favour engagement over all else, are shaping the way that she receives politics through her feeds. Who and how she votes could depend on which social media site she trusts and relies on.

X did not respond to questions from the BBC. X says online that its priority is to protect and defend the user’s voice. All of the other major social media companies say they have policies and measures in place to protect users from disinformation and hate.

Bitcoin underpins a two trillion-dollar cryptocurrency industry, is now traded by the world’s biggest investment houses and is even an official currency in one country.

But despite its meteoric rise, a deep mystery remains at its heart: what is the true identity of its founder, the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto?

Many have tried to answer that question, but so far all have failed. In October, a high-profile HBO documentary suggested that a Canadian bitcoin expert called Peter Todd was he. The only problem: he said he was not, and the crypto world largely shrugged it off.

So, inevitably, ears pricked up across our newsroom – and the crypto world at large – when on Thursday a call went out that the mysterious creator of Bitcoin was to, finally, unmask himself at a press conference.

There is deep interest in who Satoshi Nakamoto is in part because they are considered a revolutionary programmer who helped spawn the crypto industry.

Their voice, opinions and world view would be extremely influential on an industry with such a devoted and zealous fanbase.

But the fascination also stems from the fact that, as the holder of more than one million bitcoins, Satoshi would be a multi-billionaire, not least because the price of the coins is currently close to an all-time high.

Given that vast wealth, it was somewhat unusual to be asked by the organiser of Thursday’s press conference to pay for my seat at his grand unveiling.

A front row seat would be £100. It was another £50 if I wanted unlimited questions. Organiser Charles Anderson even encouraged me to spend £500 in exchange for the privilege of interviewing “Satoshi” on stage.

I declined.

Mr Anderson said I could come along any way but cautioned there might not be a seat for me, such was the level of anticipation.

As it happened, seating wasn’t a problem.

Only around a dozen reporters turned up to the prestigious Frontline Club – which interrupted proceedings at one point to stress it only provided a room, and not any official endorsement.

Very soon it became clear that all attendees were extremely sceptical.

After some digging it emerged both the organiser and the purported Satoshi were currently embroiled in a complex legal fight over fraud allegations – linked to claims to be Satoshi.

It was an unpromising start, and things only got worse from there.

Mr Anderson invited “Satoshi” to come on stage.

A man called Stephen Mollah, who had been sat silently on the side the whole time walked up and resolutely declared: “I am here to make a statement that yes: I am Satoshi Nakamoto and I created the Bitcoin on Blockchain technology.”

Over the following hour, reporters went from amused to irritated as he failed to provide any of the promised evidence for his claims.

Mr Mollah promised that he would make the Hail-Mary move of unlocking and interacting with the first-ever Bitcoins to be created – something that only Satoshi could do.

But he didn’t.

I departed, along with other bemused reporters, taking with us any lingering doubts that this would prove to be yet another dead-end in the quest to unmask Satoshi.

The list of those identified – unsuccessfully – as Satoshi Nakamoto is long.

In 2014, a high-profile article in Newsweek said it was Dorian Nakamoto, a Japanese-American man living in California.

But he denied it and the claim has largely been debunked.

A year later, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright was outed as Satoshi by reporters.

He denied it, before saying it was true – but then failed over many years to produce any evidence.

In the spring the High Court in London ruled that Mr Wright was not the inventor.

Tech billionaire and crypto enthusiast Elon Musk also denied he was behind the cryptocurrency after a former employee at one of his firms, SpaceX, suggested it.

Which brings us to the question: does it really matter?

The crypto market’s current valuation means it is worth more than Google. And it seems inconceivable that the tech giant would play such a big role in our lives without people knowing who founded it, and owned a sizeable chunk of the firm.

Perhaps there’s good reason for the real Satoshi to keep schtum though. That bitcoin stash would make them worth an estimated $69bn and their life and character would no doubt be heavily scrutinised if they were found.

Peter Todd, who was named by the HBO documentary as being Satoshi, said the unwelcome attention he’s received has made him fearful for his safety.

Many in the crypto world enjoy the fact that the mystery remains unsolved.

“No-one knows who Satoshi is and that’s a good thing,” Adam Back, one of its core developers (and another potential Satoshi candidate) posted on X recently.

Natalie Brunell, a Bitcoin podcaster, thinks Satoshi’s anonymity is not only deliberate but essential.

“By concealing his true identity, Satoshi ensured that Bitcoin wouldn’t have a leader or central figure, whose personal agenda could influence the protocol,” she told me.

“This allows people to trust Bitcoin as a system, rather than placing their trust in an individual or company.”

Carol Alexander, professor of finance at Sussex University – who lectures on the history of Bitcoin – is less sure.

In her view, the circus around who Satoshi Nakamoto is distracts from people looking into – and getting to grips with – the more serious question of how cryptocurrencies might upend the way the economy works.

As I left the Frontline Club it was hard to compute the bizarre press event, beyond one obvious fact.

For now – and perhaps forever – the search for Satoshi continues.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said her approach to the economy would be “completely the opposite” to that of Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on her first day in the job, Badenoch gave a first glimpse of her policy priorities, including on reversing the VAT hike for private schools.

She said the Conservatives “got a lot of things wrong” ahead of their historic election defeat, including on immigration and tax, but refused to give a “post-mortem” of her predecessors and claimed the Partygate scandal was “overblown”.

With appointments to her shadow cabinet expected in the next couple of days, Badenoch said she wanted to show the party was united with a meritocratically selected front bench.

When asked whether she would reverse the chancellor’s decision to increase employers’ national insurance (NI) contributions, Badenoch said she is not the chancellor and also has “very few” MPs.

“We’re not going to be able to oppose anything in terms of getting legislation through,” she said, adding she could only “make the argument that raising taxes in this way… is not going to grow our economy and will leave all of us poorer”.

However, when asked directly whether she would reverse the VAT hike on private schools, Badenoch was definite, saying “yes, yes, I would… because it’s a tax on aspiration, but it won’t raise any money” and was therefore “against our principles”.

She also told Ms Kuenssberg that “it is not the government that creates growth, it is business that creates growth”, adding that this is “completely the opposite of what Rachel Reeves is doing”.

Badenoch, who is the first black leader of a Westminster party, said she not only disagrees with Reeves’ economic policies but also the way she has discussed being the UK’s first woman chancellor in 800 years.

She said: “I think that the best thing will be when we get to a point where the colour of your skin is no more remarkable than the colour of your eyes, or the colour of your hair.

“I find it astonishing that Rachel Reeves keeps talking about how she’s the first female chancellor, which in my view is a very, very low glass ceiling within the Labour Party, which she may have smashed.

“Nowhere near as significant as what other women in this country have achieved.”

She was also critical of her predecessor Rishi Sunak’s leadership, saying he had lost trust with voters because “promises on immigration and on tax were not kept and that is something that we need to change”.

Badenoch resigned from Boris Johnson’s cabinet over his handling of the Chris Pincher affair, which she said resulted in the public thinking “we were no longer speaking for them or looking out them, we were in it for ourselves”.

But in regards to the Partygate scandal, she said Johnson walked into “a trap”.

“A lot of the stuff that happened around Partygate was not why I resigned – I thought it was overblown,” she said.

“We should not have created fixed penalty notices… that was us not going with our principles.”

When asked to apologise for the economic turmoil under Liz Truss, Badenoch said she wanted to “draw a line” under the faults of previous leaders and refused to go through a “post-mortem” of every Conservative leader “for the past 14 years”.

Instead, Badenoch said her focus was on rebuilding trust and creating a perception of unity within the party, although she said that was “very tricky”, particularly when “not everybody wants to serve”.

She added: “The public didn’t trust us for a whole bunch of reasons – not keeping promises but also looking disunited.”

Addressing the loss of Conservative voters to Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage at the last election, Badenoch denied she would only be offering voters “more of the same”.

She said: “Nigel Farage and the success of Reform are a symptom of the Conservative party in my view, not being clear enough and consistent enough about values and about how we were using those Conservative values to deliver to the British people.

“If we get this right, then I think people will start to see that Reform is nothing but a spoiler for the Conservatives and just creates more and more Labour government.”

A lighting strike at a refugee camp in Uganda has killed 13 children and one adult, police say.

They say the victims were attending a church service on Saturday evening when the lightning struck. Another 34 people were injured.

The incident occurred at Palabek Refugee Settlement in the north-west of the country. The area has recently seen heavy rains with thunder and lightning.

Kituuma Rusoke, spokesperson for Uganda Police, told BBC News that the adult killed on Saturday was 21 years old. Mr Rusoke did not reveal the exact ages of the children who died.

Palabek Refugee Settlement is home to more than 80,000 refugees and asylum seekers, according to the UN’s refugee agency. Many are from neighbouring South Sudan.

Four years ago, lightning killed 10 children in the city of Arua, also in north-western Uganda.

The children were struck while taking a break from a game of football.

• Ugandan internet propaganda network exposed by the BBC
• Ugandans react to death of Olympic runner Rebecca Cheptegei
• Ex-rebel gets 40-year jail term in landmark Ugandan case

A polio vaccination campaign in north Gaza is expected to resume on Sunday, a day after the World Health Organization (WHO) said six people, including four children, were injured following a strike on the Sheikh Radwan clinic.

The agency did not say who was responsible for the attack but an official from Gaza’s civil defence agency told AFP news agency it was carried out by an Israeli quadcopter. Israel said it is investigating but does not believe it was responsible.

Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency which is helping to lead the vaccination rollout, described the strike on the Sheikh Radwan clinic as “another example of the indiscriminate strikes on civilians”.

The second phase of the vaccine rollout began on Saturday after being postponed in October due to intense Israeli bombardments, mass displacement and lack of access in the region.

Gaza recorded its first case of polio in 25 years in August, which left a baby boy paralysed and prompted the rollout of the programme.

The immunisations are resuming as 15 UN and humanitarian organisations have described the situation in north Gaza as “apocalyptic” nearly a month after an Israeli ground offensive began.

A humanitarian pause in the fighting has been agreed upon to allow vaccinations to restart in Gaza City, the WHO said. The campaign will run for three days.

In a separate incident in Jabalia, Unicef says a car driven by a staff member “came under fire by what we believe to be a quadcopter”, according to the agency’s head, Catherine Russell.

She said the driver was unhurt but was left “deeply shaken” and called for Israel to launch an investigation.

About 15,000 children under 10 years old in towns across north Gaza, such as Jabalia, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun, “still remain inaccessible” and will be missed by the vaccination campaign, compromising its effectiveness, the agency said.

The WHO had aimed to give 119,000 children in the area a second dose of the oral polio vaccine.

The agency added that achieving this target “is now unlikely due to access constraints”.

The first round of the vaccine campaign successfully reached 559,000 children under 10 years old over three phases in south, central and north Gaza between 1 and 12 September, during which there were local “humanitarian pauses” agreed by Israel and Palestinian groups.

However, the area agreed in the latest humanitarian pause “has been substantially reduced” compared to the first round of vaccinations and is now limited to just Gaza City, according to the WHO.

From the start of the polio vaccination campaign in Gaza, medical experts stressed that delays in administering the second dose could jeopardise overall efforts to halt transmission of the contagious, potentially deadly disease.

To interrupt transmission, at least 90% of all children need to be given a minimum of two doses.

The UN human rights chief said last week that the Gaza war’s “darkest moment” is unfolding in the north of the territory.

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

At least 100,000 people have been forced to evacuate from north Gaza towards Gaza City for safety, the WHO said.

The joint statement from UN agencies, including the WHO, released on Friday, said the situation was “apocalyptic”, with the entire Palestinian population in the area “at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence”.

The UN estimates that about 100,000 residents remain in dire conditions, with severe shortages of food, water and medical supplies.

The US warned Israel this week to immediately increase humanitarian aid into Gaza as a deadline approaches to boost aid or face cuts to American military assistance. The US envoy to the UN said on Tuesday that Israel’s words “must be matched by action”, which was “not happening”.

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

More than 43,300 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Israel does not allow international journalists from media organisations, including the BBC, independent access to Gaza, making it difficult to verify facts on the ground.

Kalundborg, a town of just 16,000 people on the Danish coast about an hour’s drive from Copenhagen, is as close as you might get to a modern-day gold rush town.

It’s the main production centre for weight loss drug Wegovy. Semaglutide, used in Wegovy and diabetes drug Ozempic, is made in a factory here, and parent company Novo Nordisk has invested more than $8.5 billion (£6.5bn) in the town. That’s nearly the entire GDP of Monaco.

But persuading people to actually live in the town could prove tricky.

There’s an influx of workers and builders at the factory in the morning and an exodus in the afternoon – locals call it the “Novo Queue” and recommend avoiding the town’s road for these hours each day.

Hardly any of the workers stay – they live outside and drive in.

So when there’s £400,000 of investment per resident, what’s there not to like?

Behind the rosy figures, Kalundborg faces many challenges, from rundown schools and low incomes to many children being overweight.

State school grades in Danish language and maths here are below the national average. Some on the town’s periphery have few facilities inside or out, with just old swings in the playground.

“If you saw that, you will take one of the big cities around here and say, ‘Well, we will live there and then I can drive to Kalundborg to work,'” regional councillor Helle Laursen Petersen tells me.

