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.

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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.

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Moldova’s pro-EU President Maia Sandu has claimed a second term after a tense election run-off seen as a choice between Europe and Russia.

With most preliminary results counted, Sandu was leading with almost 55% of the vote, and in a late-night speech she promised to be president for all Moldovans.

Her rival Alexandr Stoianoglo, who was backed by the pro-Russian Party of Socialists, had promised a closer relationship with Moscow.

During the vote, the president’s national security adviser said there had been “massive interference” from Russia in Moldova’s electoral process that had “high potential to distort the outcome”.

Russia had already denied meddling in the vote, which came a week after another key Eastern European election in Georgia, whose president said it had been a “Russian special operation”.

Stoianoglo, who was fired as prosecutor general by Sandu, has denied being pro-Kremlin.

As polls closed, both Maia Sandu, 52, and her rival thanked voters, with Stoianoglo speaking in Russian as well as Romanian. Although Romanian is Moldova’s main language, Russian is widely spoken because of its Soviet past.

Voting ended in Moldova at 21:00 (19:00 GMT), with a 54% turnout higher than four years ago, and especially high among expat voters at polling stations abroad.

Stoianoglo took an early lead and won the vote in Moldova itself with more than 51%, according to the preliminary results. Sandu was far ahead in the capital Chisinau, and was completely dominant among expat voters.

As she overtook her challenger late on Sunday night, there was cheering at her campaign headquarters and chants of “victory”.

In a hoarse voice she praised her compatriots for saving Moldova and giving “a lesson in democracy, worthy of being written in history books”.

Then, moving into Russian, she said: “I have heard your voice – both those who supported me and those who voted for Mr. Stoianoglo. In our choice for a dignified future, no-one lost… we need to stand united.”

Maia Sandu’s foreign policy adviser, Olga Rosca, told the BBC she was proud of the result.

Asked whether she was surprised that Stoianoglo had won in Moldova itself, she said the vote in Moldova and abroad should be seen as one and the same: “We never divide people into Moldovans at home and expatriates – we see Moldovans as one family.”

With elections coming next year she said the president had “clearly indicated she has heard the mood for change. On several occasions between the [two presidential] votes she said the fight against corruption must be intensified and justice reform must be accelerated – she’s committed to this work”.

The final result will be declared on Monday.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen congratulated Sandu, saying “it takes a rare kind of strength to overcome the challenges you’ve faced in this election.

“I’m glad to continue working with you towards a European future for Moldova and its people,” her message on X said.

Casting his ballot, Alexandr Stoianoglo had promised to be an “apolitical president”, and that he had voted for “a Moldova that should develop in harmony with both the West and the East”.

Stoianoglo polled particularly well in rural areas and the south, while Sandu was ahead in the cities and with young voters.

After casting her ballot, Sandu had warned of “thieves” who sought to buy their vote and their country.

Presidential national security adviser Stanislav Secrieru said Russia had organised buses and large charter flights to bring voters to polling stations.

Bomb scares had briefly disrupted voting in Moldova, at UK polling stations in Liverpool and Northampton and at Frankfurt and Kaiserslautern in Germany, he added.

A Soviet republic for 51 years, Moldova is flanked by Ukraine and Romania and one of Europe’s poorest countries. It has a population of 2.5 million and an expat population of 1.2 million.

Moldova’s authorities have long warned that a fugitive oligarch called Ilan Shor has spent $39m (£30m) trying to buy the election for Moscow with handouts to 138,000 Moldovans.

Shor, who is based in Moscow, denies wrongdoing but did promise cash payments to anyone prepared to back his call for a “firm No” to the EU.

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

There were queues at polling stations in Moscow, Italy and among voters from a mainly Russian-speaking breakaway region of Transnistria, who had to cross the River Dniester into Moldovan-controlled territory to vote. Transnistria is home to a Russian military base and a huge arms depot.

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.

Although Sandu had easily won the first round of the vote, several candidates swung behind Stoianoglo, although the third-placed candidate refused to back either of the two.

The first round coincided with a nail-biting referendum on backing a change to the constitution embracing the commitment to join the EU.

In the end the vote passed by a tiny margin in favour, and Maia Sandu said there had been clear evidence of attempts to buy 300,000 votes.

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.

The King and Queen of Spain have been pelted with mud and other objects by angry protesters during a visit to flood-hit Valencia.

Shouts of “murderer” and “shame” were directed at the royal couple, Spain’s prime minister and other leaders as they walked through the town of Paiporta – one of the worst-affected in the 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.

There has been anger at a perceived lack of warning and insufficient support from authorities after the floods.

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 their entourage, who held umbrellas over the monarch as they departed.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and the head of Valencian regional government, Carlos Mazón, joined the royal couple on the visit, but were swiftly evacuated as the crowd grew increasingly hostile.

Spanish media reports that objects were hurled at Sánchez, while footage verified by the BBC appears to show stones being thrown at his car as he was driven away.

After he left, the crowd chanted: “Where is Sánchez?”

“I’m just 16,” one boy, Pau, told the BBC through tears. “We’re helping – and the leaders do nothing. People are still dying. I can’t stand this anymore.”

Another woman said: “They left us to die. We’ve lost everything: our businesses, our homes, our dreams.”

The civil guard and mounted officers were later seen attempting to disperse the angry crowd.

The royal entourage had intended to travel on to Chiva, another town in the Valencia province badly impacted by the flooding, but that visit has since been postponed.

The king later said he understood the “anger and frustration” of the protestors in a video posted on the royal household’s Instagram account.

The mayor of Paiporta, Maribel Albalat, told the BBC she was shocked by the violence, but that she understood “the frustration and desperation of the people”.

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.

On Saturday, 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 enveloped towns in thick mud.

Many communities were cut off, left without access to water, food, electricity and other basic services.

On Sunday, the death toll from the flooding rose to 217, 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 Paiporta, the town visited today by the royal delegation, have reported at least 62 deaths.

Spain’s meteorological agency AEMET issued its highest level of alert on Sunday for parts of southern Valencia – including the cities of Alzira, Cullera and Gandia.

Intense storms forecast to pass the area will not be on the scale of Tuesday’s, the agency said, with 90mm (3.45 inches) of rainfall expected.

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India recently announced a host of ambitious space projects and approved 227bn rupees ($2.7bn; £2.1bn) for them.

The plans include the next phase of India’s historic mission to the Moon, sending an orbiter to Venus, building of the first phase of the country’s maiden space station and development of a new reusable heavy-lifting rocket to launch satellites.

It’s the single largest allocation of funds ever for space projects in India, but considering the scale and complexity of the projects, they are far from lavish and have once again brought into focus the cost-effectiveness of India’s space programme.

Experts around the world have marvelled at how little Indian Space Research Organisation’s (Isro) Moon, Mars and solar missions have cost. India spent $74m on the Mars orbiter Mangalyaan and $75m on last year’s historic Chandrayaan-3 – less than the $100m spent on the sci-fi thriller Gravity.

Nasa’s Maven orbiter had cost $582m and Russia’s Luna-25, which crashed on to the Moon’s surface two days before Chandrayaan-3’s landing, had cost 12.6bn roubles ($133m).

Despite the low cost, scientists say India is punching much above its weight by aiming to do valuable work.

Chandrayaan-1 was the first to confirm the presence of water in lunar soil and Mangalyaan carried a payload to study methane in the atmosphere of Mars. Images and data sent by Chandrayaan-3 are being looked at with great interest by space enthusiasts around the world.

So how does India keep the costs so low?

Retired civil servant Sisir Kumar Das, who looked after Isro’s finances for more than two decades, says the frugality can be traced back to the 1960s, when scientists first pitched a space programme to the government.

India had gained independence from British colonial rule only in 1947 and the country was struggling to feed its population and build enough schools and hospitals.

“Isro’s founder and scientist Vikram Sarabhai had to convince the government that a space programme was not just a sophisticated luxury that had no place in a poor country like India. He explained that satellites could help India serve its citizens better,” Mr Das told the BBC.

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But India’s space programme has always had to work with a tight budget in a country with conflicting needs and demands. Photographs from the 1960s and 70s show scientists carrying rockets and satellites on cycles or even a bullock cart.

Decades later and after several successful interplanetary missions, Isro’s budget remains modest. This year, India’s budgetary allocation for its space programme is 130bn rupees ($1.55bn) – Nasa’s budget for the year is $25bn.

Mr Das says one of the main reasons why Isro’s missions are so cheap is the fact that all its technology is home-grown and machines are manufactured in India.

In 1974, after Delhi conducted its first nuclear test and the West imposed an embargo, banning transfer of technology to India, the restrictions were “turned into a blessing in disguise” for the space programme, he adds.

