With just one day to go, the race for the White House is deadlocked – both at the national level and in the all-important battleground states.

The polls are so close, within the margin of error, that either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris could actually be two or three points better off – enough to win comfortably.

There is a compelling case to make for why each may have the edge when it comes to building a coalition of voters in the right places, and then ensuring they actually turn out.

Let’s start with the history-making possibility that a defeated president might be re-elected for the first time in 130 years.

• Harris v Trump poll tracker
• Live updates from the campaign’s closing stages
• When will we know if Harris or Trump has won?

The economy is the number one issue for voters, and while unemployment is low and the stock market is booming, most Americans say they are struggling with higher prices every day.

Inflation hit levels not seen since the 1970s in the aftermath of the pandemic, giving Trump the chance to ask “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

In 2024, voters around the world have several times thrown out the party in power, partly due to the high, post-Covid, cost of living. US voters also seem hungry for change.

Only a quarter of Americans say they are satisfied with the direction the country is going in and two-thirds have a poor economic outlook.

Harris has tried to be the so-called change candidate, but as vice-president has struggled to distance herself from an unpopular Joe Biden.

Despite the fallout from the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol, a string of indictments and an unprecedented criminal conviction, Trump’s support has remained stable all year at 40% or above.

While Democrats and “Never-Trump” conservatives say he is unfit for office, most Republicans agree when Trump says he’s the victim of a political witch-hunt.

With both sides so dug in, he just needs to win over enough of the small slice of undecided voters without a fixed view of him.

Beyond the state of the economy, elections are often decided by an issue with an emotional pull.

Democrats will hope it’s abortion, while Trump is betting it’s immigration.

After encounters at the border hit record levels under Biden, and the influx impacted states far from the border, polls suggest voters trust Trump more on the immigration – and that he’s doing much better with Latinos than in previous elections.

Trump’s appeal to voters who feel forgotten and left behind has transformed US politics by turning traditional Democratic constituencies like union workers into Republicans and making the protection of American industry by tariffs almost the norm.

If he drives up turnout in rural and suburban parts of swing states this can offset the loss of moderate, college-educated Republicans.

Trump’s detractors say he undermines America’s alliances by cosying up to authoritarian leaders.

The former president sees his unpredictability as a strength, however, and points out that no major wars started when he was in the White House.

Many Americans are angry, for different reasons, with the US sending billions to Ukraine and Israel – and think America is weaker under Biden.

A majority of voters, especially men who Trump has courted through podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, see Trump as a stronger leader than Harris.

Despite Trump’s advantages, he remains a deeply polarising figure.

In 2020, he won a record number of votes for a Republican candidate, but was defeated because seven million more Americans turned out to support Biden.

This time, Harris is playing up the fear factor about a Trump return. She’s called him a “fascist” and a threat to democracy, while vowing to move on from “drama and conflict”.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll in July indicated that four in five Americans felt the country was spiralling out of control. Harris will be hoping voters – especially moderate Republicans and independents – see her as a candidate of stability.

• Visual guide – Harris and Trump’s paths to victory
• The moment I decided on my vote

Democrats were facing near-certain defeat at the point Biden dropped out of the race. United in their desire to beat Trump, the party quickly rallied around Harris. With impressive speed from a standing start, she delivered a more forward-looking message that excited the base.

While Republicans have tied her to Biden’s more unpopular policies, Harris has rendered some of their Biden-specific attack lines redundant.

The clearest of these is age – polls consistently suggested voters had real concerns about Biden’s fitness for office. Now the race has flipped, and it is Trump who’s vying to become the oldest person to ever win the White House.

This is the first presidential election since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and the constitutional right to an abortion.

Voters concerned about protecting abortion rights overwhelmingly back Harris, and we’ve seen in past elections – notably the 2022 midterms – that the issue can drive turnout and have a real impact on the result.

This time around, 10 states, including the swing state Arizona, will have ballot initiatives asking voters how abortion should be regulated. This could boost turnout in Harris’s favour.

The historic nature of her bid to become the first female president may also strengthen her significant lead among women voters.

The groups Harris is polling more strongly with, such as the college-educated and older people, are more likely to vote.

Democrats ultimately perform better with high-turnout groups, while Trump has made gains with relatively low-turnout groups such as young men and those without college degrees.

Trump, for example, holds a huge lead among those who were registered but didn’t vote in 2020, according to a New York Times/Siena poll.

A key question, then, is whether they will show up this time.