She says these schools are struggling to attract experienced teachers, helping to fuel low expectations among many parents.

After all, she says, they think their children will always get a job at the Novo Nordisk factory, so why bother trying to get to university?

Ali, Anna K, Anna and Marie at Gymnasium, the most academic secondary school in the area, tell me they want to leave to study.

“It might become interesting later, but as of now, I think it’s a bit too boring to settle down here – I think I’d like a larger city,” Anna K says.

But Ali and Marie are more excited about coming back after their studies, hopeful of more job opportunities in the town so they can enjoy its natural beauty more.

Meanwhile Brian Sonder Anderson, who runs the Blue Angel cinema and is head of the local trader’s association, points out that supermarkets and bakeries are booming locally as factory workers flock to them on their lunch breaks.

But other shops, such as those selling shoes and clothes, quickly open then shut down again because of the number of workers living elsewhere.

Many families on low incomes live here, priced out of the capital Copenhagen where rents and property prices have soared – leaving some on benefits and others relying on work at the factory.

Kalundborg also has a health problem – it’s in the highest 5% of Danish towns for children being overweight.

Novo Nordisk, meanwhile, is now Europe’s most valuable company with a revenue last year of more than $33bn – bringing its market value to more than $500bn.

Investment in the town aims to add 1,250 jobs to the existing 4,500 employees at the Kalundborg plant and ramp up production of its best-selling drugs. While the company represents about 1% of the Danish workforce, it accounts for a more sizeable proportion of its growth.

Denmark’s economic growth was 1.1% over the first nine months of 2023. But strip away the pharmaceutical sector, dominated by Novo, and the economy shrank by 0.8%. Some analysts have warned that parts of the country’s economy risks becoming too reliant on the pharmaceutical industry.

The town’s mayor Martin Damm is upbeat, insisting that more than 1,000 new jobs are being created here every year and some young people are happy to call it home.

“In Europe people are moving from the rural area into the big cities and this is going the opposite way,” he says.

“This is the little city [that] attracts big investment.”

He also insists that schools are being refurbished or already have good facilities – and that rising prosperity will, in time, lead to healthier lifestyles.

Miguel, an 18-year-old student from Madrid studying bio-technology on one of the new university courses in the town, has just joined a local football team with players from Brazil, Mexico, Poland and Ukraine.

“There’s so many international people in this town and almost everyone that I’ve talked to in English has responded in English,” he says.

Amanda, from Brazil, insists opportunities are here – she’s landed a job, placed her two young children in a local school and hopes that they’ll stay here for university.

A new highway is also being built to help ease the town’s chronic congestion – but getting people to live here will be the real fix for that.

Students at the Gymnasium think the town is at something of a crossroads.

“In five years, I think the town [will have] grown quite a lot – I hope for a multi multicultural town,” says Anna K.

“If that is so, then I might consider moving back.”

Assignment: Denmark’s weight loss boom town – listen here

And here on BBC Sounds

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?
• Path to 270: The states Harris and Trump need to win

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?

• PATH TO 270: The states they need to win – and why
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• FACT-CHECK: What the numbers really say about crime
• Read more about: Kamala Harris | Donald Trump | US election

American voters will face a clear choice for president on election day, between Democratic Vice-President Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.

Here’s a look at what they stand for and how their policies compare on different issues.

Harris has said her day-one priority would be trying to reduce food and housing costs for working families.

She promises to ban price-gouging on groceries, help first-time home buyers, increase housing supply and raise the minimum wage.

Inflation soared under the Biden presidency, as it did in many western countries, partly due to post-Covid supply issues and the Ukraine war. It has fallen since.

Trump has promised to “end inflation and make America affordable again” and when asked he says more drilling for oil will lower energy costs.

He has promised to deliver lower interest rates, something the president does not control, and he says deporting undocumented immigrants will ease pressure on housing. Economists warn that his vow to impose higher tax on imports could push up prices.

• US election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?
• Comparing Biden’s economy to Trump’s

Harris wants to raise taxes on big businesses and Americans making $400,000 (£305,000) a year.

But she has also unveiled a number of measures that would ease the tax burden on families, including an expansion of child tax credits.

She has broken with Biden over capital gains tax, supporting a more moderate rise from 23.6% to 28% compared with his 44.6%.

Trump proposes a number of tax cuts worth trillions, including an extension of his 2017 cuts which mostly helped the wealthy.

He says he will pay for them through higher growth and tariffs on imports. Analysts say both tax plans will add to the ballooning deficit, but Trump’s by more.

• Where Kamala Harris stands on 10 issues
• Where Donald Trump stands on 10 issues

Harris has made abortion rights central to her campaign, and she continues to advocate for legislation that would enshrine reproductive rights nationwide.

Trump has struggled to find a consistent message on abortion.

The three judges he appointed to the Supreme Court while president were pivotal in overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, a 1973 ruling known as Roe v Wade.

Harris was tasked with tackling the root causes of the southern border crisis and helped raise billions of dollars of private money to make regional investments aimed at stemming the flow north.

Record numbers of people crossed from Mexico at the end of 2023 but the numbers have fallen since to a four-year low. In this campaign, she has toughened her stance and emphasised her experience as a prosecutor in California taking on human traffickers.

Trump has vowed to seal the border by completing the construction of a wall and increasing enforcement. But he urged Republicans to ditch a hardline, cross-party immigration bill, backed by Harris. She says she would revive that deal if elected.

He has also promised the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history. Experts told the BBC this would face legal challenges.

• What Harris really did about the border crisis
• Could Trump really deport a million migrants?

Harris has vowed to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes”. She has pledged, if elected, to ensure the US and not China wins “the competition for the 21st Century”.

She has been a longtime advocate for a two-state solution between the Israelis and Palestinians, and has called for an end to the war in Gaza.

Trump has an isolationist foreign policy and wants the US to disentangle itself from conflicts elsewhere in the world.

He has said he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours through a negotiated settlement with Russia, a move that Democrats say would embolden Vladimir Putin.

Trump has positioned himself as a staunch supporter of Israel but said little on how he would end the war in Gaza.

Harris has criticised Trump’s sweeping plan to impose tariffs on imports, calling it a national tax on working families which will cost each household $4,000 a year.

She is expected to have a more targeted approach to taxing imports, maintaining the tariffs the Biden-Harris administration introduced on some Chinese imports like electric vehicles.

Trump has made tariffs a central campaign pledge in order to protect US industry. He has proposed new 10-20% tariffs on most imported foreign goods, and much higher ones on those from China.

He has also promised to entice companies to stay in the US to manufacture goods, by giving them a lower rate of corporate tax.

Harris, as vice-president, helped pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which has funnelled hundreds of billions of dollars to renewable energy, and electric vehicle tax credit and rebate programmes.

But she has dropped her opposition to fracking, a technique for recovering gas and oil opposed by environmentalists.

Trump, while in the White House, rolled back hundreds of environmental protections, including limits on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and vehicles.

In this campaign he has vowed to expand Arctic drilling and attacked electric cars.

Harris has been part of a White House administration which has reduced prescription drug costs and capped insulin prices at $35.

Trump, who has often vowed to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, has said that if elected he would only improve it, without offering specifics. The Act has been instrumental in getting health insurance to millions more people.

He has called for taxpayer-funded fertility treatment, but that could be opposed by Republicans in Congress.

Harris has tried to contrast her experience as a prosecutor with the fact Trump has been convicted of a crime.

Trump has vowed to demolish drugs cartels, crush gang violence and rebuild Democratic-run cities that he says are overrun with crime.

He has said he would use the military or the National Guard, a reserve force, to tackle opponents he calls “the enemy within” and “radical left lunatics” if they disrupt the election.

• Trump’s legal cases, explained

Harris has made preventing gun violence a key pledge, and she and Tim Walz – both gun owners – often advocate for tighter laws. But expanding background checks or banning assault weapons will need the help of Congress.

Trump has positioned himself as a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, the constitutional right to bear arms. Addressing the National Rifle Association in May, he said he was their best friend.

Harris has called for the decriminalisation of marijuana for recreational use. She says too many people have been sent to prison for possession and points to disproportionate arrest numbers for black and Latino men.

Trump has softened his approach and said it’s time to end “needless arrests and incarcerations” of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: When is the US election and how does it work?
• GLOBAL: Vote weighs on minds of Ukraine’s frontline soldiers
• 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?

The number of babies born in England and Wales is now the lowest since the 1970s, official statistics show.

The fertility rate – which measures how many children are born per woman during her child-bearing years – is the lowest on record at 1.44. Scotland’s is even lower at 1.3.

Britain is not unique – most countries are experiencing declining fertility and some are even going to great lengths to create a baby boom.

So what’s causing the fall-off in fertility? There’s the high cost of bringing up children, the pressure to stay in work and the challenge of finding the right partner.

But there’s also evidence that more and more young adults don’t plan on having any children at all.

BBC News has spoken to two women and two men in their thirties – the average age at which people in England and Wales become parents – to get their thoughts on the issue.

HGV driver Chris Taylor and dog groomer Jemma Wrathmell jointly earn an income of about £60,000 and have been together for 11 years.

The couple, who live in Wakefield in West Yorkshire, considered having children.

“We have had deep conversations where we go through the options and discuss things like school, cost and routine,” Gemma says.

But the conclusion was that the cost was too high.

“After all our bills and essentials there is no room in the budget to accommodate a child,” Chris says. “We don’t see how our finances will get any better within the next few years.”

As a result, they have taken a “definitive decision” – Chris is seeking to have a vasectomy, after years of Gemma having a contraceptive implant.

“Some people have said you’ll change your mind, but they know it’s our decision,” says Jemma.

“I’m also not that maternal,” she adds.

Ellie Lambert, who lives in Sheffield, wants to have children but says she hasn’t found a suitable partner.

Two years ago, she spent £18,000 on two cycles of egg freezing. “I find it really frustrating, it’s a lot of cost for something that may not ever lead to anything,” she says.

She hopes to use them if she meets someone, or if she reaches a financial situation where she can “go it alone” with the aid of a sperm donor.

Ellie says she ‘s concerned about the additional financial pressure on single-parent households.

A report from the Child Poverty Action Group last year found the average cost of raising a child to age 18 was £166,000 for a couple and £220,000 for a lone parent.

Though Ellie thought she would meet someone by her late 20s, “despite proactively being on all of the apps, it just didn’t happen.”

She says dating had become “fruitless”, citing the seemingly endless choice that dating apps offer as a factor, with fewer people wanting to commit.

But going it alone would be “a big decision”, says Ellie, who considers herself fortunate to earn a good salary.

Having already spent her savings on egg freezing, she says it would cost a further £10,000 to use a sperm donor with IVF.

For Dami Olonisakin, a sex and relationships podcaster who lives in London, improvements in fertility treatments – such as egg freezing – are “empowering” and give women “more control than ever”.

Motherhood, she says, is not something to “be taken lightly”.

“Childcare costs are soaring, maternity policies are limited, women basically have to think really hard,” she says.

She also wants to have the “support system” of a long-term partner in place before having children.

But she isn’t in a hurry. “I don’t feel I’m in a rush to settle down and have kids just because it’s expected,” she says.

Instead she is focusing on her career after growing up in a household that “didn’t have anything”.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘I am never ever putting a child through this’,” she says.

“[My parents] absolutely did their best, but I’ve always said I will not have a child until I’m… ready.”

Kari Aaron Clark, a senior research fellow at the Royal Academy of Engineering, earns £53,000 but feels he can’t afford to raise a child in London.

Four years ago, his salary was £22,000 while completing his PhD.

His partner Kaitlyn, who is currently a PhD student, is under similar financial strain.

It means despite Kari’s above-average salary, he has had less time to save for a property – something he thinks is essential before becoming a parent because of the “relatively insecure” nature of renting.

He also cites the costs of childcare. According to a recent report by children’s charity Coram, the average weekly price for a full-time childcare place for children under three in the UK is about £300, compared with nearly £430 in inner London.

Kari says his views are shared by Kaitlyn – and they are both concerned about the effects of the climate crisis.

“I’m quite happy with the idea of adopting. That way I’m helping someone already struggling in the system,” he says.

“I can adopt after they’ve got through the childcare stage.”

But despite his current pessimism about the viability of becoming a biological parent, Kari says he “wouldn’t write it off”.

This all raises the question of what the future holds if fewer children are being born.

Declining fertility rates are not just about people delaying parenthood, but about a growing trend of people not having children, says Brienna Perelli-Harris, professor of demography at the University of Southampton.

Data from the recent UK Generations and Gender Survey suggests that childless adults today are far less confident they will have children, with a quarter of 18 to 25-year-olds saying they would probably or definitely not have a child.

“Gen Z are more likely to want to stay childless,” she says. “Before, it might have been more of a taboo – it’s now more acceptable.

“And it’s down to economic factors like future income, childcare costs and employment.”

“In the long term… the population will start to shrink,” Prof Perelli-Harris adds.

“If it gets to 1.3 [children per woman] – that’s seen as very low and government should start getting concerned.”

Concerns have previously been raised about shrinking fertility rates in countries where there’s long been a downward trend, including the need for more young people to work as carers for an ageing population and pay tax.