“Our scientists used it as an incentive to develop their own technology. All the equipment they needed was manufactured indigenously – and the salaries and cost of labour were decidedly less here than in the US or Europe.”

Science writer Pallava Bagla says that unlike Isro, Nasa outsources satellite manufacturing to private companies and also takes out insurance for its missions, which add to their costs.

“Also, unlike Nasa, India doesn’t do engineering models which are used for testing a project before the actual launch. We do only a single model and it’s meant to fly. It’s risky, there are chances of crash, but that’s the risk we take. And we are able to take it because it’s a government programme.”

Mylswamy Annadurai, chief of India’s first and second Moon missions and Mars mission, told the BBC that Isro employs far fewer people and pays lower salaries, which makes Indian projects competitive.

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He says he “led small dedicated teams of less than 10 and people often worked extended hours without any overtime payments” because they were so passionate about what they did.

The tight budget for the projects, he said, sometimes sent them back to the drawing board, allowed them to think out of the box and led to new innovations.

“For Chandrayaan-1, the allocated budget was $89m and that was okay for the original configuration. But subsequently, it was decided that the spacecraft would carry a Moon impact probe which meant an additional 35kg.”

Scientists had two choices – use a heavier rocket to carry the mission, but that would cost more, or remove some of the hardware to lighten the load.

“We chose the second option. We reduced the number of thrusters from 16 to eight and pressure tanks and batteries were reduced from two to one.”

Reducing the number of batteries, Mr Annadurai says, meant the launch had to take place before the end of 2008.

“That would give the spacecraft two years while it went around the Moon without encountering a long solar eclipse, which would impact its ability to recharge. So we had to maintain a strict work schedule to meet the launch deadline.”

Mangalyaan cost so little, Mr Annadurai says, “because we used most of the hardware we had already designed for Chandrayaan-2 after the second Moon mission got delayed”.

Mr Bagla says India’s space programme coming at such low cost is “an amazing feat”. But as India scales up, the cost could rise.

At the moment, he says, India uses small rocket launchers because they don’t have anything stronger. But that means India’s spacecraft take much longer to reach their destination.

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So, when Chandrayaan-3 was launched, it orbited the Earth several times before it was sling-shot into the lunar orbit, where it went around the Moon a few times before landing. On the other hand, Russia’s Luna-25 escaped the Earth’s gravity quickly riding a powerful Soyuz rocket.

“We used Mother Earth’s gravity to nudge us to the Moon. It took us weeks and a lot of resourceful planning. Isro has mastered this and done it successfully so many times.”

But, Mr Bagla says, India has announced plans to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2040 and it would need a more powerful rocket to fly the astronauts there quicker.

The government recently said work on this new rocket had already been approved and it would be ready by 2032. This Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV) will be able to carry more weight but also cost more.

Also, Mr Bagla says, India is in the process of opening up the space sector to private players and it’s unlikely that costs will remain so low once that happens.

Along a small street in Nepal’s Bhaktapur city stands an unassuming building with a strange name – the Museum of Stolen Art.

Inside it are rooms filled with statues of Nepal’s sacred gods and goddesses.

Among them is the Saraswati sculpture. Sitting atop a lotus, the Hindu goddess of wisdom holds a book, prayer beads and a classical instrument called a veena in her four hands.

But like all the other sculptures in the room, the statue is a fake.

The Saraswati is one of 45 replicas in the museum, which will have an official site in Panauti, set to open to the public in 2026.

The museum is the brainchild of Nepalese conservationist Rabindra Puri, who is spearheading a mission to secure the return of dozens of Nepal’s stolen artefacts, many of which are scattered across museums, auction houses or private collections in countries like the US, UK and France.

In the past five years, he has hired half a dozen craftsmen to create replicas of these statues, each taking between three months and a year to finish. The museum has not received any government funding.

His mission is to secure the return of these stolen artefacts – in exchange for the replicas he has created.

In Nepal, such statues reside in temples all across the country and are regarded as part of the country’s “living culture”, rather than mere showpieces, says Sanjay Adhikari, the secretary of the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign.

Many are worshipped by locals every day, with some followers offering food and flowers to the gods.

“An old lady told me she used to worship Saraswati daily,” says Mr Puri. “When she found out the idol was stolen, she felt more depressed than when her husband passed away.”

It is also common for followers to touch these statues for blessings – meaning they are also rarely guarded – leaving them wide open for thieves.

Nepal has categorised more than 400 artefacts missing from temples and monasteries across the country, but the number is highly likely to be an underestimate, says Saubhagya Pradhananga, who heads the official Department of Archaeology.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, hundreds of artefacts were looted from Nepal as the isolated country was opening up to the outside world.

Many of the country’s most powerful administrators back then were believed to have been behind some of these thefts – responsible for smuggling them abroad to art collectors and pocketing the proceeds.

For decades, Nepalis were largely unaware about their missing art and where it had gone, but that has been changing, especially since the founding of the National Heritage Recovery Campaign in 2021 – a movement led by citizen activists to reclaim lost treasures.

Activists have found that many of these idols are now in museums, auction houses or private collections in Western countries such as the US, the UK and France.

They also work with foreign governments to pressure overseas institutions to return the pieces.

But there are many hurdles. The Taleju Necklace, dating back to the 17th century, is a case in point.

In 1970, the giant gold-plated necklace engraved with precious stones went missing from the Temple of Taleju – the goddess known as the chief protective deity of Nepal.

Its disappearance was all the more shocking as the temple is only open to the public once a year – on the 9th day of the Dashain Festival.

It’s still unclear how it might have been stolen and many in Nepal had no idea where it might have gone until three years ago, when it was seen in an unlikely place – the Art Institute of Chicago.

It was spotted by Dr Sweta Gyanu Baniya, a Nepali academic based in the US who said she fell to her knees and started to cry when she saw the necklace.

“It’s not just a necklace, it’s a part of our goddess who we worship. I felt like it shouldn’t be here. It’s sacred,” she told the US university Virginia Tech.

“We were shocked to learn after so many years that it was on display in an American museum,” says Uddhav Karmacharya, the chief priest of the Temple of Taleju.

He has submitted documents proving its provenance to Nepali authorities, saying: “The day it is repatriated will be the most important day in my life.”

According to the Art Institute of Chicago, the necklace is a gift from the Alsdorf Foundation – a private US foundation. The museum told the BBC it has communicated with the Nepali government and is awaiting additional information.

But Pradhananga said Nepal’s Department of Archaeology had provided enough evidence, including archival records. On top of that, an inscription on the necklace says it was specifically made for the Goddess of Taleju by King Pratap Malla.

It’s these “tactics of delay” that often “wear down campaigners”, says one activist, Kanak Mani Dixit.

“They like to use the word ‘provenance’ whereby they ask for evidence from us. The onus is put on us to prove that it belongs to Nepal, rather than on themselves on how they got hold of them.”

But overall, some progress has been made, and about 200 artefacts have been returned to Nepal since 1986 – though most transfers took place in the past decade.

A sacred idol of the Hindu deities – Laxmi Narayan – has been brought back home to Nepal from the Dallas Museum of Art almost 40 years after it first disappeared from a temple.

Currently, 80 repatriated artefacts are housed in a special gallery of the National Museum of Nepal, waiting to undergo restoration before being returned to their rightful places. Six idols have been returned to the community since 2022.

The idol of Laxmi Narayan has been brought home and reinstalled at the temple it was originally taken from and is being worshipped daily, just like it was in the 10th century when the idol was first made.

But many worshippers are now a lot more paranoid – putting these idols in iron cages to protect them from going missing.

Mr Puri however hopes his museum will eventually have its shelves wiped bare.

“I want to tell the museums and whoever is holding the stolen artefacts: Just return our gods!” he says. “You can have your art.”

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy has said the concept of reparations for former colonial nations affected by slavery “is not about the transfer of cash”.

In his first comments since 56 Commonwealth leaders in October signed a joint letter saying “the time has come” for a conversation about reparations, Lammy told the BBC that was not “the debate people are wanting to have”.

“I’m keen to emphasise that there’s a sort of simplistic press debate in part of the media that thinks this is about the transfer of cash,” he said.

Speaking in Nigeria, Lammy said instead the UK wanted to look to developing relations with the continent based on the sharing of skills and science.

“It’s not about the transfer of cash, particularly at a time of a cost of living crisis around much of the globe, and certainly in the UK,” Lammy said.

“That is not the debate I think that people are wanting to have. They’re wanting to think about the future.”

Speaking in Lagos, a Nigerian port city once central to the transatlantic slave trade, during his first visit to Africa as foreign secretary, Lammy said it was right the UK had previously apologised for its role in slavery.