It’s no secret that American elections are expensive, and 2024 is on track to be the most expensive ever.

But when it comes to spending power – Harris is on top. She’s raised more since becoming the candidate in July than Trump has in the entire period since January 2023, according to a recent Financial Times analysis, which also noted that her campaign has spent almost twice as much on advertising.

This could play a role in a razor-tight race that will ultimately be decided by voters in swing states currently being bombarded by political ads.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How to win the electoral college
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: How this election could change the world
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

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

At least 10 people have been killed after a volcano erupted in eastern Indonesia in the early hours of Monday, officials have said.

Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, located on Flores Island in East Nusa Tenggara province, erupted at 23:57 local time, according to the Indonesian Center for Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation (PVMG).

Hadi Wijaya, a PVMG spokesperson, said fiery lava and rocks had hit the villages about 4km (two miles) from the crater, burning and damaging residents’ houses.

According to local officials, the eruption has affected seven villages.

PVMG said fires had “occurred in residential areas due to the ejection of incandescent material” from the volcano.

It has raised the status of the volcano to the highest alert level, warning that a 7km (four-mile) radius from the crater must be cleared.

“We have started evacuating residents since this morning to other villages located around 20km (13 miles) from the crater,” local official Heronimus Lamawuran told Reuters.

Video footage shared with BBC News by eyewitnesses shows people covered in volcanic ash, rock showers and homes ablaze, as well as the scorched aftermath of the disruption.

A spokesperson from Indonesia’s disaster agency warned of potential flash floods and cold lava flows in the coming days.

They added that the local government had declared a state of emergency for the next 58 days, meaning the central government could help provide aid to 10,000 affected residents.

Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki – one of a pair of prominent volcanic peaks at the eastern end of the island of Flores – has been erupting on and off since last December, and there was already an official warning to stay more than 3km away from it.

The prolonged volcanic activity there this year has badly affected the local economy.

Hundreds of people have left their homes and have been sheltering in schools, while cashew nut farmers have complained that their crops have been ruined by the huge quantities of ash which have fallen on the surrounding area.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an area of high seismic activity atop multiple tectonic plates, and has about 130 active volcanoes.

Many communities live dangerously close to the volcanoes in order to cultivate the fertile soil they provide.

At least 36 people have died and 27 have been injured after a bus fell into a gorge in India’s northern state of Uttarakhand.

Officials said 44 people were on board when the driver lost control and the bus fell into a 50m-deep ditch in Marchula, located in the state’s Almora district.

The state government has ordered an inquiry into the accident.

Buses are the main mode of transport in the Himalayan state and accidents are not uncommon.

The bus was on its way to the state’s Ramnagar district when the accident took place on Monday morning.

Photos and videos from the site showed the badly damaged vehicle overturned at the bottom of a hill.

Several passengers died on the spot, while those injured were taken to nearby hospitals. Rescue operations are still under way.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed his condolences for the families of the victims.

He has announced compensation of 200,000 rupees ($2,378; £1,834) for the families of the deceased and 50,000 rupees to those who were wounded.

Uttarakhand’s Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami has also announced financial assistance for the victims and their families.

Buses are a common mode of transport in India, especially between smaller towns and districts. However, operators often flout safety rules and overcrowd them beyond capacity.

Approximately 160,000 people are killed in road accidents in India every year – the highest in the world – mainly due to speeding and careless driving.

Spanish rescuers are focusing their search for missing people on underground garages and a multi-storey car park in Valencia following last week’s devastating floods.

It is feared shoppers and workers were trapped inside the car park at a shopping mall in Aldaia, on the outskirts of Valencia, as floodwater overwhelmed the area.

Police have confirmed that no victims were located in the first 50 vehicles inspected at the site.

But reports suggest these vehicles were found near the entrance to the car park, with much of the rest of it still submerged and yet to be explored.

It comes as Spain’s State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) placed part of the north-eastern Catalonia region on red alert for torrential rain, with its capital Barcelona experiencing flooding on Monday morning.

Catalan media showed footage of cars partially submerged on a highway and floodwater entering a bus.

Water has also entered parts of the city’s El Prat airport, including the public area of Terminal 1. More than 80 flights have been cancelled, delayed or diverted, while rail services have been suspended.

The death toll across the affected areas now stands at 217, after a year’s worth of rain fell in and around Valencia last week. So far no deaths have been reported in Catalonia.

Among the dead were a British couple in their 70s, whose family confirmed they had been found dead in their car days after the flash floods hit Valencia.