But populations can continue to grow for a long time after fertility falls below 2.1 children per woman, known as the replacement level – the number of children required to ensure a population replaces itself from one generation to the next – the ONS says.

This is the case in the UK and other countries like Spain and Italy, where the fertility rate is even lower.

“Immigration can stall population decline or even reverse it,” says Prof Perelli-Harris.

“I do not think we will see the UK population start to decline for the foreseeable future, although the ageing of the population will become even more pronounced.”

Three years ago, the DNA-testing firm 23andMe was a massive success, with a share price higher than Apple’s.

But, from those heady days of millions of people rushing to send it saliva samples in return for detailed reports about their ancestry, family connections and genetic make-up, it now finds itself fighting for its survival.

Its share price has plummeted and this week it narrowly avoided being delisted from the stock market.

And of course this is a company that holds the most sensitive data imaginable about its customers, raising troubling questions about what might happen to its huge – and extremely valuable – database of individual human DNA.

When contacted by the BBC, 23andMe was bullish about its prospects – and insistent it remained “committed to protecting customer data and consistently focused on maintaining the privacy of our customers.”

But how did what was once one of the most talked-about tech firms get to the position where it has to answer questions about its very survival?

Not so long ago, 23andMe was in the public eye for all the right reasons.

Its famous customers included Snoop Dogg, Oprah Winfrey, Eva Longoria and Warren Buffet – and millions of users were getting unexpected and life-changing results.

Some people discovered that their parents were not who they thought they were, or that they had a genetic pre-disposition to serious health conditions. Its share price rocketed to $321.

Fast forward three years and that price has slumped to just under $5 – and the company is worth 2% of what it once was.

What went wrong?

According to Professor Dimitris Andriosopoulos, founder of the Responsible Business Unit at Strathclyde University, the problem for 23andMe was twofold.

Firstly, it didn’t really have a continuing business model – once you’d paid for your DNA report, there was very little for you to return for.

Secondly, plans to use an anonymised version of the gathered DNA database for drug research took too long to become profitable, because the drug development process takes so many years.

That leads him to a blunt conclusion: “If I had a crystal ball, I’d say they will maybe last for a bit longer,” he told the BBC.

“But as it currently is, in my view, 23andMe is highly unlikely to survive.”

The problems at 23andMe are reflected in the turmoil in its leadership.

The board resigned in the summer and only the CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki – sister of the late YouTube boss Susan Wojcicki and ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergei Brin – remains from the original line-up.

Rumours have swirled that the firm will shortly either fold or be sold – claims that it rejects.

“23andMe’s co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki has publicly shared she intends to take the company private, and is not open to considering third party takeover proposals,” the company said in a statement.

But that hasn’t stopped the speculation, with rival firm Ancestry calling for US competition regulators to get involved if 23andMe does end up for sale.

Companies rising and falling is nothing new – especially in tech. But 23andMe is different.

“It’s worrying because of the sensitivity of the data,” says Carissa Veliz, author of Privacy is Power.

And that is not just for the individuals who have used the firm.

“If you gave your data to 23andMe, you also gave the genetic data of your parents, your siblings, your children, and even distant kin who did not consent to that,” she told the BBC.

David Stillwell, professor of computational social science at Cambridge Judge Business School, agrees the stakes are high.

“DNA data is different. If your bank account details are hacked, it will be disruptive but you can get a new bank account,” he explained.

“If your (non-identical) sibling has used it, they share 50% of your DNA, so their data can still be used to make health predictions about you.”

The company is adamant these kinds of concerns are without foundation.

“Any company that handles consumer information, including the type of data we collect, there are applicable data protections set out in law required to be followed as part of any future ownership change,” it said in its statement.

“The 23andMe terms of service and privacy statement would remain in place unless and until customers are presented with, and agree to, new terms and statements.”

There are also legal protections which apply in the UK under its version of the data protection law, GDPR, whether the firm goes bust or changes hands.

Even so, all companies can be hacked – as 23andMe was 12 months ago.

And Carissa Veliz remains uneasy – and says ultimately a much robust approach is needed if we want to keep our most personal information safe.

“The terms and conditions of these companies are typically incredibly inclusive; when you give out your personal data to them, you allow them to do pretty much anything they want with it,” she said.

“Until we ban the trade in personal data, we are not well protected enough.”

A former soldier who became a heroin dealer is now a successful artist after finding his passion while serving a 13-year prison sentence.

Kevin Devonport spiralled into criminality after he left the Army aged 21 and he struggled with drug addiction.

After turning his life around, he has won multiple awards, exhibited in London, obtained a university degree and has a studio in Leeds.

The 52-year-old spoke to the BBC about how he carved a new path for himself while still behind bars.

Mr Devonport was 35 when he was caught selling heroin in 2007 and a self-proclaimed “career criminal” who had already served three jail sentences.

Facing the prospect of another lengthy prison term, he took the advice of another inmate who told him – “don’t serve time, let time serve you”.

“I tried using the time constructively,” Mr Devonport, who served as a Chieftain gunner in the First Royal Tank Regiment, said.

“I really wanted to sort my life out by then.”

He enrolled at the Open University and obtained a first-class honours degree in sociology, but it was when he stumbled across a painting class organised by charity Care After Combat, that he changed his life’s trajectory.

“I was never really an arty person,” he said.

“I’d look and admire but I never thought I could do it myself.”

However, Mr Devonport, who grew up on a council estate in Leeds and left school with no qualifications at 15, said he took to the class “like a fish to water”.

His first painting – “a little landscape” – may not have been his best work but he said it was the process of creating it that really struck a chord.

Having never imagined he would be an artist, he won his first national award while still in prison.

“It’s not been a conscious decision, it’s like life has directed me that way,” he said.

Despite his successes, navigating life after his release in 2014, his reintegration into society and the stigma of incarceration, were challenging.

His last run-in with the law was in 2018, when he was jailed for producing cannabis.

Mr Devonport, who is now a father to Sinead, eight, said it was his art that anchored him and inspired his first exhibition titled “Unlabelled”.

“Coming into a world where you are not as accepted, you are a bit like driftwood,” he said.

“Being an artist gives me a sense of who I am, a sense of identity. I was lost. It’s given me something to attach to.”

Identity, his experience of the justice system as well as his time in the Army on active duty in Germany and Northern Ireland, are often themes that feature in his paintings.

“I tell stories, each object has a meaning,” Mr Devonport, who works with offenders and tutors fine art, said.

“When you know my art, you can read it like a book.”

Some of his most recent work is currently on display in Leadenhall Market, London, as part of his exhibition “Nothing Ordinary Here” and he has studio space at Assembly House in Armley, Leeds.

While his route into art may have been an unconventional one, he said he did not regret his past.

“The things I’ve done with my own life experiences, it’s made me who I am.

“I think in terms of my art, it’s made me a better artist.”

West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds

Rumours, misleading allegations and outright lies about voting and fraud are flooding online spaces in unprecedented numbers in advance of the US election.

Hundreds of incidents involving purported voting irregularities are being collected and spread by individuals, as well as both independent and Republican-affiliated groups. A small number of posts are also coming from Democrats.

The whirlwind of claims spreading online poses a challenge to election officials who are having to debunk rumours and reassure voters, while preparing to administer election day on Tuesday.

In nearly every case, the posts support the Trump campaign’s false claim that the former president won the 2020 election and suggestions that he will potentially be cheated out of victory again on 5 November.

When asked whether he will accept the 2024 election result, Donald Trump said during the presidential debate in September that he would if it was a “fair and legal and good election”.

A majority of Americans – 70% – expect him to reject the result if he loses, according to a CNN/SSRS poll released Monday.

Just this week, Trump himself claimed widespread fraud in a key swing state.

“Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before,” Trump posted on his Truth Social network. “REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!”

The allegation followed officials in three Pennsylvania counties saying they were working with local law enforcement to investigate some voter registration applications for potential fraud.

While Trump and allies seized on the announcements, the state’s top election official, Republican Al Schmidt, has urged caution and warned voters to be aware of “half-truths” and disinformation circulating on social media.

“This is a sign that the built-in safeguards in our voter registration process are working,” he said.

The BBC has seen hundreds of allegations of election fraud online, on social networks and on message boards and in chat groups. Some of these posts have been viewed millions of times each.

The posts have implied it’s easy for non-citizens to vote, made false claims about voting machines and sowed distrust in the ballot-counting process.

One video claimed to show recently-arrived Haitians voting in Georgia.

The BBC has found clear indications, including false addresses and stock photos, which indicate the video is a fake. On Friday US security officials said it was made by “Russian influence actors”.

Another person on X claiming they were Canadian posted a picture of a ballot and said: “Figured I would drive across the border and vote.”

It, too, is a fake, and part of an effort co-ordinated on the fringe message board 4chan. The ballot shown is from Florida, a state that requires identification to vote in person and is about a 20-hour drive from the Canadian border.

Meanwhile in Northhampton County, Pennsylvania, a video was posted on X showing a man dropping off a container of ballots at a courthouse, alleging suspicious activity. It turned out he was a postal worker delivering mail-in ballots, but the video was seen more than five million times.

Experts worry the burst of misinformation just before election day could undermine people’s trust in the results – or lead to threats and violence in the lead-up to the election and beyond.

It’s happened before.

In the hours and days that followed the 2020 presidential election, while votes were still being counted, then-President Trump turned to social media to allege fraud and falsely claim that he was the real winner of the election. “Stop the steal” became a slogan of his supporters’ movement to overturn the results.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?

On social media, chatrooms and during street protests, conspiracy theorists alleged widespread voter fraud, culminating with a riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Meanwhile, in battleground states like Georgia, election officials – civil servants whose job it is to oversee the election – faced death threats.

While false claims about voting ramped up after the 2020 vote, groups that monitor this kind of activity say this year it has started well before election day.

Wendy Via, founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), said some far-right and right-wing activists “are preparing themselves for the election to be stolen in a way they weren’t in 2020”.

“We cannot overstate the role of conspiracy theories in all of this,” she said.

These doubts have already reached Trump supporters on the ground. At a rally this week in Wisconsin, another key swing state, a number of people said they believed only illegal activity would prevent the Republican nominee from winning.

“I feel very confident about Trump, as long as there’s no cheating,” said Brad Miller of Green Bay, who mentioned that he’d already heard rumours about fraud. “Our only hope is that it’s not big enough to change the result.”

After the 2020 election, dozens of court cases alleging election fraud were lodged by Trump’s team across multiple states, but none succeeded.

Experts say that isolated incidents of ballot fraud and administrative errors always happen in US presidential elections, which run across all 50 states and in 2020 involved more than 150 million voters.

But real incidents are now being catalogued and shared online to an unprecedented degree and being used, alongside fake posts, as evidence of widespread cheating.

In southern California, dozens of ballots were found in a storm drain. Despite the unknown circumstances around the event, online partisans immediately suspected deliberate fraud.

“They WILL cheat,” says one of the thousands of comments posted.

As cases have cropped up in recent days – including those in Pennsylvania and a Chinese student being charged with illegally voting in Michigan – authorities have repeatedly pointed to their investigations as examples of the robustness of election safeguards.

But those who believe conspiracy theories about widespread fraud see these incidents as evidence of a co-ordinated plan by Democrats to “rig” the election.

“Look at this new cheat voter fraud,” read one typical comment responding to the news from Pennsylvania. “Dems already doing their best to steal another election.”

The overall effect can have a disastrous impact on trust in democracy, experts say.

“These incidents are catnip for those who seek to undermine confidence in the election result,” said Luis Lozada, chief executive of Democracy Works, a not-for-profit group that distributes information about voting.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: All you need to know about the vote
• 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
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

The mass of election fraud claims spreading on social media have been aided by a network of groups that crowdsource allegations.

Groups like Texas-based True The Vote, founded in 2009, have long been on the forefront of questioning election security.

On an app developed by True the Vote called VoteAlert, supporters post examples of alleged election irregularities.

They have collected a wide range of claims, from minor security oversights to allegations of deliberate vote tampering. The organisation also has people monitoring live-streamed cameras that have been pointed on ballot drop boxes in a number of states. Many local officials have repeatedly outlined the steps they have taken to make the boxes secure.

“Our hope is we see exactly nothing at these drop boxes,” said True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht during one of her recent regular online meetings for supporters.

But she also hinted that Democratic-aligned groups were aiming to commit election fraud on a vast scale.

“If they want to try to pull the kinds of things that we saw being pulled in 2020, they’re highly unlikely to get away with it because we have, literally, eyes everywhere,” she added.

The BBC contacted True the Vote for comment.

A number of other groups are asking supporters to report alleged irregularities.

Elon Musk’s America political action committee has started a community – akin to a message board – on X, filled with rumours and allegations about voting. With 50,000 members, several posts go up every minute, almost around the clock.

Other efforts include the Election Integrity Network, a group founded by a former Trump lawyer who is challenging voter registrations and recruiting poll watchers – partisan observers who attend polling places.

The volume of messages on these platforms – along with the vagueness of some of the claims, with often anonymous sources – makes it nearly impossible to verify each allegation.