He said: “When we look back on that period, there were many horrors. It was horrific and horrendous in many, many ways. And there are scars that were left, and let’s be clear – I am the descendant of enslaved people, so I recognise that.

“When we were last in government, we said sorry, and we commemorated the abolition of the slave trade.”

Lammy acknowledged that Caribbean nations had made a 10-point plan for reparatory justice.

But he said he believed developing nations would benefit as part of that through things such as the transfer of technical skills and science expertise from the UK.

The foreign secretary’s remarks on reparations follow the issue’s discussion last month at CHOGM in Samoa.

The UK has faced growing calls from Commonwealth leaders to pay reparations for the country’s role in the slave trade.

Before the Samoa summit, Downing Street had said the issue was not due for discussion but Sir Keir Starmer later signed a document calling for talks on “reparatory justice” alongside other Commonwealth leaders.

Lammy spoke to the BBC at the beginning of a trip in which he will visit Nigeria and South Africa – among the continent’s biggest economies.

He said he wanted to launch a five-month consultation period with African nations.

“I think the UK needs a new approach to Africa,” the foreign secretary said.

“Much has changed since the last time my party was in government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, where there was a huge commitment to the continent but it was largely based on development.

“The dynamism, the energy here in Lagos. The potential for growth and opportunity in a range of areas. There is so much potential.

“What I hope over the coming months and years is that the UK can partner more, here in Nigeria and on the continent.

“And that the UK is present once more, because what I’ve heard is that the UK has stepped back somewhat over the last few years, it reflects on our trading figures.

“There’s much that I think we can do together over the coming months and years.”

Asked about other issues relating to Africa, Lammy said the conflict in Sudan was of “tremendous concern” and said the UK planned to make that a priority during November, when it has the rotational presidency of the United Nations Security Council.

He said: “The loss of life is unbelievable and outstrips other conflicts around the world.

“The humanitarian catastrophe that has now been unfolding for many months is something of tremendous concern.

“We have just become the chair of the UN Security Council and I intend to make Sudan my priority over the course of this next month.

“I will be in New York raising the issues – both the humanitarian issues, but also how we bring the parties together to try and reach a peaceful outcome.

“It’s been a subject of huge concern that Sudan has not commanded the international attention that it requires, given the way that it’s not just the suffering involved, but the way that it is frankly unpicking stability in the wider region, and will have huge implications potentially if Sudan is to be a a totally failed state.

“Huge implications not just for east Africa and the African continent, but of course for Europe as well.”

“You can imagine how terrifying it is for a woman to be stuck with a very violent partner, feeling that fear every single day,” says Queen Camilla in a forthcoming TV documentary about tackling domestic abuse.

The Queen has been campaigning for many years to raise awareness of domestic and sexual violence – and in this ITV film she talks candidly to some of its victims.

“By scratching the surface you get a terrible shock. It’s such a heinous crime,” says the Queen, who has called for domestic violence to be talked about more openly.

The Queen also says in the film that King Charles, who is undergoing cancer treatment, is “doing really well” and that the “problem is trying to stop him”.

Queen Camilla has been a longstanding campaigner against domestic abuse and uses this documentary to say it should not be a taboo subject.

“If we could just get more people discussing it…” she says, as she highlights how abuse can mean psychological manipulation as well as physical attacks.

“Coercive control is almost the most frightening bit of domestic abuse. You meet somebody, you think they’re wonderful, attractive, and love you, and then bit by bit they start to undermine you,” says Queen Camilla.

“They take away your friends, they take away your family. They take control of your money. They start dressing you. And yet all the time I suppose people still believe they’re doing it because they love them,” she says in the documentary, to be screened later this month.

One of the survivors of domestic abuse, who meets the Queen, talks of the “invisible chains” that stop people escaping, particularly when they have children.

There are also accounts of violence, aggression and threats – and the Queen visits a refuge for women seeking a safe place to escape.

Also appearing is former prime minister Theresa May who talks to human rights lawyer Cherie Blair about changing attitudes to domestic abuse.

“Domestic abuse was something that happened behind closed doors and you didn’t interfere,” she says. “Police always used that phrase, ‘oh, it’s a domestic’, and wasn’t anything to do with them.

“Over the years we’ve realised that domestic abuse is wider than what we used to call it… It’s about trying to take control over an individual person’s life,” adds the former PM.

“Domestic abuse doesn’t have to be physical. And it is actually all about power and control,” says Cherie Blair.

The documentary reports that in England and Wales last year more than two million people experienced some form of domestic abuse. And on average, every five days a woman was killed by a current or former partner.

In the documentary, the Queen meets Diana Parkes, whose daughter was killed by her estranged husband.

“I think she’s so strong because not many people would be able to survive the death of their daughter. I admire her more than I can say,” says the Queen.

The issue of domestic violence has been a consistent theme in the Queen’s visits – both in the UK and abroad, including her most recent trip to Australia and Samoa.

At an event at the Commonwealth summit in Samoa, she said there was a “gigantic task ahead of us”, needing the support of both men and women. “It is this: to end domestic and sexual violence across the Commonwealth, now and for ever.”

She had previously warned of a “pandemic” of violence against women and invited campaigners to Buckingham Palace.

In the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard, Camilla said that there was an urgent need to challenge a culture in which it seemed “violence against women is normal”.

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

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.

American actor James Van Der Beek says he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer.

The 47-year-old, known for starring in the TV series Dawson’s Creek and the film Varsity Blues, told People magazine about his diagnosis and treatment.

“I have colorectal cancer. I’ve been privately dealing with this diagnosis and have been taking steps to resolve it,” he told the outlet.

Van Der Beek says there is reason for “optimism” and that he is “feeling good”.

BBC News has reached out to a representative for the actor.

Colorectal cancer develops from growths in the colon’s inner lining and can spread if not treated, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

More men develop this form of cancer than women. Increased screenings have helped detect it early – lowering the number of people who die from colorectal cancer, the clinic notes.

Van Der Beek starred in multiple popular shows and films in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He played Dawson Leery in the hit TV show Dawson’s Creek, which ran from 1998 to 2003.

He also played a fictionalised version of himself in the cult television show Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, and he performed on the 28th US season of Dancing with the Stars.

Van Der Beek has continued working through his diagnosis.

He has two projects in production, including a Tubi original film called Sidelined: The QB and Me, which is due to come out later this month.

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.

• LIVE: Follow updates as election day nears
• All you need to know about election night

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?

Opportunities were pouring in: Netflix, soaps and well-paying TV adverts. Actor Thea Beyleveld was excited to see her new talent agent, Archie Purnell, working hard to make her dreams come true.

His job was to put her forward for roles and act as the middle-man, negotiating contracts and pay. He then took a cut of commission for work she booked.

But allegations broke online about faked acting credits and fees not being sent on time. Actors were sharing similar experiences on social media using the hashtag #BodhiGate.

“The one thing that caught my attention was [the] late payments,” Thea, 36, says. “My heart immediately dropped.”

Now, former clients tell the BBC they have been left thousands of pounds out of pocket and “in the lurch” by authorities, while Archie has declared himself bankrupt.

In the UK, you do not need a licence to set up a talent agency and there is no watchdog to regulate them.

Talent agencies are legally classed as “employment agencies” and so have to comply with the Employment Agencies Act 2003, which states payments must be made within 10 days of the money being received.

However, Bodhi Talent Agency clients were forced to chase cash owed to them for months.

In January, Thea asked Archie about payment for her work on Netflix’s The Crown and a car advert.

Paperwork seen by the BBC shows that the Bodhi Talent Agency had received the money in full for Thea’s work at least five months before the above messages.

In total, Thea says she is owed £12,960.

“Words cannot express the rage, betrayal and hurt you have caused me,” she wrote to Archie in a letter after the discovery.

Action Fraud referred reports elsewhere because it doesn’t have investigative powers. The Greater Manchester Police determined this was a civil matter.

Ten former clients who are part of the performers’ union Equity, including Thea, had been pursuing civil legal action against him to retrieve nearly £40,000, but it dropped the case after he declared himself bankrupt.

The BBC has spoken to 30 former clients, with others reporting issues around late payments or no payment at all for jobs they had done.

Jack Bence, previously a regular face on the sitcom Bad Education, signed with the Bodhi Talent Agency in March 2022.

Jack, also 36, claims he is owed £7,079.81 for work on jobs including an advert for a well-known hotel chain and a mystery, Mrs Sidhu Investigates.

With a young family, every penny counts for Jack – who works another job for an events company.