On Monday morning, Spain’s interior minister refused to say how many were still missing.

The storm caught many victims in their vehicles on roads and in underground spaces such as car parks, tunnels and garages, where rescue operations are particularly difficult.

Outside the Bonaire shopping mall in Aldaia on Monday, rotting piles of debris lined the roads while noisy generators pumped out water – but thousands of gallons remained inside the mall car park.

Spanish police used drones to check the inside of the flooded parking to have a first look of the situation, a police spokesperson said.

When the BBC asked a local police officer how much longer the operation would take, he said he could not give an estimate, but that teams would stay as long as necessary.

As is the case in many parts of the region that have been devastated by the floods, there is a vacuum of information.

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

On Sunday, the king and queen of Spain were pelted with mud and other objects by angry protesters during a visit to the town of Paiporta – one of the worst-affected in the Valencia region.

Objects were also thrown at Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who was quickly evacuated.

The Civil Guard has opened an investigation into the chaotic scenes, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told public broadcaster TVE.

He blamed “marginal groups” for instigating the violence where mud spattered the monarchs’ face and clothes.

In a news conference on Monday, the chief of Spain’s Military Emergencies Unit (UME) said it had pre-deployed 500 troops to Valencia so they could begin working as soon as they were authorised to.

General Francisco Javier Marcos said that when he saw the situation worsen, he sent alerts to 1,000 soldiers, who travelled overnight “so that by dawn the next day, people of Valencia could see that the armed forces were there”.

He added: “You might say we didn’t intervene rapidly. The weather prevented that partially, and secondly, it was a matter of order and discipline.

“You might say that doesn’t justify being slow – well look, you can’t bring more chaos to an already very chaotic situation.”

Local authorities in Valencia have extended travel restrictions for another two days to facilitate the work of the emergency services, cancelled school classes and urged people to work from home.

Gen Marcos said gridlock on some roads was making it hard to distribute food to the 69 affected municipalities.

He said that the number of troops on the ground had been “scaled up” – with 7,800 due by 20:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on Monday. These were being supported by 17,000 volunteers and 5,000 army soldiers offering logistical support, he said.

A warship carrying 104 marine infantry soldiers as well as trucks with food and water docked in Valencia’s port on Monday.

Gen Marcos said the UME was “doing everything we can”, including working double shifts.

He added: “We must be disciplined and we must be patient. I know that’s hard, because pain and emotion means that’s not easy.”

Bangladesh is ramping up payments to Adani Power after the Indian conglomerate cut electricity supplies by half, reportedly over an unpaid $800m bill.

Two senior government officials told the BBC they are already processing partial payments to Adani, which supplies 10% of the electricity used by Bangladesh.

“We have addressed payment glitches and already issued a $170 million [£143m] letter of credit to Adani group,” a senior Bangladesh Power Development Board official told the BBC.

Adani supplies Bangladesh from its 1600 megawatt coal-fired plant in eastern India. The company hasn’t responded to BBC queries about cuts to its supply to Bangladesh, which suffers regular power shortages.

Officials say the company has threatened to suspend all supplies if the money owed to it is not cleared by 7 November. But the Bangladesh Power Development Board official said they did “not believe it would not come to a stage where full supplies are cut off”.

Bangladesh officials told the BBC they will make payments gradually and regularly and are confident of resolving the payment crisis.

“We are shocked and surprised that despite us ramping up payments, supplies have been cut. We are ready to repay and will make alternate arrangements, but will not let any power producer hold us hostage and blackmail us,” said Fouzul Kabir Khan, energy adviser to the interim government.

Bangladesh stepped up repayments from $35m in July, to $68m in September and $97m in October, he said.

The country is already suffering from increased power shortages in rural areas.

Bangladesh has been struggling to generate dollar revenues to pay for costly essential imports like electricity, coal and oil. Foreign currency reserves fell during months of student-led protests and political turmoil that ousted the Sheikh Hasina government in August.

The interim government which replaced her has sought an additional $3bn loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in addition to its existing $4.7bn bailout package.

Adani’s power deal with Bangladesh, signed in 2015, was one of the many under Sheikh Hasina, which the current interim government has called opaque. A national committee is now reassessing 11 previous deals, including the one with Adani, which has often been criticised as expensive.

Besides Adani Power, other Indian state-owned firms also sell power to Bangladesh, including NTPC Ltd and PTC India Ltd. Power Development Board officials confirmed that partial payments of money owed to other Indian power suppliers are also being made.