The groups, and the Trump campaign, say that these efforts are solely meant to ensure the integrity of the vote. The BBC contacted the Trump campaign for comment.

The effect of this is unpredictable.

The Department of Homeland Security, in a memo reported on by US outlets including the BBC’s partner CBS, said on Monday that election conspiracy theories could spark action by domestic extremists.

And observers expect the wave of misinformation to continue well beyond election day. Polls suggest the election will be among the closest in modern US history. It may take days to count all the votes and determine the winner.

Luis Lozada of Democracy Works says the election is being conducted in an “ecosystem of distrust”.

But despite the doubts being sown, he says, “accurate information is getting out there”.

“Election officials work very hard to ensure that elections are run properly, as they were in 2020,” Mr Lozada said. “That’s not going to stop folks from taking anecdotes, and trying to punch holes.”

Joe Biden has always regarded two places as home – Ireland and Delaware.

When he leaves the White House in a matter of months he will head to the latter, and in that state there is some anger at the way he lost his chance to serve a second term as President.

Yet even his supporters accept that the 81-year-old was showing his age when his Democratic Party colleagues told him it was time to leave the race.

“I think it would have run him into the ground for sure, to have a campaign to try to come up above the (polling) numbers that have been so horrible for the whole time he has been in office,” says Kathy Magner.

Kathy Magner’s father worked with Biden’s dad 50 years ago and she has known him for decades.

“I think what time he has left after the presidency, he can enjoy it knowing he did the best he could,” she says.

Kathy helps run Limestone Presbyterian Church in Wilmington and one of her jobs is to put up a message with meaning on a sign at the front of the building.

Just days ahead of the election, when America decides between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the sign states: ‘Hate never solves problems. It creates them.’

There seems little doubt that those words are a nod towards how politically divisive the last few months have been.

It has even had an impact within the congregation here.

“We have had family members who have disowned each other because they are on the other side,” says Kathy.

“I have a sister-in-law who I will not talk to, because if I call her we end up shouting and I just hang up on her.”

Last year Limestone Presbyterian helped to host Christian teenagers from Northern Ireland as part of a cross-community initiative.

The pastor of the church says those visits gave him some optimism that America’s divisions could be overcome.

“What I found interesting was the history of the Ulster Project,” says Reverend Tim Bostick.

“Of how it grew out of the Catholic and Protestant challenges that Northern Ireland had gone through.

“And learning to appreciate and respect each other through our differences.

“We need more of that!”

But in the centre of Wilmington, outside the railroad station named after Joseph R Biden Jr. it was clear that not everyone agreed.

One Trump supporter told me that America was a worse place now because of Biden.

And when I asked him what his presidency would be remembered for, he said two words: “His senility.”

Generally though I found a fondness for the outgoing President who is a familiar figure in the city.

One of his favourite places to eat is the Charcoal Pit diner.

Inside the 1950s-themed restaurant there are pictures of visits by both Biden and the man he served as vice-president Barack Obama.

While understandably he has been a less regular visitor during the last four years, the diner’s staff say he still gets food to take out when he’s in Delaware.

“He eats cheesesteaks and cheeseburgers… And thick black and white shakes with extra ice cream,” says the chef Lupe Avilez.

“And he talks to you like he’s known you forever.”

Like their most famous regular, Lupe’s wife Mary has familial links to Ireland. And she says Biden’s love of the island is obvious even in the west wing.

“I know someone that works in a bank locally and she was in the Oval Office a week ago,” reveals Mary.

“She says that he has a rugby ball signed by all the players… And a big photo album full of pictures of everywhere he went in Ireland.

“She said it was so nice to see.”

Joe Biden’s presidential visit to Ireland last year was memorable, personal and political.

The trip was a celebration of his roots but also a chance to throw his leadership weight behind political progress in Northern Ireland.

He has backed that up by encouraging trans-Atlantic investment from America through his economic envoy, Joe Kennedy III.

Securing big sums is always difficult but Biden’s pick for the role showed he was serious in trying to make it work.

Kennedy is charismatic, well-connected and part of a Democratic party dynasty with their own Irish links.

But he indicated recently on BBC Radio Ulster’s Good Morning Ulster programme that he is likely to move on when this Presidency ends in January.

Whether Kennedy will be replaced and how important Ireland (north and south) will be in the next White House is not exactly clear, no matter who wins.

Once US politicians fretted over the Irish-American vote. This election has shown how much its importance has faded into the distance, with both campaigns much more concerned about getting the likes of Black and Latino voters to the ballot box.

However, Mary Avilez believes it still matters.

“I think it is important because we need to have relationships with other countries,” she insists.

Not everyone agrees. Many commentators suggest the tone and priorities of recent debates indicate that America is looking ever inward, as it finally decides who should be its next leader.

BBC Radio Ulster’s Good Morning Ulster programme will be live from the United States from Monday 4 November until Friday 8 November with Chris bringing you all the latest news and reaction in the presidential election.

Hidden away in a church in Hamburg is a plaque dedicated to a relatively unknown Welsh woman, outlining astonishing acts of bravery.

Mabel Wulff from Newport lived in Nazi Germany – surviving years of Gestapo harassment and bravely fighting fires caused by falling bombs.

The plaque says the St Thomas à Becket Anglican Church, known as simply “the English church” for many years, would have been destroyed without her – after she hid its artwork to save it from damage and smothered fires as they started.

She also sheltered people to save their lives.

“She’s a part of history – Newport history and Hamburg history,” says Eddie Wulff, Mabel’s grandson who has spent the past few years trying to learn more about his grandmother’s life.

“But very few in Wales seem to know about it. She was formidable.”

It is a story that begins in Newport in 1909 when seamstress Mabel Phillips married Max Wulff, a German sailor.

They couldn’t have imagined the difficulties ahead, with Max setting up a restaurant on Alexandra Road in the Pill area of the city and the couple welcoming two sons in 1911 and 1913.

But the family were separated, with Max seen as an enemy of the state by the British government and sent to prisoner of war camps in Lancaster and on the Isle of Man.

Life for Mabel and her sons Edward and Leonard became difficult, says Eddie.

“There was a lot of anti German feeling in Newport. They asked Mabel whether she would divorce Max because he was a German – she refused to do that.”

It was a feeling Eddie himself remembers, being in school in Newport at the end of the 1940s, where he recalled being called “Nazi” and “Gestapo”.

“They must have had it even worse” he said.

As soon as World War One ended, Max wasn’t allowed to return to Newport but sent back to Germany, where his young family would soon join him.

“They had so much hassle – every stage of their life had been hard,” Eddie said.

That became apparent again in 1930s Hamburg. By then Mabel was the caretaker of “the English church”, a Church of England church originally established because of the trade links between the city and the UK.

Once war broke out, an Anglican church with a British caretaker attracted numerous visits from the Gestapo.

“She said they really were nasty and they were strutting about. They were always looking for the Union flag and the British Legion flag which Mabel had hidden under the altar,” Max said.

“They were bouncing about, asking where these things were – they were actually walking on top of them.”

As a key port city, Hamburg was targeted by sustained bombing raids, most notably during Operation Gomorrah in 1943.

In anticipation of this, Mabel hid and stored some of the beautiful paintings and engravings from the church, meaning they were saved from damage.

It seemed there was nothing she wouldn’t do to protect the building during the raids, putting her life at risk.

“She did put fires out, she went around and smothered them and got water and put them out on numerous occasions. She did save the church,” said Eddie.

Mabel Wulff also let families, displaced by the bombings, shelter in the church – again drawing the attention of the Gestapo.

“She was a good person. You didn’t mess with Mabel – she was formidable,” Eddie recalls.

At the end of the war, Mabel brought out the union flag she had hidden under the altar and draped it over the church’s balcony as British Troops entered the city.

Mabel’s bravery was noted by Church of England officials in 1947, thanking her for the “great personal danger” she put herself in.

In 1956 she was awards a British Empire Medal for her actions.

Even though Mabel returned to Newport in her later years and lived with Eddie and his family when he was a child, much of her story was unknown until relatively recently.

“You would have to drag it out of her. I am very proud of her. Most of it passed me by most of my life. I am in my 80s now and I’m just realising how important my grandmother was.”

A man with cerebral palsy who had given up hope of getting work has landed a modelling job after featuring in a BBC documentary.

Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Elliot Caswell said he had been “nervous and excited” to get the opportunity.

BBC video journalist Rachel Price spent five years filming Elliot Caswell’s life after meeting him on a plane in 2019.

In the BBC iPlayer documentary A Life of My Own, Elliot, now 25, opened up about his struggles to find work.

However, a senior art director at high street retailer Primark happened to watch BBC Breakfast on the day a segment about Elliot, as well as the documentary, aired.

The art director thought that Elliot would be a perfect model for a new clothing range and got in touch with him on social media through a modelling agency.

On Wednesday, Elliot travelled to Manchester for the two-day shoot.

Video journalist Rachel joined him on set.

“Having watched Elliot for five years from being a shy young lad who looked at his mum to help him talk, it was then amazing to watch him light up the room with his smile and humour,” she said.

Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Elliot said: “Inclusivity is very important when it comes to the world of work.”

Chris Caswell, Elliot’s mum, said that the skills required for modelling were “perfect” for him because he could use his personality.

She told BBC Breakfast that Elliot’s “whole world has changed” since the documentary was released.

“Elliot has some limitations, but he has so much to give. He’s very person-centred – he likes to do customer service things,” she said.

“He has some fantastic skills, but just needs a little bit of support to get a job.”

Elliot told the programme that while he was open to more modelling work in the future, he was looking for customer-facing work – and his dream job would be something connected to Newcastle United, the football team he supports.

Photographer Esmé Moore, who also has cerebral palsy, said it was surprising that it was Elliot’s first shoot.

“When someone has a lot of character, it’s instantly easy to photograph because that can come across on set,” she said.

Charlie Magadah-Williams, head of diversity and inclusion at Primark, said the company was looking for a variety of models for the shoot, and Elliot “really fit the bill for somebody that we were looking to work with”.

“It’s been fantastic to watch Elliot doing what he’s doing and learning his new job,” she said.

She added that as a business, Primark was “really committed to becoming more accessible”, both for their employees and customers.

Vice-President Kamala Harris has made a surprise appearance alongside comedian and actor Maya Rudolph on the live comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live (SNL).

Cheers from the audience drowned out the first lines spoken by the Democrats’ US presidential candidate.

The pair performed a scripted exchange featuring puns on Harris’s first name, Kamala, including “keep calm-ala” and “carry on-ala”.

Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Republican candidate Donald Trump, expressed surprise that Harris would appear on SNL given what he said was her unflattering portrayal on the show.

Asked if Trump had been invited to appear on the programme, Miller said “I don’t know, probably not”, according to the BBC’s US partner CBS News.

• Follow live updates as candidates make final push in swing states

During the sketch, which lasted about two minutes, Ms Rudolph performed a mirror-image double of Harris.

“It is nice to see you, Kamala,” Harris told Ms Rudolph. “And I’m just here to remind you, you got this.”

Speaking in sync, the duo said they share each other’s “belief in the promise of America” and announced together “live from New York; it’s Saturday night”.

Harris also mocked a recent stunt by her election opponent Trump, in which he appeared to struggle to open the door to a garbage truck.

“You can do something your opponent cannot do,” Harris told Rudolph. “You can open doors.”

Trump’s garbage truck stunt was in response to comments by President Biden in which he appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage”, although the White House has denied that was Biden’s intention.

Several other presidential candidates, including Trump, have featured on the programme during previous election campaigns.

Trump’s appearance came in 2015, when he hosted the show.

However, going on the programme so close to election day is unusual.

Brendan Carr, a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission media regulatory agency’s five-person board, slammed the move as “a clear and blatant effort to evade” its equal time rule.

The federal policy requires US broadcasters to treat political candidates equally in terms of air time, and Mr Carr wrote on X that its purpose is “to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct – a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election”.

Asked about the surprise appearance on Fox News, Trump’s son Eric said mainstream media has been against his father “from day one”.

“I mean, just no one, no one trusts most of those mainstream channels,” he said. “I’m not sure if the Saturday Night Live stuff is going to ultimately matter. I think it’s my father’s work ethic [is] going to matter.”

Harris briefly stepped away from her campaign in the battleground states to make Saturday’s surprise trip to New York for the broadcast.

She arrived on Air Force Two, at LaGuardia Airport, following early evening campaigning in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Harris was scheduled to head to Detroit but aides said she’d be making an unscheduled stop once she was in the air.

Her appearance wasn’t announced beforehand and was only confirmed by an official moments before it began.

Polls show the two presidential candidates are locked in a tight race in seven key swing states.

Both Harris and Trump are preparing a blitz of these battleground states in the final days of the campaign.

Badgers tunnelling under a road in Lincolnshire have caused £100,000 worth of damage, a council has said.

The mammals had dug a sett under the A52 at Seaholme Road, in the middle of Mablethorpe, according to Lincolnshire County Council.

Emergency repairs to the road would have to be carried out to stop it falling apart, a spokesperson for the authority said.

However, the council had had to wait for a licence from Natural England before the work could be carried out because badgers were a protected species, they added.

The authority had wanted to carry out the repairs earlier, but now the licence had been granted, it was running out of time to do the emergency work, according to the spokesperson.