In January, he had to chase Archie for a second instalment for the hotel ad, having received “the mother of all tax bills”.

Archie said in a later WhatsApp message he would send Jack £2,000 of his own funds, to avoid Jack “stressing”.

“I’m more than happy to do that, if it takes the pressure off you at the minute – until it comes in,” Archie said in a voice note.

“That actually made me a bit emotional, because I was like, wow, you’re going above and beyond for something that’s not your fault… that’s how I saw it at the time, naively,” Jack says.

Archie had in fact received payment for the job in October 2023.

“[Now] I feel isolated, alone, left in the lurch, but I’m also angry. He will do it again because why wouldn’t he?,” Jack says.

Other actors affected include:

• Michelle Parker, who claims she is owed nearly £4,700 for her work on a Disney+ programme
• Susie Riddell, who says the realisation she may not receive £2,858 owed for her work on ITV’s Grace as “hugely upsetting”
• Angela Wityszyn, who claims she is owed money for a job she filmed more than two years ago. She says she did not sign the contract detailing the fees for the job, and that it features someone else’s signature
• Sarah Tattersall, who is owed £246 for work on a TV pilot and feels “blindsided”

While Jack and Thea only ever knew Archie by that name, according to Companies House, his real name is Jamie Thomas Fisher.

Originally from Wigan, Jamie started out in the industry as an actor.

Although one of Jamie’s own former agents says he had little success in front of the camera, they describe him as “charming” and “over the top”.

Citing instances of what they call “love-bombing” behaviour like buying gifts or chocolates to grab their attention, “I can see why anyone would believe what he said,” the agent told the BBC.

• Watch the investigation on Morning Live on BBC One on Monday at 09:30 and on BBC iPlayer

He bounced around several agencies in the North West, gaining experience as a fledgling agent, building contacts and eventually he set up his own business.

But others have called into question the credentials Jamie built his reputation on.

Jamie reportedly claimed to have trained at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and that he worked his way up at United Agents, a top London agency. He wrote in emails that he was a member of the Personal Managers’ Association – which has a code of conduct for agents to observe.

The BBC contacted all three of these organisations. They all said they had no record of him.

Several ex-clients have told the BBC Jamie sent them audition opportunities that were never intended for them.

Layla Shirley from Birmingham signed with the agency in June 2022.

Jamie sent her a promising self-tape opportunity, where actors are chosen by production companies to record their auditions at home. It was for an advert with a well-known burger chain – despite the fact she is vegan.

The production company later confirmed they had no record of making this request for Layla.

“So many times with self-tapes, you get them the night before, and you’ve got to drop everything or cancel your plans to learn the lines, which is a sacrifice we make… If you’ve done all that for nothing, it really is a kick in the teeth.”

Frustrated, Layla began speaking about her experience with other former clients and Alexa Morden, host of the 98% Club, a podcast which explores the reality of work for jobbing actors.

The most important thing Layla wanted to draw attention to though, was the operation of Jamie’s agency for child actors, Luna Kids Casting.

Luna Kids Casting held auditions in April, July and October 2023, with pop-up banners in the Wigan studio suggesting children signed by Jamie went on to work for Cbeebies, Sky, Disney and Fox.

Sarah Wilson’s 10-year-old daughter was successful during busy auditions and a photoshoot day was scheduled for those children asked to join the books.

Parents were asked to pay £180 in cash to Jamie’s Mum on the reception desk.

While this was “incredibly expensive”, Sarah says she felt reassured by the amount of paperwork requested prior to signing her daughter up.

But costs kept mounting. They included a £66 charge for a child’s details and images to be uploaded to the agency’s website and a fee of £120 to sign them up to Spotlight, a platform where actors are submitted for jobs.

Agreements also outline a monthly fee of £14.40. These charges were described as non-refundable.

According to the Agents of Young Performers Association, upfront fees should only be charged 30 days after a client and agency has entered into a contract.

Sarah says she later discovered a fake credit added to her daughter’s Spotlight profile. It said she had taken part in a stage production called As It Was, with Jamie’s partner listed as the director.

The BBC has searched for this production online and has found no record of its existence.

Despite paying just under £500 to Luna Kids Casting, Sarah says only one audition opportunity was sent to them. She moved her daughter to another agency.

“It wasted a year of opportunity [and] it raised her hopes, a little girl’s dreams.”

Jamie was not only running talent agencies, but a sister company called Access Workshops providing training for actors.

When actors signed up to Bodhi, their welcome emails stated it was mandatory to attend sessions by Access Workshops.

The workshops cost between £55 and £60 and involved actors learning scripts and performing in front of top industry professionals.

Attendees say Jamie would begin by giving a talk, where he would mention a portion of the fee would be donated to charity, with the logos of Mind, Rainbow Railroad and the Oddballs Foundation visible in photos of the sessions posted on social media.

In emails seen by the BBC, Jamie and his partner’s signatures featured graphics that said Access Workshops donates a percentage of “overall profits” to organisations such as Tackle HIV.

We contacted each organisation and none had any record of receiving any donation from the Bodhi Talent Agency or Access Workshops.

Actors like Alexa Morden have used the #BodhiGate scandal to call for change in an industry that seems glamorous on the surface.

Her podcast, The 98% Club, refers to 2019 research by Queen Mary University of London, which references surveys that found that just 2% of actors in the UK make enough money to survive.

When issues do arise, actors are scared to speak out or be seen as “troublemakers” because of an uneven power dynamic, Alexa says.

Those who have been left out of pocket, like Thea, feel “let down” by the industry.

Equity had been working to bring a claim against Bodhi Talent Agency and Jamie Fisher to recover nearly £40,000 on behalf of 10 members.

But it told the BBC it was made aware Jamie has no assets, and none are held by the company.

In a statement, Equity said: “Having taken legal advice, we have been told that there is no prospect of monies being returned to creditors and that they do not expect to be making any payments at all.

“This outcome is hugely disappointing. Mr Fisher and his rogue agency have treated its clients appallingly, leading to the loss of significant amounts of money owed to them.”

Others have questioned the role of the platform Spotlight. In 2019, former employers warned Spotlight alleging that Jamie was submitting fake credits for his own clients, as well as “concocting” productions that never existed.

They claimed his “consistent fabrications” could cause damage to the industry, but said they heard little back.

In response, Spotlight told the BBC it was provided with verified references from casting professionals who had been positive about their business dealings with Jamie Fisher.

It also said it had “actively supported affected individuals during the agency’s closure by offering one-to-one assistance and guiding them on how to address their concerns, including directing them to Equity and the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate (EASI)”.

While it does not regulate talent agencies, Spotlight says it can “remove their services for misuse of our platform or for breaching our terms and conditions”.

The #BodhiGate scandal, first reported by Deadline, has also generated discussion about the limited regulation of UK entertainment, in contrast with the US, where 22 states require an agency licence.

“We see from the US that a structure is possible which can give consumers much more protection and ensure that unscrupulous agents aren’t able to practice in this arena and make promises that they can’t fulfil – alongside charging unfair fees,” Christopher Gabbitas, a commercial lawyer working in the creative sector, told the BBC.

He suggests that actors should look for established agencies, read any contracts carefully and speak to current clients if looking for representation.

Alongside Equity, actors we spoke to said they were in the process of, or had, submitted reports to the EASI, the government-backed watchdog which polices UK employment agencies. It has the power to bar individuals from practicing.

The BBC understands it is currently investigating complaints around Luna Kids Casting and the Bodhi Talent Agency.

In the meantime, Thea and Jack have been left wondering if they will ever see any of the money they say they are owed.

“It really makes you question everything,” Thea says, adding that she feels let down, most of all, by someone she once regarded as a friend.

Jamie Fisher has not responded to any requests for comment by the BBC.

Environmental campaigner Julie Bolthouse points out that Northern Virginia has the world’s largest concentration of data centres. This is not something she is thrilled about.

“We’re the Wall Street of the data centre industry,” says Ms Bolthouse, who is a director of local Virginian charity and campaign group Piedmont Environmental Council.

Data centres are vast warehouses that house stacks of computers that store and process data used by websites, companies and governments.

Northern Virginia, the northern region of the state of Virginia, has been a key location for data centres since the 1990s. This is thanks to its immediate proximity to Washington DC, yet with historically cheap electricity and land prices.

Centred on the city of Ashburn, which is 35 miles (56km) west of the US capital, there are more than 477 data centres in the state. This is by far the largest number in the US, with Texas in second place on 290, and California third with 283.

In fact, some studies say that 70% of the world’s internet traffic goes through Ashburn and the surrounding area, which has been dubbed “Data Centre Alley”.