Bangladesh is restarting some of the gas-fired and oil-fired power plants to bridge the supply shortfall, although experts say it will increase the cost of power. With winter approaching, power demands on the grid is expected to ease as air conditioners are switched off.

“Other coal-fired plants are running at 50% capacity and the country is unable to buy enough coal owing to the dollar crisis, so it is important to continue readymade power supply from Adani. It is marginally more expensive than local producers but it is a crucial supply,” said Dr Ajaj Hossain, energy expert and a retired professor.

Bangladesh is planning to commission its first nuclear power plant in December to diversify its energy mix. Built with Russian assistance, it is costing $12.65bn, mostly financed by long-term Russian loans.

“Music is sacred to me,” Quincy Jones once said. “Melody is God’s voice.”

He certainly had the divine touch.

Jones, who had died at the age of 91, was the right-hand man to both Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson, and helped to shape the sound of jazz and pop over more than 60 years.

His recordings revolutionised music by crossing genres, promoting unlikely collaborations and shaping modern production techniques.

Here are 10 songs that showcase his versatility and brilliance in the studio, and his ability to draw the best out of the musicians he worked with.

Michael Jackson met Quincy Jones on the set of the 1978 movie The Wiz, and asked him to produce his next album. That record was Off The Wall – a disco extravaganza that established Jackson as a solo star.

They teamed up again for 1982’s Thriller, which arguably remade the pop business. Not only did it produce seven top 10 singles; but it crossed racial barriers, appealing equally to black and white audiences.

Key to the success was Billie Jean, a dark tale about the groupies Jackson met while touring with his brothers. As a producer, Jones wasn’t keen on the track at first – arguing with Jackson about the long instrumental opening.

“I said, ‘Michael we’ve got to cut that intro,’” he later recalled.

“He said, ‘But that’s the jelly! That’s what makes me want to dance.’ And when Michael Jackson tells you, ‘That’s what makes me want to dance,’ well, the rest of us just have to shut up.”

With those words ringing in his ears, Jones kept the arrangement lean and funky. He even instructed sound engineer Bruce Swedien to create a drum sound with a “sonic personality” that no-one had ever heard before. The result is one of the most recognisable intros in the history of pop.

• Listen to Billie Jean

“The friendship was so strong. You can’t describe it,” said Jones of his partnership with Frank Sinatra – which extended far beyond the recording studio.

“Seven double Jack Daniels in an hour… [Sinatra] invented partying.”

After establishing their relationship on 1964’s It Might As Well Be Swing, Jones helped Sinatra re-arrange his signature songs for a four-week residency at the Copa Room in The Sands hotel, Las Vegas.

“It was probably the most exciting engagement I have ever done in my life, since I started performing,” Sinatra later recalled.

Accompanied by the Count Basie Orchestra, the star sounds perfectly at ease, breezing around standards like I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Fly Me To The Moon and You Make Me Feel So Young.

But it’s Come Fly With Me that most perfectly captures the vitality of Jones’s new arrangements, especially in the charismatic interplay between Sinatra and the brass section.

No wonder that it was chosen as the show’s opening number – as captured on the award-winning live album, Sinatra At The Sands.

• Listen to Come Fly With Me (Live)

Lesley Gore was just a teenager when her vocal demos made their way into Quincy Jones’s hands in the early 1960s. Up to that point, he’d been working with jazz singers like Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan – but he heard something he liked on Gore’s tape.

“She had a mellow, distinctive voice and sang in tune, which a lot of grown up rock ‘n’ roll singers couldn’t do, so I signed her,” he wrote in his autobiography.

For their first session, Jones picked It’s My Party out of a pile of 200 demos and got to work. He double-tracked Gore’s voice, adding little flourishes of brass and unexpected chord changes that perfectly evoke the song’s adolescent angst.

He then rush-released the single, after discovering that Phil Spector had plans to record the same song with the Crystals. It duly topped the US charts and went to number nine in the UK.

• Listen to It’s My Party

Recorded by The Lovin’ Spoonful, Summer In The City is a 1960s rock classic, full of ominous organ chords and powerful drum hits that capture the sticky filth of an oppressive heatwave.

Quincy Jones version, recorded for his 1973 album You’ve Got It Bad Girl, is almost unrecognisable as the same song. Lazily chilled-out, the Hammond organ is played with a featherlight touch, and the drums are gently brushed.

Most of the lyrics are excised and, when they arrive at the 2’30” mark, they’re sung with almost heavenly serenity by Valerie Simpson (of Ashford and Simpson fame).