All work on badger setts must be completed between July and the end of November so the repairs did not interfere with the badgers’ mating season, they explained.

Councillor Richard Davies said: “In total, these works are going to cost us an additional £100,000 to complete.”

The Mablethorpe area already has road closures on the A1104 for resurfacing work, and Davies said the authority was aware of traffic flow issues in the town.

The A1104 scheme could not be paused as it was at a critical point, he said.

“Our hands are tied about scheduling these conflicting works,” Davies explained.

“We have no option but to get this additional programme up and running straight away.

“If there was any other option available to us, we’d take it.”

Davies added that it was “extremely frustrating we have not been given this licence until now”.

A condition of the licence issued by Natural England requires the works be carried out under a road closure, to ensure the safety of the badgers.

The council spokesperson said the work would be carried out between 09:00 GMT and 16:00 GMT from Saturday 8 November and Wednesday 20 November.

A three-way traffic light system would operate outside those hours so the road could be used.

Natural England has been approached for a comment.

Lincolnshire on BBC Sounds latest episode of Look North here.

A great-grandmother has received more than 2,000 birthday cards for her 103rd birthday.

Sylvia Dalton’s care home in Middlesbrough wanted her to have a “special surprise” to celebrate the milestone on Friday.

They put out a plea for birthday cards on social media in the hope they would receive 103 of them, but more kept coming.

Mrs Dalton said she was “amazed” and “enjoyed reading them very much”.

She has three daughters, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, who live as far apart as Scotland and Guernsey.

Mrs Dalton spent most of her working life teaching in Stockton-on-Tees, where she eventually became the headteacher of an infant school.

Kelly Deane, deputy manager at Montpellier Manor Care Home, described Mrs Dalton as a “gorgeous, lovely lady, who lives a very social life” at the home in Stainton, which she moved into in 2023.

“She loves chatting to people,” she said.

When asked why they made the plea for birthday cards, Ms Deane said: “It’s quite an achievement to get to the age of 100, never mind 103, so we just wanted to do something special for her while she’s here with us.

“We are just so amazed at how many we’ve received, people have been so kind and thoughtful, it’s just overwhelming really.”

If you have ever written your name in the air with a sparkler on bonfire night then you have experimented with light painting.

Baffled by the “lines of light floating in mid-air”, Scottish photographer David Gilliver knew he had to try capturing them with his camera.

“I thought it was like sorcery, it’s like magic,” he says.

For 15 years, Mr Gilliver has been a pioneer in the technique of light painting.

Now, one of his pictures – which he has called Where Rainbows Sleep – has been shortlisted for this year’s British Photography Awards in its newest category – best low light photograph.

Picture this: Mr Gilliver is stood in a pitch black fishing boat hut, dressed head to toe in dark clothing, holding a “light sabre”.

No, he’s not re-enacting Star Wars – this is just how the process of making the photo begins.

To blend into the low-light background, Mr Gilliver must imitate one of film’s greatest villains.

He channels his inner Darth Vader but instead of “the force” he uses a long exposure photography technique, keeping the shutter open for anything from 30 seconds to 20 minutes.

His camera, which he controls remotely, is at the other end of the room securely fixed to a tripod, because even the slightest movement will cause a blurring of the image.

Mr Gilliver moves towards the camera, swooshing his light sabre before disappearing down the trap door.

The exposure length gives him enough time to fire a flash gun manually to illuminate the boat hut surroundings.

“Simple is often best”, Mr Gilliver says, when it comes to creating his waves of light.

But he also loves to experiment.

In another photo, he uses butterfly keyrings with battery-operated lights to create an image of multiple floating butterflies.

He also created an eerie orb sitting within the ancient Callanish stones on the Isle of Lewis, by swinging a light on the end of a string like a lasso during the long exposure time.

The 45-year-old Glasgow School of Art graduate has always had an artistic eye.

However, making a living as an artist initially proved difficult and he ended up working in finance in the Channel Islands for 14 years.

He became “utterly obsessed” with light painting to capture the “magical” landscapes of Guernsey at night.

When he moved back to Scotland in 2015, he says the “dramatic” and “iconic” backdrops of the country kept his creativity alive.

In 2018, he abandoned his 9 to 5 life to finally take up photography full time.

When he started posting his light paintings online, he says most people would ask him how he did it.

Photographers would ask to come with him while he created his images, he says.

Mr Gilliver, who lives in Gartcosh, North Lanarkshire, now teaches his own workshops across the UK.

He says most people think the technique is hard to understand but actually it is “very accessible” once people start to experiment and play with light.

He says teaching “found” him and he enjoys people’s natural curiosity.

“Watching their eyes light up as they begin to learn what the creative possibilities are of this amazing art form is one of the many joys of teaching,” he says.

Along with light painting, Mr Gilliver has a large portfolio of macro photography.

The technique is a form of extreme close-up photography and can be used to capture small objects, flowers and insects.

Mr Gilliver plays around with imaginative scenarios using small figurines.

His photos range from iconic film scenes to handling more serious topics.

This year, his recreation of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet’s famous “I’m flying” scene from the blockbuster movie Titanic has been shortlisted in the macro category.

It depicts a miniature Jack and Rose recreating the famous scene on top of an electric iron.

He is no stranger to the British Photography Awards, having already won the best macro photograph category in 2022 by turning a face mask into a swimming pool for a Covid pandemic image.

“Delivering a serious message without trivialising what you’re talking about is the key,” he says.

The photographer says it would be unfair to choose which of photographic forms he prefers.

He says macro photography exercises his imagination but light painting feels more like an experience.

The “experiential” side of light painting is what makes the “incredible process reign supreme”, he says.

Mr Gilliver has been shortlisted for three categories in this year’s British Photography Awards, for best macro, low light and commercial photography.

The awards will take place on 4 November.

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.

A camper in Montana who was initially reported to have died in a bear attack was murdered by a stranger he welcomed to share his campsite and offered a beer, officials said.

Police say Daren Christopher Abbey, 41, was arrested and charged with murder after his DNA was discovered on a beer can at the campsite where the victim’s body was found.

Dustin Kjersem, 35, was allegedly killed on 10 October and found two days later by friends who thought he had been mauled by a bear.

The two men did not know each other before the chance encounter in the outdoors, and no motive for the attack has yet been identified, Gallatin County Sheriff said in a statement.

Sheriff Dan Springer said that Mr Kjersem had welcomed his killer to share his campsite, about 35 miles (56km) south of the city of Bozeman.

Prosecutors say that at some point, Mr Abbey hit Mr Kjersem with a piece of wood, then stabbed him with a screwdriver and attacked him with an axe.

The suspect allegedly returned to the crime scene later to remove items from the camp he thought might tie him to the murder, but overlooked the beer can.

He has confessed to the killing, telling police that he attacked his victim after discovering him at the site where he had planned to camp, officials say.

Police say Mr Abbey led them to several items he had stolen from the campsite, including an axe, guns and a cooler.

“This appears to be a heinous crime committed by an individual who had no regard for the life of Dustin Kjersem,” Sheriff Springer said.

“We have a bit of his story, but … we don’t really know what the true story is,” Springer said.

Mr Abbey was ordered to be held on $1.5m (£1.2m) bail during a court appearance on Friday.

The Prince of Wales has spoken of his deep personal connections with Africa – ahead of his environmental Earthshot Prize awards ceremony in Cape Town in South Africa next week.

“Africa has always held a special place in my heart – as somewhere I found comfort as a teenager, where I proposed to my wife,” said Prince William ahead of his visit.

Prince William’s mother, Diana, had many associations with the continent, including supporting a mine-clearing charity, and his return there as a young man seemed to have left an emotional impact.

It was in Kenya that the prince proposed to Catherine during a romantic trip in 2010.

At the time he said he’d been carrying the engagement ring – which previously belonged to his mother – around in his rucksack for several weeks, building up to the proposal.

Prince William says he is taking his environmental prize back to its African roots – as a visit to Namibia had been the “founding inspiration” and the “birthplace” of the awards.

“It was in Namibia in 2018 that I realised the power of how innovative, positive solutions to environmental problems could drive transformative change for humans and nature,” says Prince William.

The Earthshot Prize, first awarded in 2021, supports sustainable, eco-friendly projects from around the world, with five winners each receiving £1m.

There is a focus on ideas from Africa for this year’s event, with more than 400 African-led projects nominated and another 350 linked to the continent.

Although Africa generates the fewest emissions for global warming, many of its countries are among the most vulnerable to climate change.

The emphasis of the awards is on tangible results, scaling up good ideas to make a bigger impact. For instance, one of last year’s finalists was a project to reduce air pollution from car tyres and that’s now being developed in a partnership with Uber in the UK and US.

“By the end of the week, I want the Earthshot Prize to have provided a platform to all those innovators bringing about change for their communities, encouraged potential investors to speed African solutions to scale and inspired young people across Africa who are engaged in climate issues,” says Prince William.

In keeping with the green theme, guests will arrive on a green carpet rather than red and South African landmarks will be illuminated in green light.

The prince will attend the awards ceremony on 6 November, which will feature a performance of a song from the Lion King on top of Table Mountain, with the event available on BBC iPlayer.

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?
• Path to 270: The states Harris and Trump need to win

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?

• PATH TO 270: The states they need to win – and why
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• SIMPLE GUIDE: How you can get most votes but lose
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• FACT-CHECK: What the numbers really say about crime
• Read more about: Kamala Harris | Donald Trump | US election

Bitcoin underpins a two trillion-dollar cryptocurrency industry, is now traded by the world’s biggest investment houses and is even an official currency in one country.

But despite its meteoric rise, a deep mystery remains at its heart: what is the true identity of its founder, the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto?

Many have tried to answer that question, but so far all have failed. In October, a high-profile HBO documentary suggested that a Canadian bitcoin expert called Peter Todd was he. The only problem: he said he was not, and the crypto world largely shrugged it off.

So, inevitably, ears pricked up across our newsroom – and the crypto world at large – when on Thursday a call went out that the mysterious creator of Bitcoin was to, finally, unmask himself at a press conference.

There is deep interest in who Satoshi Nakamoto is in part because they are considered a revolutionary programmer who helped spawn the crypto industry.

Their voice, opinions and world view would be extremely influential on an industry with such a devoted and zealous fanbase.

But the fascination also stems from the fact that, as the holder of more than one million bitcoins, Satoshi would be a multi-billionaire, not least because the price of the coins is currently close to an all-time high.

Given that vast wealth, it was somewhat unusual to be asked by the organiser of Thursday’s press conference to pay for my seat at his grand unveiling.

A front row seat would be £100. It was another £50 if I wanted unlimited questions. Organiser Charles Anderson even encouraged me to spend £500 in exchange for the privilege of interviewing “Satoshi” on stage.

I declined.

Mr Anderson said I could come along any way but cautioned there might not be a seat for me, such was the level of anticipation.

As it happened, seating wasn’t a problem.

Only around a dozen reporters turned up to the prestigious Frontline Club – which interrupted proceedings at one point to stress it only provided a room, and not any official endorsement.

Very soon it became clear that all attendees were extremely sceptical.

After some digging it emerged both the organiser and the purported Satoshi were currently embroiled in a complex legal fight over fraud allegations – linked to claims to be Satoshi.

It was an unpromising start, and things only got worse from there.

Mr Anderson invited “Satoshi” to come on stage.

A man called Stephen Mollah, who had been sat silently on the side the whole time walked up and resolutely declared: “I am here to make a statement that yes: I am Satoshi Nakamoto and I created the Bitcoin on Blockchain technology.”

Over the following hour, reporters went from amused to irritated as he failed to provide any of the promised evidence for his claims.

Mr Mollah promised that he would make the Hail-Mary move of unlocking and interacting with the first-ever Bitcoins to be created – something that only Satoshi could do.

But he didn’t.

I departed, along with other bemused reporters, taking with us any lingering doubts that this would prove to be yet another dead-end in the quest to unmask Satoshi.

The list of those identified – unsuccessfully – as Satoshi Nakamoto is long.

In 2014, a high-profile article in Newsweek said it was Dorian Nakamoto, a Japanese-American man living in California.

But he denied it and the claim has largely been debunked.

A year later, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright was outed as Satoshi by reporters.

He denied it, before saying it was true – but then failed over many years to produce any evidence.

In the spring the High Court in London ruled that Mr Wright was not the inventor.

Tech billionaire and crypto enthusiast Elon Musk also denied he was behind the cryptocurrency after a former employee at one of his firms, SpaceX, suggested it.

Which brings us to the question: does it really matter?

The crypto market’s current valuation means it is worth more than Google. And it seems inconceivable that the tech giant would play such a big role in our lives without people knowing who founded it, and owned a sizeable chunk of the firm.

Perhaps there’s good reason for the real Satoshi to keep schtum though. That bitcoin stash would make them worth an estimated $69bn and their life and character would no doubt be heavily scrutinised if they were found.

Peter Todd, who was named by the HBO documentary as being Satoshi, said the unwelcome attention he’s received has made him fearful for his safety.

Many in the crypto world enjoy the fact that the mystery remains unsolved.

“No-one knows who Satoshi is and that’s a good thing,” Adam Back, one of its core developers (and another potential Satoshi candidate) posted on X recently.