Thanks in large part to the continuing boom in artificial intelligence (AI), which requires more computing power, demand for data centres is rocketing. As a result, global data centre capacity is expected to double over the next five years, according to a recent study by business analysis firm Moody’s.

Ms Bolthouse and other environmentalists in Northern Virginia are opposed to the continuing expansion of the data centre sector in their region, saying it is already having a major negative impact on their quality of life.

She points to new electricity cables being built over conservation land, parks and neighbourhoods, increased water demand, and the facilities’ back-up diesel generators affecting air quality.

Ms Bolthouse also cites the fact that households in Virginia and neighbouring Maryland are being expected to help pay for the electricity network upgrades that the data centres require.

She and fellow campaigners are fighting back. “We’re working directly on the ground, opposing each data centre application and working on the local zoning, and trying to educate our local planning commission and supervisors about the issues that we see. But we’re also working at the state level.”

Similar campaigns against data centres are springing up all over the world, including in the Republic of Ireland, where such facilities use 21% of the country’s electricity.

“Our main objections to data centres revolve around their potential negative impacts on our climate, their sustainability, and local infrastructure,” says Tony Lowes of Friends of the Irish Environment. “When data centres rely on fossil fuel, they potentially strain the electricity grid and can undermine national renewable energy commitments.”

The group is continuing to challenge plans for a new €1.2bn ($1.3bn; £1bn) data centre in County Clare on Ireland’s west coast.

Mr Lowes adds that while Friends of the Irish Environment would prefer to see data centre development halted altogether, there are various mitigations that might help, including sites prioritising renewable energy, and implementing energy and cooling efficiency measures.

The big players in the global data centre industry are trying to allay people’s concerns. This summer, for example, Microsoft launched its Data Center Community Pledge.

Microsoft is promising that by next year it will procure 100% renewable energy globally. And that by 2030 it will “achieve zero waste through a combination of waste reduction, reuse, recycling and composting”, and become “water positive”. The latter means that it aims for its data centres to return more water to the local supply than they use.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS) already uses recycled water for cooling in 20 of its 125 data centres around the world, and also says it will be “water positive” by 2030.

Josh Levi, president of the Data Center Coalition, which represents dozens of data centre operators including Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Meta, says that data centres are leading the way on clean energy use.

“For example, wind and solar capacity contracted to data centre providers and customers represented two-thirds of the total US corporate renewables market last year, and four of the top five purchasers of renewable energy in the US are companies that operate data centres,” he says.

“The data centre industry is also unlocking greater energy savings and efficiencies for homes, businesses, utilities, and other end users – everything from smart thermostats to grid-enhancing technologies require the digital infrastructure provided by data centres.”

The protests against data centres have also extended to South America, where campaigners say they have achieved successes.

In Uruguay, for example, Google changed the design of a new facility now under construction. It was initially due to be water cooled, but the US giant switched to an air-cooled system.

This followed protests in a country that has been experiencing droughts and a shortage of drinking water.

“Water use by Google in the initial proposal would have been equivalent to the daily consumption of drinking water by 55,000 people in our country,” says María Selva Ortiz of Friends of the Earth Uruguay.

“This threat to the right to water amidst a water crisis raised strong criticisms, leading Google to change the proposed technology to cool down its equipment, so the project was modified. Chillers will cool down with air instead of water.”

In Chile, meanwhile, Google has halted plans for a data centre over similar water use concerns.

Back in Virginia, Ms Bolthouse says the firms need to do more to boost sustainability. In the long run, she says, it will be in the industry’s own interests to improve data centres’ environmental impact.

“What’s going to happen if we continue with business as usual is that electrical prices are going to skyrocket for everybody, including the data centre industry – and that’s their biggest bill, so that’s going to impact them,” she says. “The water scarcity issue is also going to impact them.

“So I am optimistic that we’re going to see a little bit of progress, but I think it’s going to take time.”

Some artists become legends in their lifetime yet remain a mystery years after their death.

Indian painter Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde, born 100 years ago on 2 November 1924, was one such master.

Considered one of South Asia’s greatest abstract painters, Gaitonde was part of a rebellious generation of artists who laid the foundation for a new era of Indian art in the mid-20th Century.

He was deeply inspired by the techniques used by Western painters but his work remained rooted in Asian philosophy, infusing light and texture in ways that, admirers say, evokes a profound sense of calmness.

His paintings were meant to be “meditations on the light and universe”, says Yamini Mehta, who worked as the international head of South Asian Art at Sotheby’s.

“The play of light and shadows and texture makes these paintings dynamic.”

In a career that spanned decades, Gaitonde never pursued fame or fortune. But his works continue to grab attention at auctions, years after his death in 2001.

In 2022, an untitled oil painting by him fetched 420m rupees (nearly $5m; £3.9m), setting a new record for Indian art at that time. The bluish shades of the work reminded viewers of large expanses of the sea or sky.

Gaitonde lived as a recluse for most of his life. He was deeply impacted by Japanese Zen philosophy and this meditative mindset was often reflected in his paintings.

“Everything starts from silence. The silence of the canvas. The silence of the painting knife. The painter starts by absorbing all these silences… Your entire being is working together with the brush, the painting knife, the canvas to absorb that silence and create,” he told journalist Pritish Nandy in a rare interview in 1991.

Originally from the western state of Goa, Gaitonde’s family lived in Mumbai city (formerly Bombay) in a small, three-room dwelling in a chawl – an affordable tenement complex for the city’s working class.

A born artist, he joined Mumbai’s famous JJ School of Arts for training in 1946. Despite his father’s disapproval – art was not seen as a viable career in India at the time – Gaitonde funded his own studies and earned a diploma in 1948.

For some time, he was part of a group of influential Indian artists called the Progressive Artists Group, which was set up to encourage new forms of art. Formed in 1947 in Mumbai, the group counted leading artists such as Francis Souza, SH Raza, MF Husain and Bhanu Athaiya – the first Indian to win an Oscar – as its members.

Gaitonde also worked at the city’s Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute, another hub frequented by legends such as sitarist Ravi Shankar and theatre artist Ebrahim Alkazi.

“This was an interesting time as Mumbai was a hotbed of creativity,” says artist and writer Satish Naik, who has published an anthology on Gaitonde in the Marathi language.

Indian art at that time was largely dominated by realism, found in the murals of the Ajanta caves and in Mughal art or miniature paintings.

“Gaitonde began with realistic works but soon sought a different path. He was one of the first ones to reject the form and adopt the formless,” Naik said.

“In that sense, he was a rebel. He wanted to paint as it pleased him, not as someone dictated to him.”

Gaitonde’s deep interest in spirituality helped him progress towards his craft.

“My paintings are nothing else but the reflection of nature,” he once wrote in a 1963 questionnaire for New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

In 1963, Morris Graves, a famous abstract painter from the US, saw Gaitonde’s work during a trip to India, and was heavily impressed.

He immediately sent a letter to Dan and Marian Johnson of the Willard Gallery in New York, describing him as “one of the finest” painters he had ever seen.

“He’s as fine – or superb – as Mark Rothko at his best and will be a world-known painter one of these days,” Graves wrote.

“He is an abstract painter with something unspeakably beautiful and clean. They are the most beautiful landscapes of the mind plus light.”

In 1964, Gaitonde moved to New York after getting the Rockefeller Fellowship. The next two years were a formative phase in his career as the young artist got a chance to meet American modern artists and see their works, which further developed his style.

In 1971, Gaitonde received the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian award in India, for his outstanding contribution to art.

But despite his growing fame, he became increasingly withdrawn in the coming years.

His disciple and renowned artist Laxman Shreshtha recounts in Naik’s book how MF Husain would often try to visit Gaitonde at his Delhi residence.

“If Gaitonde didn’t want to meet anyone, he would not open the door, not even for Husain who would sketch something on the door and go. That was Husain’s way of saying ‘I had dropped by’.”

Even his work underwent a shift. Usually, the artist would paint anywhere between six and seven canvases in a year. But after a spinal injury in 1984, the numbers went down considerably.

“I still continue to paint; I make paintings in my head. I now have limited energy which I need to conserve and cannot waste putting paint to canvas,” he once told art gallerist Dadiba Pundole.

As Gaitonde’s stature as an artist grew, his paintings became fewer and rarer, all of which added to the charm and mystery surrounding his work.

It is perhaps also one of the reasons why his paintings command such high prices even today.

When Gaitonde died in 2001 at the age of 77, his death went widely unreported as the artist lived his last years in obscurity.

But his thought-provoking canvases continued to make waves around the world.

Cara Manes, an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art, once said that Gaitonde’s works were an embodiment of what silence might look like. “And yet there’s a certain shimmering effect that emerges out of that silence which is then pitted against these very solid marks, assertive application of colours.”