Natalie Brunell, a Bitcoin podcaster, thinks Satoshi’s anonymity is not only deliberate but essential.

“By concealing his true identity, Satoshi ensured that Bitcoin wouldn’t have a leader or central figure, whose personal agenda could influence the protocol,” she told me.

“This allows people to trust Bitcoin as a system, rather than placing their trust in an individual or company.”

Carol Alexander, professor of finance at Sussex University – who lectures on the history of Bitcoin – is less sure.

In her view, the circus around who Satoshi Nakamoto is distracts from people looking into – and getting to grips with – the more serious question of how cryptocurrencies might upend the way the economy works.

As I left the Frontline Club it was hard to compute the bizarre press event, beyond one obvious fact.

For now – and perhaps forever – the search for Satoshi continues.

Just over three months ago, Vice-President Kamala Harris walked up to a microphone to make a speech that would define both her past and her future.

A day before, President Joe Biden had dropped out of the election race and endorsed her to succeed him as Democratic candidate. With only a short period of campaigning ahead of her, Harris had no time to waste.

There is a saying in politics: define yourself or be defined by your opponent. And in that moment, when Harris made her first pitch to the American people, she defined herself not just in terms of her record in the White House or as a US senator, but the years she spent as a California prosecutor.

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds – predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said of her Republican challenger.

The line has been repeated often at her campaign rallies and stump speeches, as the 60-year-old has sought to frame this election as a contest between a hard-bitten prosecutor and a convicted felon, constantly reminding voters of Trump’s legal troubles.

• How Donald Trump came back from the political abyss

But a look back at Harris’s time in and out of California’s courtrooms reveals her enduring struggle to define herself, what her opponents say is a history of pivoting on issues depending on the political weather, as well as her uncanny ability to seize the moment when others have counted her out.

Harris’s time in law enforcement began just out of law school in Alameda County, California – which includes the cities of Berkeley and her hometown of Oakland.

During the 1990s, in the midst of the government’s “war on drugs”, Oakland struggled with violent crime.

For a junior prosecutor, the job was daunting. But the severity of the cases you had to deal with meant it was considered a top job for a young and ambitious attorney, said Teresa Drenick, who worked with Harris at the time.

“It was like a potboiler of an atmosphere. The amount of grief and agony you ingested every day was hard to process. For us, it was intense. The stakes being high, the crimes being so serious,” she told the BBC.

“It was near the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic. There were gang murders, street corner murders taking place. There was a lot going on in Oakland that enabled you as a prosecutor to handle some of the most serious cases that a prosecutor is ever going to handle.”

Ms Drenick and Harris were on the same trial team together. She admired Harris’s confidence in front of a jury, and her respect for her colleague only grew when Harris was transferred to a different team in the same courthouse focused on child sexual assault.

“She was very, very caring of victims of child abuse. She was able to speak to them in a way that allowed them to open up to her,” she said.

It was at this time that Harris dated Willie Brown, a local political kingmaker and speaker of the California State Assembly who helped launch the careers of some of the state’s other most prominent political leaders, including Gavin Newsom, the current governor, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed.

Brown appointed her to two state boards and introduced her to some of San Francisco’s highest-profile Democratic donors. The short-lived romance ended by the time Brown was elected as the city’s mayor in 1995. Three years later, Harris took a job at the San Francisco district attorney’s office.

During her relationship with Brown, who was 30 years her senior, Harris had begun mingling with some of the city’s political heavyweights.

San Francisco’s political machine, which Harris has described as “a bare-knuckled sport”, has launched the careers of some of the nation’s biggest political stalwarts including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the late Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Harris forged relationships with both of them, rising alongside contemporaries like Newsom, as she found her feet in the political world.

Her swift rise through San Francisco’s rough-and-tumble politics were defined by days in courtrooms representing victims and nights at glitzy political galas.

This was also around the time that Harris met one of her closest friends – and most significant donors – Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Jobs donated $500 to Harris’s 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney, which she won, toppling the man who had hired her. Twenty years later, the billionaire philanthropist donated nearly $1m to the Biden-Harris re-election campaign, according to Fortune Magazine. It’s not known how much she has directly contributed to Harris’s bid for the presidency, but the amount is considered substantial.

On the day before Easter in 2004, just four months into Kamala Harris’s tenure as the district attorney of San Francisco, a gang member brandishing an AK-47 rifle fatally shot a 29-year old police officer named Isaac Espinoza.

The slaying stunned the city, with many politicians and prominent members of the police calling for the death penalty.

But Harris, who had made opposition to capital punishment a key part of her political campaign to become the city’s top prosecutor, instead decided to pursue a life sentence without parole. She made her decision public just 48 hours after the murder, without informing the widow first.

“She did not call me,” Espinoza told CNN in 2019. “I don’t understand why she went on camera to say that without talking to the family. It’s like, you can’t even wait till he’s buried?”

The backlash was swift. Speaking at the officer’s funeral, Senator Feinstein demanded his killer “pay the ultimate price”. While walking out of the church service, she told reporters that had she known Harris was against the death penalty, she probably wouldn’t have endorsed her.

“[T]here can be no exception to principle,” Harris later wrote in an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, defending her decision.

Long-time civil rights attorney John Burris, who supported Harris’s decision at the time, said he thought it was “politically was not wise for her, but it was a philosophical position she took”.

“She was pretty bold in her position and she did take a lot of heat for it,” he told the BBC. “That was a pretty progressive stand.”

The incident could have been the end of her political ambitions, but Harris, who had grown up with a single mother in the working-class city of Oakland, carried on.

“Is she a political animal? Absolutely not. Is she naturally skilled? Yes,” said Brian Brokaw, who managed Harris’s two successful campaigns for California attorney general in 2010 and 2014. “For her, politics is the means to the end. She is focused on the end result and the impact she can have on people’s lives less than the process.”

Harris seemed to absorb some lessons from her first major decision as San Francisco district attorney. Four years later, she again declined to pursue the death penalty after a dramatic killing, but this time, she better understood how her decision would reverberate.

Tony Bologna had been driving in San Francisco with his three sons when their vehicle was barraged by gunfire. Bologna and two of his sons were killed; his third son was critically injured.

Shortly after the killing, police arrested Edwin Ramon Umaña, an undocumented member of the MS-13 gang who had evidently mistaken the 49-year old Bologna for a sworn enemy.

This time, Harris opted to deliver the difficult news about her prosecutorial decision to Bologna’s widow Danielle herself, recalls Matt Davis, who was representing Danielle Bologna in a civil suit against the city at the time.

“It was no surprise that Danielle had a very strong, negative reaction to the news,” Mr Davis told the BBC in a recent interview. “She made it clear that she was upset, and Kamala listened to her and expressed her sympathies but stayed pretty firm.”

The meeting left an indelible impression on Davis. He had befriended Harris in law school in San Francisco, and when she had first revealed her plans to run for D.A., he remembers thinking she didn’t have a chance.

But he says that painful conversation made him realise he had underestimated her.

“That was not an easy thing to do,” Mr Davis said.

Over the span of her law enforcement career, Harris’s allies sought to paint her as a “progressive prosecutor” committed to criminal justice reform but also tough on crime.

It was a fine line to walk in a liberal city in the country’s largest left-leaning state, and one that critics on both sides of the political aisle say she did not stick to.

As district attorney, she adopted a so-called “smart-on-crime” philosophy, which included initiatives to keep non-violent offenders out of prison by steering them into job training programs and ensuring young offenders remained in school.

Niki Solis, an attorney in the San Francisco public defender’s office who worked opposite Harris in the early 2000s, said she had been receptive to her concerns about how young victims of sex trafficking were being charged with prostitution, as opposed to being treated as victims.

“I realised that she understood issues that a lot of her predecessors and a lot of [district attorneys] up and down the state failed to understand or even acknowledge,” said Ms Solis.

Trump and his allies on the right have sought to play up this time in her career, depicting her as part of a “San Francisco liberal elite”. But on the left of politics, she has been accused of not being reform-minded enough, with some on social media nicknaming her “Kamala the cop”.

But by the time Harris was elected as California’s attorney general, in 2010, her progressive tendencies appeared to have given way to political pragmatism.

“She was seeking more of a national profile. She wanted to make a mark. There was definitely an expectation of an interesting future to come,” said Gil Duran, who worked for Harris in the attorney general’s office for a few months.

“The attorney general – usually a sleepy backwater of an office – was now home to a rising star.”

On the national stage, Harris began to make her mark. In 2012, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Harris threatened to walk away from negotiations on a financial settlement between state attorneys general and five US banks. California was set to receive around $4 billion in the initial deal, and Harris eventually secured $18 billion for the state.

The Harris campaign has highlighted this case on the campaign trail as more proof she’s willing to stand up to powerful interests.

But more recent reporting shows that only $4.5 billion of the settlement ended up going towards California homeowners who had been ripped off by lenders.

In moves that angered some liberals, she implemented a school truancy program state-wide, which some county prosecutors used to arrest parents. And she defied a Supreme Court order to reduce overcrowding in the state’s prisons.

She also reversed her previous position on the death penalty in 2014 when, as attorney general, she appealed a lower court’s ruling that found it was unconstitutional. Now, the prosecutor who once refused to sentence violent murderers to death on the basis that “there is no exception to principle” was defending the state’s right to do just that.

Hadar Aviram, a criminal justice and civil rights professor who petitioned Harris to leave the decision in place, was one of many critics of her stance.

“You are not under any obligation to defend things that are morally unjust,” she told CNN in 2019 of the episode. “If you truly believe that they’re morally unjust and you have an opportunity to take a stand, I think it’s an imperative to do so.”

Former San Francisco city attorney Louise Renne, who worked with Harris when she first left Oakland, said the torrent of criticism she faced over her support for the death penalty was unfair.

“The thing is when you’re state attorney general, you have to defend the law. That’s your obligation,” she told the BBC. “ I don’t regard that as a weakness or a valid criticism at all.”

But Harris was selective about which laws she enforced. In 2004, when Gavin Newsom, then San Francisco’s mayor, decided to allow same-sex weddings, in violation of state law, Harris helped officiate a few of the ceremonies, calling it “one of the most joyful” moments of her career.

Her long record as a prosecutor would prove tricky when, after being elected to the US Senate in 2016, Harris decided to run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

She chose to kick off her 2020 presidential run just blocks away from the Alameda County Courthouse, the same place where she first uttered the words, “for the people” – which would become part of her campaign slogan.

But in the midst of her campaign, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was murdered by a police officer during an arrest, igniting a nationwide racial reckoning and demand for criminal justice reform. Her past defence of the death penalty, and resistance to prison reform, earned her criticism from her party’s left-flank.

She dropped out of the presidential race before the primary contests to choose a Democratic contender had even begun.

Now, as Harris campaigns for president against Donald Trump, she is again calling attention to her prosecutorial bona-fides, but reframed in a new political atmosphere.

While many cities, including San Francisco, experimented with progressive police reform after Floyd’s murder, a spike in crime and homelessness during the pandemic has triggered a public backlash against so-called “soft on crime” policies. Republicans have also heavily focused on political messaging around crime and public safety in recent years.

Harris’s past as a prosecutor is no longer such a liability, and in a race against the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes, the narrative aligns with the political moment.

Notably, at the Democratic National Convention this summer, abolishing the death penalty was dropped from the party platform.

And while in 2020, Harris was trying to win over left-leaning Democrats, she is now explicitly making a pitch for moderate Republicans who may be fed up with Trump. To do that, she has shifted a number of her positions – from border security to single-payer health care – to the centre.

This has led to accusations from her opponents that she is a flip-flopper.

She’s “a chameleon”, Trump’s running mate and Ohio Senator JD Vance told CNN in August. “She pretends to be one thing in front of one audience and she pretends to be something different in front of another audience.”

But Mr Duran, Harris’s former colleague in the attorney general’s office, sees it less as a matter of political scrupulousness and more simply a sign of her political pragmatism.

“I think she does have conviction but it’s really hard to run a campaign on your convictions alone, for the most part,” he said. “The Kamala Harris we’re seeing now is very much poll and focus-group driven.”

What Harris really stands for has been a question that has dogged her throughout her career – and continues to follow her on her bid for the Oval Office. But to Mr Brokaw, her former campaign manager, she has always operated on her own terms.

“She has carved her own path and left a whole bunch of people behind who counted her out and underestimated her,” he said.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: When is the US election and how does it work?

• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power

• REAL STORIES: The moment these Americans decided who to vote for

• 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?

The King and Queen of Spain have been pelted with mud and other objects by angry protesters during a visit to the flood-hit town of Paiporta.

Shouts of “murderer” and “shame” were directed at the royal delegation as they walked through the town – one of the worst-affected areas of the Valencia region.

With mud on their faces and clothes, King Felipe and Queen Letizia were later seen consoling members of the crowd.

More than 200 people were killed in the floods, the worst in Spain for decades. Emergency workers are continuing to comb through underground car parks and tunnels in the hope of finding survivors and recovering bodies.

• Follow live: Angry crowds throw mud at Spain’s king in flood-hit Valencia

There has been anger at a perceived lack of warning and insufficient support from authorities after the floods.

King Felipe and Queen Letizia have been visiting Paiporta, a town that has been severely affected.

Footage showed the king making his way down a pedestrian street, before his bodyguards and police were suddenly overwhelmed by a surge of protesters, hurling insults and screaming.

They struggled to maintain a protective ring around the monarch, as some of the protesters threw mud and objects.

The king engaged with several, even embracing them.

Images showed mud on the faces and clothes of the king, queen and the officials accompanying them, who held umbrellas over the monarch as they departed.

The civil guard and mounted officers were later seen attempting to disperse the angry crowd.

It comes after residents criticised local authorities over their response to catastrophic flooding.

Juan Bordera, a member of the Valencian parliament, called the king’s visit “a very bad decision”.

Authorities “didn’t listen to any warnings,” Mr Bordera told the BBC.

“It’s logical that the people are angry, it’s logical that the people didn’t understand why this visit is so urgent,” he added.

In a post on X, the president of Valencia’s parliament, Carlos Mazón, said he understood the public’s anger and praised the king’s “exemplary” response.

On Saturday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez ordered 10,000 more troops, police officers and civil guards to the area.

He said the deployment was Spain’s largest in peacetime. But he added that he was aware the response was “not enough” and acknowledged “severe problems and shortages”.

The flooding began on Tuesday, following a period of intense rainfall. Floodwaters quickly caused bridges to collapse and covered towns with thick mud.

Many communities were cut off, left without access to water, food, electricity and other basic services.

By Saturday, the death toll from the flooding rose to 211, with many more feared missing.

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

Some areas have been particularly devastated. Authorities in town of Paiporta, visited today by the royal couple, have reported at least 62 deaths.

The number of babies born in England and Wales is now the lowest since the 1970s, official statistics show.

The fertility rate – which measures how many children are born per woman during her child-bearing years – is the lowest on record at 1.44. Scotland’s is even lower at 1.3.

Britain is not unique – most countries are experiencing declining fertility and some are even going to great lengths to create a baby boom.

So what’s causing the fall-off in fertility? There’s the high cost of bringing up children, the pressure to stay in work and the challenge of finding the right partner.

But there’s also evidence that more and more young adults don’t plan on having any children at all.

BBC News has spoken to two women and two men in their thirties – the average age at which people in England and Wales become parents – to get their thoughts on the issue.

HGV driver Chris Taylor and dog groomer Jemma Wrathmell jointly earn an income of about £60,000 and have been together for 11 years.

The couple, who live in Wakefield in West Yorkshire, considered having children.

“We have had deep conversations where we go through the options and discuss things like school, cost and routine,” Gemma says.

But the conclusion was that the cost was too high.

“After all our bills and essentials there is no room in the budget to accommodate a child,” Chris says. “We don’t see how our finances will get any better within the next few years.”

As a result, they have taken a “definitive decision” – Chris is seeking to have a vasectomy, after years of Gemma having a contraceptive implant.

“Some people have said you’ll change your mind, but they know it’s our decision,” says Jemma.

“I’m also not that maternal,” she adds.

Ellie Lambert, who lives in Sheffield, wants to have children but says she hasn’t found a suitable partner.

Two years ago, she spent £18,000 on two cycles of egg freezing. “I find it really frustrating, it’s a lot of cost for something that may not ever lead to anything,” she says.

She hopes to use them if she meets someone, or if she reaches a financial situation where she can “go it alone” with the aid of a sperm donor.

Ellie says she ‘s concerned about the additional financial pressure on single-parent households.

A report from the Child Poverty Action Group last year found the average cost of raising a child to age 18 was £166,000 for a couple and £220,000 for a lone parent.

Though Ellie thought she would meet someone by her late 20s, “despite proactively being on all of the apps, it just didn’t happen.”

She says dating had become “fruitless”, citing the seemingly endless choice that dating apps offer as a factor, with fewer people wanting to commit.

But going it alone would be “a big decision”, says Ellie, who considers herself fortunate to earn a good salary.

Having already spent her savings on egg freezing, she says it would cost a further £10,000 to use a sperm donor with IVF.

For Dami Olonisakin, a sex and relationships podcaster who lives in London, improvements in fertility treatments – such as egg freezing – are “empowering” and give women “more control than ever”.

Motherhood, she says, is not something to “be taken lightly”.

“Childcare costs are soaring, maternity policies are limited, women basically have to think really hard,” she says.

She also wants to have the “support system” of a long-term partner in place before having children.

But she isn’t in a hurry. “I don’t feel I’m in a rush to settle down and have kids just because it’s expected,” she says.

Instead she is focusing on her career after growing up in a household that “didn’t have anything”.

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘I am never ever putting a child through this’,” she says.

“[My parents] absolutely did their best, but I’ve always said I will not have a child until I’m… ready.”

Kari Aaron Clark, a senior research fellow at the Royal Academy of Engineering, earns £53,000 but feels he can’t afford to raise a child in London.

Four years ago, his salary was £22,000 while completing his PhD.

His partner Kaitlyn, who is currently a PhD student, is under similar financial strain.

It means despite Kari’s above-average salary, he has had less time to save for a property – something he thinks is essential before becoming a parent because of the “relatively insecure” nature of renting.

He also cites the costs of childcare. According to a recent report by children’s charity Coram, the average weekly price for a full-time childcare place for children under three in the UK is about £300, compared with nearly £430 in inner London.

Kari says his views are shared by Kaitlyn – and they are both concerned about the effects of the climate crisis.

“I’m quite happy with the idea of adopting. That way I’m helping someone already struggling in the system,” he says.

“I can adopt after they’ve got through the childcare stage.”

But despite his current pessimism about the viability of becoming a biological parent, Kari says he “wouldn’t write it off”.

This all raises the question of what the future holds if fewer children are being born.

Declining fertility rates are not just about people delaying parenthood, but about a growing trend of people not having children, says Brienna Perelli-Harris, professor of demography at the University of Southampton.

Data from the recent UK Generations and Gender Survey suggests that childless adults today are far less confident they will have children, with a quarter of 18 to 25-year-olds saying they would probably or definitely not have a child.

“Gen Z are more likely to want to stay childless,” she says. “Before, it might have been more of a taboo – it’s now more acceptable.

“And it’s down to economic factors like future income, childcare costs and employment.”

“In the long term… the population will start to shrink,” Prof Perelli-Harris adds.

“If it gets to 1.3 [children per woman] – that’s seen as very low and government should start getting concerned.”

Concerns have previously been raised about shrinking fertility rates in countries where there’s long been a downward trend, including the need for more young people to work as carers for an ageing population and pay tax.

But populations can continue to grow for a long time after fertility falls below 2.1 children per woman, known as the replacement level – the number of children required to ensure a population replaces itself from one generation to the next – the ONS says.

This is the case in the UK and other countries like Spain and Italy, where the fertility rate is even lower.

“Immigration can stall population decline or even reverse it,” says Prof Perelli-Harris.

“I do not think we will see the UK population start to decline for the foreseeable future, although the ageing of the population will become even more pronounced.”

Brat summer might be over as we grapple with how dark it is at 4pm, but the concept of being a brat – “pack of cigs and a Bic lighter”, according to the singer Charli XCX – lives on.

There’s Rosalia gifting Charli XCX a bouquet of cigarettes on her birthday, Addison Rae smoking not one but two at the same time in her music video Aquamarine, and the actor Paul Mescal saying he refused to give up smoking when getting into shape for Gladiator II.

The risks of smoking are well known – it’s still the leading cause of preventable death in the UK and is responsible for nearly 78,000 deaths annually.

GP and cancer specialist Dr Misra-Sharp says even in low quantities, smoking increases the risk of serious diseases like lung cancer, which has a 90% five-year mortality rate.

Despite this, singers, actors and influencers seem to be bringing smoking back into vogue – quite literally, with cigarettes making a return as on the New York Fashion Week runways earlier this year as accessories.

So, why are cigarettes being glamorised again?

Lucy, a 20-year-old university student, says she took up smoking recently because “it’s just what everyone does”.

Almost all her friends also smoke and she says it’s more than just a habit, it’s an aesthetic.

“I definitely think everyone trying to be brat has influenced people to start smoking because Charli herself says you have to have a pack of cigs if you really want to embody the vibe.”

Charli XCX isn’t the only celebrity to inadvertently become a so-called cigfluencer.

There are now Instagram accounts which share snaps of hundreds of celebs like Dua Lipa, Chappell Roan and Anya Taylor-Joy smoking.

The stereotypical image of a smoker may once have been an old, overweight man with rotting teeth, but that’s now been replaced by the young and glamorous celebrities who pout at the camera mysteriously with a Marlboro Gold in hand.

The aesthetic of these smoking celebs is reminiscent of the noughties when the likes of Kate Moss and Jennifer Anniston would step out in low-rise jeans and baby tees with a cigarette on their lips.

Journalist Olivia Petter says the cigarette has become a symbol that represents our nostalgia towards a bygone era of carefreeness, frivolity and hedonism and it’s making an comeback in pop culture.

Emerald Fennell’s seductive and scandalous thriller Saltburn perfectly encapsulated the mid-noughties and reminded us of a time where it was legal to smoke indoors.

Not only were there promo pics for the film of Jacob Elordi’s character smoking topless, but smoking was such an integral part that actor Archie Madekwe (who plays Farleigh) requested cigarette lessons because he had never smoked one before.

According to Truth Initiative, a nonprofit health organisation against smoking, nine out of the 10 films nominated for the Oscars top prize earlier this year featured smoking, which is up from the seven in the year before.

Some of 2024’s biggest songs have also featured tobacco imagery – Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga’s Die With A Smile shows Gaga smoking as she plays the piano and sings.

Jessica, a 26-year-old who works in marketing, says smoking has “become so normalised again”.

“I didn’t know anyone that smoked a few years ago but now it seems like everyone is doing it and you sort of forget how bad it is for you.”

A recent estimate from Cancer Research suggests that around 350 young people still take up smoking each day in the UK and nearly one in 10 15-year-olds say they sometimes smoke.

But, overall, the number of young people smoking is declining – official estimates show that fewer than one out of every 10 young adults in the UK smoke cigarettes – a steep drop from a quarter of 18-24-year-olds 12 years ago.

Although the number of young people smoking is in decline, vaping has soared in popularity – one out of every seven 18-24-year-olds who never regularly smoked now use e-cigarettes.

Jessica used to vape but says “now everyone does it, it’s just not cool any more” – and it seems the normality of vaping is causing some people to switch to cigarettes.

In a recent video posted on TikTok, singer Addison Rae responded to a question about vaping by saying: “Ew, I hate vaping. Smoke a cigarette!”

US-based doctor James Hook tells the BBC he has seen cases of young people taking up smoking after vaping.

He thinks the way smoking is glamorised by celebrities means cigarettes “give young people a certain credibility those older than them do not have to work as hard for”.

He adds that many of them are “emulating older people that are considered sophisticated, trendy or appealing”.

Dr Hook also says that UK authorities taking a tougher stance on smoking might be encouraging people to rebel.

“There will always be individuals who challenge the status quo so it should come as no surprise a ban on something only adds fuel to the fire of rebellion and a threat to a person’s sense of independence.”

The government is planning one of the toughest smoking laws in the world which would eventually ban the sale of cigarettes in the UK as the new law will effectively raise the legal age people can buy cigarettes by one year every year.

With the government’s intent on stamping out the deadly habit, the resurgence of the cigarette – and the cigfluencers – may be more of a passing trend than a lasting cultural shift, particularly as its appeal is less about the act itself and more about the aesthetic and symbolism it represents.

Meet Gabriela. She’s in her forties, Latina, and lives in Miami. She’s not that into politics, but she does care about the economy – and abortion rights. And she doesn’t know if she’ll vote – or who for. The only catch? She’s not real.

Gabriela’s one of five fictional characters I created in 2022 to monitor how different people, with different political views, are targeted by content on social media. She’s been part of an ongoing experiment for the BBC’s Americast podcast, investigating how social media algorithms may be influencing people’s vote.

With election day fast approaching, it’s the undecided and disillusioned voters who the two main presidential candidates are making last ditch attempts to win over. How is the battle unfolding over their different social media feeds?

While some of these “undercover voters”, as we call them, were created to represent a certain political point of view based on data from the Pew Research Centre, Gabriela began by essentially expressing no interest in politics at all on her social media feeds. But over the past two years her feeds have morphed as I’ve watched and followed the content she’s recommended.

How do you create an undercover voter? First, I made her profiles across the major social media sites – X, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. I kept her account private, and, since she wasn’t political, had her follow and engage with content that had nothing to do with politics – coupon pages, dance videos, community groups and other Spanish-language content.

All five characters have private accounts, and no friends.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?

These social media profiles can’t offer an exhaustive view into what every voter is being pushed online, but they can offer an insight into the impact of social media sites this election.

Whenever she was recommended content on any of the platforms, I engaged with it – whether it was watching the latest TikTok dance or following a Facebook page about saving at the supermarket – to see what the algorithms would recommend to Gabriela next.

Soon, she was being recommended political content, too.

Now there’s a war raging inside her feeds between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris – and who appears to have the upper hand is different depending on which social media site she looks at.