For the artist, though, art remained a deeply personal form of self-expression.

He often said: “I let the colours flow and watch. That is my painting.”

Rohit Bal, one of India’s most celebrated fashion designers, has died aged 63 after a long period of illness.

The Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) announced his death in a post on Instagram, saying that his work “redefined Indian fashion”.

One of India’s first designers, Bal popularised fashion designing as a viable, glamorous profession in the 1990s and many who came after him credit him for their success.

He had been forced to take a prolonged break due to ill health but made an emotional comeback just weeks ago.

“We will always need a Rohit Bal around to show what classic elegance is – and why it crosses the generational divide,” said an article in The Indian Express newspaper after Bal, looking frail but delighted, appeared alongside his models at the grand finale of the India Fashion Week in October.

Bal’s designs won acclaim for his deep understanding of Indian textiles and meticulous attention to detail.

His innovative creations were worn by Hollywood stars and supermodels and he became synonymous with blending India’s rich cultural heritage with a contemporary flair.

Born in Srinagar in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1961, Bal graduated from Delhi’s St Stephens College with an honours degree in history. He then worked in his family’s export business for a few years, learning the ropes.

After completing his formal education in fashion design at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) in Delhi, Bal embarked on a journey that would redefine Indian fashion.

He set up his own label and designer line in 1990 and later opened several stores in India, the Middle East and Europe.

On his website, Bal described himself as a designer who “combines the right mix of history, folklore, village craft, and dying arts to create imaginative and innovative masterpieces for catwalks and fashion talks”.

In 1996, Time magazine listed him as India’s ‘Master of fabric and fantasy’.

Bal’s designs reached far and wide, with Hollywood actress Uma Thurman and supermodels Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Pamela Anderson wearing his creations. In 2001, tennis star Anna Kournikova walked the ramp for his Paris show.

Best known for his use of lotus and peacock motifs, Bal used rich fabrics like velvet and brocade – his designs were elaborate, inspired by Indian grandeur and royalty.

Apart from designing clothes in his own label, Bal lent his name to endorse products from shoes to linen, had tie-ups with textile giants like the Aditya Birla Group and even ventured into designing jewellery and luxury watches.

He also opened a line for children, saying that he believed that “children are a major consumer class in urban India”.

Bal crafted costumes for the widely-watched Indian game show Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who Wants to be a Millionaire?) and designed costumes for the cabin crew of British Airways.

He unveiled his inaugural prêt line for online retailer Jabong in 2014.

“I want to separate Rohit Bal from the House of Bal – in products as well as style, in expensiveness and expanse,” Bal told Shefalee Vasudev in Mint newspaper.

“Rohit Bal stores (there will be no prêt here) will be special. People come to me only for special things – they want garments that are like handmade pieces of art. I have it in me to balance the right and left sides of my creative and business leanings.”

When I met Bal years ago in his studio, his characteristic flamboyance was evident in dazzling neon coloured silks embellished with intricate embroidery; sleek blouses and skirts along with taffeta skirts and netted blouses, in bright, warm and cool colours.

“Fabric is the seed of designing a garment, it is the lifeblood of fashion,” he told me.

His earliest memories of fabric were totally sensory, he said, recalling the downy feel of a jamawar shawl at home in Srinagar and the soft warmth of his mother’s shahtoosh saris.

His early years in Srinagar contributed to what he described as a “blissful childhood”. The idyllic life, he said, was disrupted by the violence in the region, compelling the family to relocate to Delhi.

Bal remembered embarking on a sartorial adventure at the age of 11 when he coaxed his father into a tailor’s shop in Delhi to craft his own cowboy pants adorned with tassels.

Bal also diversified into the restaurant business and designed the interiors of one of Delhi’s posh restaurants, Veda, whose opulent and extravagant interiors created a buzz in the Indian media.

He told me it was also okay with him if foreign brands like Armani or Hilfiger came to take up high street space in India.

“They can’t do what I can with Indian designs,” Bal said.

His flamboyant lifestyle prompted the Indian media to call him “the bad boy of fashion”.

“People see me in photographs surrounded by pretty models and think that I am a snobbish, high-maintenance designer who is about beauty and hedonism. When they meet me, they realise how fake that perception is,” he told Vasudev.

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.

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”.

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.”

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.”

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
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• 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.

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.

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.

The plight of an Instagram-famous pet squirrel that was euthanised by New York wildlife officials has become a campaign talking point two days before the US presidential election.

Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, told a rally that the death of Peanut the squirrel raised questions about government priorities.

The Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) said it had seized the animal because officials were notified of potentially unsafe house housing for the pet.

The agency said it put Peanut down after he bit an official involved in the seizure. The DEC also euthanised a raccoon named Fred that they took from the same property.

Campaigning in Sanford, North Carolina, on Sunday, Vance said Republican White House nominee Trump was “fired up” about Squirrel’s death.

“The same government that doesn’t care about hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant criminals coming into our country, doesn’t want us to have pets,” the Ohio senator told supporters in North Carolina. “It’s the craziest thing.”

Peanut’s owner, Mark Longo, accuses the agency of using excessive force when they came to his home on 30 October.

On Sunday, he vowed to take legal action in a social media post with the hashtag “Justiceforpeanut”.

A GoFundMe he launched has so far raised $140,000 (£108,000).

Vance is far from the only prominent conservative to view the lovable critter as a martyr of government overreach.

New York congressman Nick Langworthy took to social media over the weekend to express his frustration with the “unannounced raid”.

The Republican lawmaker said the state’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul had “misguided priorities”.

“In New York State, we have sanctuaries for illegal immigrants while innocent pets are killed,” he wrote on social media.

New York DEC officials said they visited Mr Longo’s home on Wednesday after receiving “multiple reports from the public about the potentially unsafe housing of wildlife that could carry rabies and the illegal keeping of wildlife as pets”.

Mr Longo said on his Instagram that there was a “special place in hell” for the DEC.

He had been taking care of Peanut for seven years and the pair’s antics amassed more than half a million followers on Instagram.

This is not the first time pets have featured in the immigration debate this election season.

Earlier this year, Vance and Trump amplified baseless claims that Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town were eating cats.

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

• LIVE: Follow updates as election day nears
• All you need to know about election night

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

The King and Queen of Spain have been pelted with mud and other objects by angry protesters during a visit to flood-hit Valencia.

Shouts of “murderer” and “shame” were directed at the royal couple, Spain’s prime minister and other leaders as they walked through the town of Paiporta – one of the worst-affected in the 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.

There has been anger at a perceived lack of warning and insufficient support from authorities after the floods.

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 their entourage, who held umbrellas over the monarch as they departed.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and the head of Valencian regional government, Carlos Mazón, joined the royal couple on the visit, but were swiftly evacuated as the crowd grew increasingly hostile.

Spanish media reports that objects were hurled at Sánchez, while footage verified by the BBC appears to show stones being thrown at his car as he was driven away.

After he left, the crowd chanted: “Where is Sánchez?”

“I’m just 16,” one boy, Pau, told the BBC through tears. “We’re helping – and the leaders do nothing. People are still dying. I can’t stand this anymore.”

Another woman said: “They left us to die. We’ve lost everything: our businesses, our homes, our dreams.”

The civil guard and mounted officers were later seen attempting to disperse the angry crowd.

The royal entourage had intended to travel on to Chiva, another town in the Valencia province badly impacted by the flooding, but that visit has since been postponed.

The king later said he understood the “anger and frustration” of the protestors in a video posted on the royal household’s Instagram account.

The mayor of Paiporta, Maribel Albalat, told the BBC she was shocked by the violence, but that she understood “the frustration and desperation of the people”.

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.

On Saturday, 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 enveloped towns in thick mud.

Many communities were cut off, left without access to water, food, electricity and other basic services.

On Sunday, the death toll from the flooding rose to 217, 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 Paiporta, the town visited today by the royal delegation, have reported at least 62 deaths.

Spain’s meteorological agency AEMET issued its highest level of alert on Sunday for parts of southern Valencia – including the cities of Alzira, Cullera and Gandia.

Intense storms forecast to pass the area will not be on the scale of Tuesday’s, the agency said, with 90mm (3.45 inches) of rainfall expected.

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India recently announced a host of ambitious space projects and approved 227bn rupees ($2.7bn; £2.1bn) for them.

The plans include the next phase of India’s historic mission to the Moon, sending an orbiter to Venus, building of the first phase of the country’s maiden space station and development of a new reusable heavy-lifting rocket to launch satellites.