Gabriela’s feed on X is dominated by stand-out moments from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, mainly from profiles that have purchased blue ticks on the site.

One popular meme, for example, featured four images from Trump’s campaign, from his mugshot to his recent photo-op riding in a garbage truck. Alongside the photos are maps of the US showing states switching to red for the Republicans.

“Seems accurate” reads the cation. The message was clear: Trump is making a comeback.

Content created and shared by Trump’s very active supporters on X rack up tens of millions of views. While there are also groups of accounts supporting Harris, they didn’t make it to Gabriela’s feed as often. Posts about Trump also tended to focus on him as a person – when policy was mentioned, it was usually about immigration or the economy.

A major change occurred at X after I set up Gabriela’s profile in August 2022: Elon Musk bought the social media company. Since his takeover of Twitter in October 2022, Mr Musk has made a number of changes – from renaming it X to offering a paid-for premium service.

There have also been changes to the algorithm, affecting what kinds of content gets the most traction.

Now, almost every time I open Gabriela’s feed on X, I see a post from Mr Musk himself close to the top. He repeatedly posts in support of Trump, and in recent days he’s re-shared some unfounded claims of election fraud. This is very different from what her feed looked like when she first created her account.

One recent post Mr Musk re-shared, which her profile was recommended, spread unfounded rumours about election officials in Colorado being possibly complicit in voter fraud.

The post Mr Musk re-shared referred to an employee error exposing passwords for some election equipment.

According to officials in the state, though, the “vote counting equipment requires two passwords to access, and those passwords are kept separately” which they say means “election system remains completely secure” following the error.

I spent time this summer with election officials in a centre where the votes are counted in Jefferson county, Colorado.

One IT worker called Cuong told me how since 2020, he and his colleagues have been repeatedly “targeted with harassment, accusations of us doing nefarious things”, triggered by unfounded allegations of – for example – hacked or broken voting machines.

Gabriela’s feed on TikTok, on the other hand, is frequently recommended montages of Kamala Harris, often speaking at rallies. These are created by supporters and similar to the kinds of posts users create to support their favourite celebrity or musician.

One reads “America is ready for Kamala Harris” from an account called Latinos for Harris.

The clips tend to focus on Harris as a person, rather than her policies – although several do reference the topic of abortion rights and the issue of personal freedom.

When a comedian at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage”, it sparked backlash from many in the Latino community.

Gabriela’s TikTok feed has featured some video clips of that moment, or commentary on that moment, frequently with Spanish captions taking offence to those comments.

The algorithm pushed content highly relevant to Gabriela’s identity as a Latina voter.

There’s some content from the official accounts belonging to both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s campaigns on her feed too.

One campaign video shows Harris alongside Michelle Obama in front of an American flag declaring this election is “going to be close”, with 7.7 millions views.

Another shows Donald Trump dancing alongside popular streamer Adin Ross. That has 67.1 million views – showing how his content is having a huge reach, even if not so much on Gabriela’s feed.

While TikTok prohibits political ads, it’s not the same on YouTube, where Gabriela has been targeted by several about both of the main candidates. The paid-for ads she receives tend to focus on the economy. A video from Harris’s campaign team saying she will “cut taxes for 100 million working Americans”. Another advert from Trump’s team declares “there’s no time to waste! Make a plan, get to the polls & vote Trump”.

A lot of this content, whether ads or posts from the campaigns and supporters, seems focused on motivating people to actually go out and vote, rather than change their minds about a topic.

Like her TikTok feed, Gabriela’s YouTube leans towards partisan political content, opinions and campaign messages. But I’ve not seen the same kinds of posts pushing unsupported claims of voter fraud that I’ve spotted on Gabriela’s X feed. Her X feed has been overtaken by almost entirely political posts.

Her Instagram and Facebook accounts have remained fairly apolitical. Meta, which owns both of the social media companies, decided to stop recommending political content from accounts that users don’t already follow earlier this year.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: All you need to know about the vote
• 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
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

The biggest changes I’ve spotted on Gabriela’s social media feeds over the two years I’ve been running her profile have happened on X.

In recent weeks, Mr Musk has been very vocal about his support for Trump, which he’s entitled to do as a private citizen. He has also accused Twitter of old – as well as other social media sites – of suppressing right-wing view points. And he has previously said he believes X is a space for all political opinions.

But Gabriela’s feed shows how, at least to one originally neutral viewer, the site skewered in Trump’s favour – which appears to be in part because of changes to how the site works under Mr Musk’s tenure.

Last month, X also changed its rules so accounts can make money according to engagement from premium accounts – likes, shares and comments – rather than the ads that pop up under their posts.

I investigated how these changes helped some users make thousands of dollars, they say, from sharing content that included election misinformation, AI-generated images and unfounded conspiracy theories.

X’s user base is smaller than lots of other sites. But it is the home of politicians, activists and journalists and screengrabs from its site can migrate onto larger platforms.

Another significant but less extreme shift has occurred on Gabriela’s TikTok feed.

Before she didn’t see much about the Democrats, but after Joe Biden announced he was no longer running to be President her feed has been increasingly flooded with pro-Kamala Harris videos.

Because Gabriela isn’t real, it’s impossible to know how much she would react to any of these social media posts. Plenty of factors beyond the online world could shape her decision.

One thing’s for sure, though, my previously apolitical voter has not been able to avoid the deluge of politics – and algorithms on the sites, which appear to favour engagement over all else, are shaping the way that she receives politics through her feeds. Who and how she votes could depend on which social media site she trusts and relies on.

X did not respond to questions from the BBC. X says online that its priority is to protect and defend the user’s voice. All of the other major social media companies say they have policies and measures in place to protect users from disinformation and hate.

The US and Israel “will definitely receive a crushing response”, Iran’s supreme leader has said, following an Israeli attack on Iran a week ago.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made the comments while speaking to students on Saturday ahead of the 45th anniversary of the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran.

The threat comes as Iran assesses whether and how to respond to Israel’s attack last month, that Iran said killed four soldiers, which was in retaliation for an Iranian missile attack against Israel earlier in October.

The Iranian attack came in response to the killings of the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas – Iranian-backed armed groups fighting Israel – and a senior Iranian commander.

Khamenei said Iran’s enemies, including Israel and the US, “will definitely receive a crushing response to what they are doing to Iran, the Iranian people, and the resistance front”.

Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance” is an alliance of Tehran-backed groups that include Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and well-armed groups in Iraq and Syria. Most have been designated as terrorist entities by some Western states.

Israel is said to have inflicted severe damage on Iranian air defences and missile capacities in its 26 October attack, even though Iran has not admitted this.

Israel sees Iran as the crucial backer of the Hamas attacks which killed about 1,200 people on 7 October last year.

More than 250 were also taken into the Gaza Strip as hostages.

Since then, Israel has launched a major operation in Gaza, during which more than 43,300 people have been killed, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Israel also went on the offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon in September, after almost a year of cross-border fighting and rocket fire, which Hezbollah had launched in support of Palestinians the day after the Hamas attacks.

Israel said it wanted to ensure the safe return of tens of thousands of residents from northern Israel displaced by the conflict.

More than 2,800 people have been killed in Lebanon since then, and 1.2 million others displaced, according to Lebanese authorities.

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

Relations between the US and Iran have not properly stabilised since 4 November 1979, when Iranian protesters seized more than 50 US diplomats and embassy staff, triggering a hostage drama that lasted 444 days.

Unprecedented air pollution in the Pakistani city of Lahore has forced authorities to close all primary schools for a week.

From Monday, 50% of office workers will also work from home, as part of a “green lockdown” plan. Other measures include bans on engine-powered rickshaws and vendors that barbecue without filters.

“This smog is very harmful for children, masks should be mandatory in schools,” Punjab Senior Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said.

Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city, topped the world list of cities with the most polluted air for a second time on Sunday.

The air quality index, which measures a range of pollutants, exceeded 1,000 on Saturday, well above the benchmark of 300 considered “dangerous” by the World Health Organization, according to data from IQAir.

The level of fine particulate matter in the air, the most damaging to health, also soared well into hazardous levels.

Raja Jehangir Anwar, a senior environment official, said the “biggest headache” causing the smog was the practice of burning crop waste, known as stubble, across the Indian border.

Aurangzeb said the fumes were “being carried by strong winds into Pakistan”.

“This cannot be solved without talks with India,” she said, adding that the provincial government would initiate such discussions through the foreign ministry.

The government is urging people to stay indoors and avoid unnecessary travel.

Vehicles equipped with pumps are spraying water into the air to help control the smog level. Construction work has been halted in certain areas.

The situation will be assessed again next Saturday to establish whether schools should remain shut.

Inhaling toxic air can have catastrophic health consequences, including strokes, heart disease, lung cancer and some respiratory diseases, according to the WHO.

Last month pupils were banned from outdoor exercise until January and school hours were adjusted to prevent children from travelling when pollution levels are the highest.

“As a mother, I am full of anxiety,” 42-year-old Lilly Mirza told AFP news agency.

“Last year was not this bad… Somebody needs to tell us what has happened. Did a pollution bomb explode somewhere?”

The smog crisis is worse in winter, when cold, denser air traps pollutants closer to the ground.

Joe Biden has always regarded two places as home – Ireland and Delaware.

When he leaves the White House in a matter of months he will head to the latter, and in that state there is some anger at the way he lost his chance to serve a second term as President.

Yet even his supporters accept that the 81-year-old was showing his age when his Democratic Party colleagues told him it was time to leave the race.

“I think it would have run him into the ground for sure, to have a campaign to try to come up above the (polling) numbers that have been so horrible for the whole time he has been in office,” says Kathy Magner.

Kathy Magner’s father worked with Biden’s dad 50 years ago and she has known him for decades.

“I think what time he has left after the presidency, he can enjoy it knowing he did the best he could,” she says.

Kathy helps run Limestone Presbyterian Church in Wilmington and one of her jobs is to put up a message with meaning on a sign at the front of the building.

Just days ahead of the election, when America decides between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the sign states: ‘Hate never solves problems. It creates them.’

There seems little doubt that those words are a nod towards how politically divisive the last few months have been.

It has even had an impact within the congregation here.

“We have had family members who have disowned each other because they are on the other side,” says Kathy.

“I have a sister-in-law who I will not talk to, because if I call her we end up shouting and I just hang up on her.”

Last year Limestone Presbyterian helped to host Christian teenagers from Northern Ireland as part of a cross-community initiative.

The pastor of the church says those visits gave him some optimism that America’s divisions could be overcome.

“What I found interesting was the history of the Ulster Project,” says Reverend Tim Bostick.

“Of how it grew out of the Catholic and Protestant challenges that Northern Ireland had gone through.

“And learning to appreciate and respect each other through our differences.

“We need more of that!”

But in the centre of Wilmington, outside the railroad station named after Joseph R Biden Jr. it was clear that not everyone agreed.

One Trump supporter told me that America was a worse place now because of Biden.

And when I asked him what his presidency would be remembered for, he said two words: “His senility.”

Generally though I found a fondness for the outgoing President who is a familiar figure in the city.

One of his favourite places to eat is the Charcoal Pit diner.

Inside the 1950s-themed restaurant there are pictures of visits by both Biden and the man he served as vice-president Barack Obama.

While understandably he has been a less regular visitor during the last four years, the diner’s staff say he still gets food to take out when he’s in Delaware.

“He eats cheesesteaks and cheeseburgers… And thick black and white shakes with extra ice cream,” says the chef Lupe Avilez.

“And he talks to you like he’s known you forever.”

Like their most famous regular, Lupe’s wife Mary has familial links to Ireland. And she says Biden’s love of the island is obvious even in the west wing.

“I know someone that works in a bank locally and she was in the Oval Office a week ago,” reveals Mary.

“She says that he has a rugby ball signed by all the players… And a big photo album full of pictures of everywhere he went in Ireland.

“She said it was so nice to see.”

Joe Biden’s presidential visit to Ireland last year was memorable, personal and political.

The trip was a celebration of his roots but also a chance to throw his leadership weight behind political progress in Northern Ireland.

He has backed that up by encouraging trans-Atlantic investment from America through his economic envoy, Joe Kennedy III.

Securing big sums is always difficult but Biden’s pick for the role showed he was serious in trying to make it work.

Kennedy is charismatic, well-connected and part of a Democratic party dynasty with their own Irish links.

But he indicated recently on BBC Radio Ulster’s Good Morning Ulster programme that he is likely to move on when this Presidency ends in January.

Whether Kennedy will be replaced and how important Ireland (north and south) will be in the next White House is not exactly clear, no matter who wins.

Once US politicians fretted over the Irish-American vote. This election has shown how much its importance has faded into the distance, with both campaigns much more concerned about getting the likes of Black and Latino voters to the ballot box.

However, Mary Avilez believes it still matters.

“I think it is important because we need to have relationships with other countries,” she insists.

Not everyone agrees. Many commentators suggest the tone and priorities of recent debates indicate that America is looking ever inward, as it finally decides who should be its next leader.

BBC Radio Ulster’s Good Morning Ulster programme will be live from the United States from Monday 4 November until Friday 8 November with Chris bringing you all the latest news and reaction in the presidential election.