It’s the single largest allocation of funds ever for space projects in India, but considering the scale and complexity of the projects, they are far from lavish and have once again brought into focus the cost-effectiveness of India’s space programme.

Experts around the world have marvelled at how little Indian Space Research Organisation’s (Isro) Moon, Mars and solar missions have cost. India spent $74m on the Mars orbiter Mangalyaan and $75m on last year’s historic Chandrayaan-3 – less than the $100m spent on the sci-fi thriller Gravity.

Nasa’s Maven orbiter had cost $582m and Russia’s Luna-25, which crashed on to the Moon’s surface two days before Chandrayaan-3’s landing, had cost 12.6bn roubles ($133m).

Despite the low cost, scientists say India is punching much above its weight by aiming to do valuable work.

Chandrayaan-1 was the first to confirm the presence of water in lunar soil and Mangalyaan carried a payload to study methane in the atmosphere of Mars. Images and data sent by Chandrayaan-3 are being looked at with great interest by space enthusiasts around the world.

So how does India keep the costs so low?

Retired civil servant Sisir Kumar Das, who looked after Isro’s finances for more than two decades, says the frugality can be traced back to the 1960s, when scientists first pitched a space programme to the government.

India had gained independence from British colonial rule only in 1947 and the country was struggling to feed its population and build enough schools and hospitals.

“Isro’s founder and scientist Vikram Sarabhai had to convince the government that a space programme was not just a sophisticated luxury that had no place in a poor country like India. He explained that satellites could help India serve its citizens better,” Mr Das told the BBC.

• India makes historic landing near Moon’s south pole
• The year India reached the Moon – and aimed for the Sun

But India’s space programme has always had to work with a tight budget in a country with conflicting needs and demands. Photographs from the 1960s and 70s show scientists carrying rockets and satellites on cycles or even a bullock cart.

Decades later and after several successful interplanetary missions, Isro’s budget remains modest. This year, India’s budgetary allocation for its space programme is 130bn rupees ($1.55bn) – Nasa’s budget for the year is $25bn.

Mr Das says one of the main reasons why Isro’s missions are so cheap is the fact that all its technology is home-grown and machines are manufactured in India.

In 1974, after Delhi conducted its first nuclear test and the West imposed an embargo, banning transfer of technology to India, the restrictions were “turned into a blessing in disguise” for the space programme, he adds.

“Our scientists used it as an incentive to develop their own technology. All the equipment they needed was manufactured indigenously – and the salaries and cost of labour were decidedly less here than in the US or Europe.”

Science writer Pallava Bagla says that unlike Isro, Nasa outsources satellite manufacturing to private companies and also takes out insurance for its missions, which add to their costs.

“Also, unlike Nasa, India doesn’t do engineering models which are used for testing a project before the actual launch. We do only a single model and it’s meant to fly. It’s risky, there are chances of crash, but that’s the risk we take. And we are able to take it because it’s a government programme.”

Mylswamy Annadurai, chief of India’s first and second Moon missions and Mars mission, told the BBC that Isro employs far fewer people and pays lower salaries, which makes Indian projects competitive.

• India names astronauts for maiden space flight
• How important are India’s Moon mission findings?

He says he “led small dedicated teams of less than 10 and people often worked extended hours without any overtime payments” because they were so passionate about what they did.

The tight budget for the projects, he said, sometimes sent them back to the drawing board, allowed them to think out of the box and led to new innovations.

“For Chandrayaan-1, the allocated budget was $89m and that was okay for the original configuration. But subsequently, it was decided that the spacecraft would carry a Moon impact probe which meant an additional 35kg.”

Scientists had two choices – use a heavier rocket to carry the mission, but that would cost more, or remove some of the hardware to lighten the load.

“We chose the second option. We reduced the number of thrusters from 16 to eight and pressure tanks and batteries were reduced from two to one.”

Reducing the number of batteries, Mr Annadurai says, meant the launch had to take place before the end of 2008.

“That would give the spacecraft two years while it went around the Moon without encountering a long solar eclipse, which would impact its ability to recharge. So we had to maintain a strict work schedule to meet the launch deadline.”

Mangalyaan cost so little, Mr Annadurai says, “because we used most of the hardware we had already designed for Chandrayaan-2 after the second Moon mission got delayed”.

Mr Bagla says India’s space programme coming at such low cost is “an amazing feat”. But as India scales up, the cost could rise.

At the moment, he says, India uses small rocket launchers because they don’t have anything stronger. But that means India’s spacecraft take much longer to reach their destination.

• What has India’s Moon rover Pragyaan been up to since landing?
• India’s Sun mission reaches final destination

So, when Chandrayaan-3 was launched, it orbited the Earth several times before it was sling-shot into the lunar orbit, where it went around the Moon a few times before landing. On the other hand, Russia’s Luna-25 escaped the Earth’s gravity quickly riding a powerful Soyuz rocket.

“We used Mother Earth’s gravity to nudge us to the Moon. It took us weeks and a lot of resourceful planning. Isro has mastered this and done it successfully so many times.”

But, Mr Bagla says, India has announced plans to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2040 and it would need a more powerful rocket to fly the astronauts there quicker.

The government recently said work on this new rocket had already been approved and it would be ready by 2032. This Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV) will be able to carry more weight but also cost more.

Also, Mr Bagla says, India is in the process of opening up the space sector to private players and it’s unlikely that costs will remain so low once that happens.

The plight of an Instagram-famous pet squirrel that was euthanised by New York wildlife officials has become a campaign talking point two days before the US presidential election.

Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, told a rally that the death of Peanut the squirrel raised questions about government priorities.

The Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) said it had seized the animal because officials were notified of potentially unsafe house housing for the pet.

The agency said it put Peanut down after he bit an official involved in the seizure. The DEC also euthanised a raccoon named Fred that they took from the same property.

Campaigning in Sanford, North Carolina, on Sunday, Vance said Republican White House nominee Trump was “fired up” about Squirrel’s death.

“The same government that doesn’t care about hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant criminals coming into our country, doesn’t want us to have pets,” the Ohio senator told supporters in North Carolina. “It’s the craziest thing.”

Peanut’s owner, Mark Longo, accuses the agency of using excessive force when they came to his home on 30 October.

On Sunday, he vowed to take legal action in a social media post with the hashtag “Justiceforpeanut”.

A GoFundMe he launched has so far raised $140,000 (£108,000).

Vance is far from the only prominent conservative to view the lovable critter as a martyr of government overreach.

New York congressman Nick Langworthy took to social media over the weekend to express his frustration with the “unannounced raid”.

The Republican lawmaker said the state’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul had “misguided priorities”.

“In New York State, we have sanctuaries for illegal immigrants while innocent pets are killed,” he wrote on social media.

New York DEC officials said they visited Mr Longo’s home on Wednesday after receiving “multiple reports from the public about the potentially unsafe housing of wildlife that could carry rabies and the illegal keeping of wildlife as pets”.

Mr Longo said on his Instagram that there was a “special place in hell” for the DEC.

He had been taking care of Peanut for seven years and the pair’s antics amassed more than half a million followers on Instagram.

This is not the first time pets have featured in the immigration debate this election season.

Earlier this year, Vance and Trump amplified baseless claims that Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town were eating cats.

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?

American actor James Van Der Beek says he was diagnosed with colorectal cancer.

The 47-year-old, known for starring in the TV series Dawson’s Creek and the film Varsity Blues, told People magazine about his diagnosis and treatment.

“I have colorectal cancer. I’ve been privately dealing with this diagnosis and have been taking steps to resolve it,” he told the outlet.

Van Der Beek says there is reason for “optimism” and that he is “feeling good”.

BBC News has reached out to a representative for the actor.

Colorectal cancer develops from growths in the colon’s inner lining and can spread if not treated, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

More men develop this form of cancer than women. Increased screenings have helped detect it early – lowering the number of people who die from colorectal cancer, the clinic notes.

Van Der Beek starred in multiple popular shows and films in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He played Dawson Leery in the hit TV show Dawson’s Creek, which ran from 1998 to 2003.

He also played a fictionalised version of himself in the cult television show Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, and he performed on the 28th US season of Dancing with the Stars.

Van Der Beek has continued working through his diagnosis.

He has two projects in production, including a Tubi original film called Sidelined: The QB and Me, which is due to come out later this month.

Along a small street in Nepal’s Bhaktapur city stands an unassuming building with a strange name – the Museum of Stolen Art.

Inside it are rooms filled with statues of Nepal’s sacred gods and goddesses.

Among them is the Saraswati sculpture. Sitting atop a lotus, the Hindu goddess of wisdom holds a book, prayer beads and a classical instrument called a veena in her four hands.

But like all the other sculptures in the room, the statue is a fake.

The Saraswati is one of 45 replicas in the museum, which will have an official site in Panauti, set to open to the public in 2026.

The museum is the brainchild of Nepalese conservationist Rabindra Puri, who is spearheading a mission to secure the return of dozens of Nepal’s stolen artefacts, many of which are scattered across museums, auction houses or private collections in countries like the US, UK and France.

In the past five years, he has hired half a dozen craftsmen to create replicas of these statues, each taking between three months and a year to finish. The museum has not received any government funding.

His mission is to secure the return of these stolen artefacts – in exchange for the replicas he has created.

In Nepal, such statues reside in temples all across the country and are regarded as part of the country’s “living culture”, rather than mere showpieces, says Sanjay Adhikari, the secretary of the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign.

Many are worshipped by locals every day, with some followers offering food and flowers to the gods.

“An old lady told me she used to worship Saraswati daily,” says Mr Puri. “When she found out the idol was stolen, she felt more depressed than when her husband passed away.”

It is also common for followers to touch these statues for blessings – meaning they are also rarely guarded – leaving them wide open for thieves.

Nepal has categorised more than 400 artefacts missing from temples and monasteries across the country, but the number is highly likely to be an underestimate, says Saubhagya Pradhananga, who heads the official Department of Archaeology.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, hundreds of artefacts were looted from Nepal as the isolated country was opening up to the outside world.

Many of the country’s most powerful administrators back then were believed to have been behind some of these thefts – responsible for smuggling them abroad to art collectors and pocketing the proceeds.

For decades, Nepalis were largely unaware about their missing art and where it had gone, but that has been changing, especially since the founding of the National Heritage Recovery Campaign in 2021 – a movement led by citizen activists to reclaim lost treasures.

Activists have found that many of these idols are now in museums, auction houses or private collections in Western countries such as the US, the UK and France.

They also work with foreign governments to pressure overseas institutions to return the pieces.

But there are many hurdles. The Taleju Necklace, dating back to the 17th century, is a case in point.

In 1970, the giant gold-plated necklace engraved with precious stones went missing from the Temple of Taleju – the goddess known as the chief protective deity of Nepal.

Its disappearance was all the more shocking as the temple is only open to the public once a year – on the 9th day of the Dashain Festival.

It’s still unclear how it might have been stolen and many in Nepal had no idea where it might have gone until three years ago, when it was seen in an unlikely place – the Art Institute of Chicago.

It was spotted by Dr Sweta Gyanu Baniya, a Nepali academic based in the US who said she fell to her knees and started to cry when she saw the necklace.

“It’s not just a necklace, it’s a part of our goddess who we worship. I felt like it shouldn’t be here. It’s sacred,” she told the US university Virginia Tech.

“We were shocked to learn after so many years that it was on display in an American museum,” says Uddhav Karmacharya, the chief priest of the Temple of Taleju.

He has submitted documents proving its provenance to Nepali authorities, saying: “The day it is repatriated will be the most important day in my life.”

According to the Art Institute of Chicago, the necklace is a gift from the Alsdorf Foundation – a private US foundation. The museum told the BBC it has communicated with the Nepali government and is awaiting additional information.

But Pradhananga said Nepal’s Department of Archaeology had provided enough evidence, including archival records. On top of that, an inscription on the necklace says it was specifically made for the Goddess of Taleju by King Pratap Malla.

It’s these “tactics of delay” that often “wear down campaigners”, says one activist, Kanak Mani Dixit.

“They like to use the word ‘provenance’ whereby they ask for evidence from us. The onus is put on us to prove that it belongs to Nepal, rather than on themselves on how they got hold of them.”

But overall, some progress has been made, and about 200 artefacts have been returned to Nepal since 1986 – though most transfers took place in the past decade.

A sacred idol of the Hindu deities – Laxmi Narayan – has been brought back home to Nepal from the Dallas Museum of Art almost 40 years after it first disappeared from a temple.

Currently, 80 repatriated artefacts are housed in a special gallery of the National Museum of Nepal, waiting to undergo restoration before being returned to their rightful places. Six idols have been returned to the community since 2022.

The idol of Laxmi Narayan has been brought home and reinstalled at the temple it was originally taken from and is being worshipped daily, just like it was in the 10th century when the idol was first made.

But many worshippers are now a lot more paranoid – putting these idols in iron cages to protect them from going missing.

Mr Puri however hopes his museum will eventually have its shelves wiped bare.

“I want to tell the museums and whoever is holding the stolen artefacts: Just return our gods!” he says. “You can have your art.”

Moldova’s pro-EU President Maia Sandu has claimed a second term after a tense election run-off seen as a choice between Europe and Russia.

With most preliminary results counted, Sandu was leading with almost 55% of the vote, and in a late-night speech she promised to be president for all Moldovans.

Her rival Alexandr Stoianoglo, who was backed by the pro-Russian Party of Socialists, had promised a closer relationship with Moscow.

During the vote, the president’s national security adviser said there had been “massive interference” from Russia in Moldova’s electoral process that had “high potential to distort the outcome”.

Russia had already denied meddling in the vote, which came a week after another key Eastern European election in Georgia, whose president said it had been a “Russian special operation”.

Stoianoglo, who was fired as prosecutor general by Sandu, has denied being pro-Kremlin.

As polls closed, both Maia Sandu, 52, and her rival thanked voters, with Stoianoglo speaking in Russian as well as Romanian. Although Romanian is Moldova’s main language, Russian is widely spoken because of its Soviet past.

Voting ended in Moldova at 21:00 (19:00 GMT), with a 54% turnout higher than four years ago, and especially high among expat voters at polling stations abroad.

Stoianoglo took an early lead and won the vote in Moldova itself with more than 51%, according to the preliminary results. Sandu was far ahead in the capital Chisinau, and was completely dominant among expat voters.

As she overtook her challenger late on Sunday night, there was cheering at her campaign headquarters and chants of “victory”.

In a hoarse voice she praised her compatriots for saving Moldova and giving “a lesson in democracy, worthy of being written in history books”.

Then, moving into Russian, she said: “I have heard your voice – both those who supported me and those who voted for Mr. Stoianoglo. In our choice for a dignified future, no-one lost… we need to stand united.”

Maia Sandu’s foreign policy adviser, Olga Rosca, told the BBC she was proud of the result.

Asked whether she was surprised that Stoianoglo had won in Moldova itself, she said the vote in Moldova and abroad should be seen as one and the same: “We never divide people into Moldovans at home and expatriates – we see Moldovans as one family.”

With elections coming next year she said the president had “clearly indicated she has heard the mood for change. On several occasions between the [two presidential] votes she said the fight against corruption must be intensified and justice reform must be accelerated – she’s committed to this work”.

The final result will be declared on Monday.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen congratulated Sandu, saying “it takes a rare kind of strength to overcome the challenges you’ve faced in this election.

“I’m glad to continue working with you towards a European future for Moldova and its people,” her message on X said.

Casting his ballot, Alexandr Stoianoglo had promised to be an “apolitical president”, and that he had voted for “a Moldova that should develop in harmony with both the West and the East”.

Stoianoglo polled particularly well in rural areas and the south, while Sandu was ahead in the cities and with young voters.

After casting her ballot, Sandu had warned of “thieves” who sought to buy their vote and their country.

Presidential national security adviser Stanislav Secrieru said Russia had organised buses and large charter flights to bring voters to polling stations.

Bomb scares had briefly disrupted voting in Moldova, at UK polling stations in Liverpool and Northampton and at Frankfurt and Kaiserslautern in Germany, he added.

A Soviet republic for 51 years, Moldova is flanked by Ukraine and Romania and one of Europe’s poorest countries. It has a population of 2.5 million and an expat population of 1.2 million.

Moldova’s authorities have long warned that a fugitive oligarch called Ilan Shor has spent $39m (£30m) trying to buy the election for Moscow with handouts to 138,000 Moldovans.

Shor, who is based in Moscow, denies wrongdoing but did promise cash payments to anyone prepared to back his call for a “firm No” to the EU.

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

There were queues at polling stations in Moscow, Italy and among voters from a mainly Russian-speaking breakaway region of Transnistria, who had to cross the River Dniester into Moldovan-controlled territory to vote. Transnistria is home to a Russian military base and a huge arms depot.

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.

Although Sandu had easily won the first round of the vote, several candidates swung behind Stoianoglo, although the third-placed candidate refused to back either of the two.

The first round coincided with a nail-biting referendum on backing a change to the constitution embracing the commitment to join the EU.

In the end the vote passed by a tiny margin in favour, and Maia Sandu said there had been clear evidence of attempts to buy 300,000 votes.

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.

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.