Originally released as a b-side, it’s become one of Jones’s most influential songs. According to WhoSampled.com, it’s been sampled on 87 other songs, including tracks by Massive Attack, Eminem, Nightmares on Wax and The Roots.

• Listen to Summer In The City

Another example of how Jones’s skill as an arranger could completely change a song.

Mad About The Boy was written by Sir Noël Coward, for the 1932 revue Words and Music. In the original, it was sung by four different women, each expressing their love for an unnamed film star (rumoured to be Douglas Fairbanks Jr) as they wait in line to see one of his films.

It’s funny and quirky and clever – but when Dinah Washington covered the song in 1961, Jones slowed it down and switched the time signature from 4/4 to 6/8, allowing the singer to prowl through the lyrics with a newfound carnality.

Overlooked at the time, it gained a new lease of life in 1992 when it was used to soundtrack a Levis advert and crept into the UK charts for the first time.

• Listen to Mad About The Boy

Written in just 20 minutes, Soul Bossa Nova was inspired by an early-60s fad for Brazilian music, sparked by the success of João Gilberto and Stan Getz’s Desafinado.

Jones is in his element here – with chirruping flutes and big trombone slides that capture the joie de vivre of the carnival. He also makes prominent use of a cuíca, the Brazilian drum that produces what sounds like a very happy monkey in the opening bars.

The bossa-craze may have been short-lived, but Jones’s song endured, most memorably in the opening dance sequence of Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery.

• Listen to Soul Bossa Nova

From the beginning, Jones and Jackson planned to make Thriller a blockbuster pop album.

“We went through 800 songs to get to nine,” Jones said. “That’s not casual.”

The work was exhausting. At one point, they were working in three studios simultaneously… until the speakers caught fire.

Beat It was crucial to the project – because it was designed to get Jackson played on US rock radio, an unheard of prospect in the heavily-segregated music industry of the 1980s.

Jones had told Jackson to write “a black version” of The Knack’s My Sharona – the 1979 hit song that sold more then 10 million copies. But Jackson was one step ahead. He had a demo that fit the bill, albeit without a hook or lyrics.

While Jackson worked on those elements (you can hear his first, wordless attempt at the melody on his YouTube channel), Jones called on Eddie Van Halen to perform the guitar solo.

“He came in and he stacked up his Gibson [guitars],” Jones later recalled.

“I said, ‘I’m not going to sit here and try to tell you what to play… Let’s try three or four takes. Some of it will be over-animated, some of it will be long, and we’ll sculpt it.

“And he played his ass off.”

The song, with its West Side Story-inspired video, landed just as MTV took off, making Jackson a permanent fixture in living rooms across America.

But for all the commercial focus of the Thriller project, Jones always maintained that the music came first.

“I’ve never, ever in my life done music for money or fame – because that’s when God walks out of the room,” he said.

• Listen to Beat It

Jones discovered guitarist George Johnson and bassist Louis Johnson when he heard them playing on a demo by Chaka Khan’s sister, Taka Boom.

He hired them to play on the soundtrack for the celebrated TV mini-series Roots, placed them in his touring band, and helmed their 1976 debut album Look Out For #1 (including a sublime cover of The Beatles’ Come Together).

But the brothers didn’t achieve mainstream success until 1977, with the release of Strawberry Letter #23.

Originally recorded by Shuggie Otis, Jones’s version toughens up the production, with a strutting bassline and soaring backing vocals – but George Johnson struggled to recreate Shuggie’s original guitar solo, which was full of complicated triplet notes.

Frustrated, Jones called up session musician Lee Ritenour for help.

“Quincy was walking down the hallway tearing his hair out,” Ritenour later recalled. “He said, ‘I’m going to lunch, Ritenour. Get it done.’

Released in the middle of the punk and disco boom, the song’s romantic psychedelia still found an audience – reaching number 13 in the charts. It was later re-popularised by Quentin Tarantino in the film Jackie Brown.

• Listen to Strawberry Letter #23

Early in his career, Jones was one of the most in-demand arrangers in jazz, working with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee.

In 1958, he recorded an entire album with Sarah Vaughan in Paris, backed by a 55-piece orchestra. Among the highlights is the lovestruck ballad Misty – originally recorded by pianist Erroll Garner, and made famous by Johnny Mathis.

Unlike their syrupy and sentimental versions, Vaughan and Jones (along with producer Jack Tracy) give the lyrics some pathos. She might be “as helpless as a kitten up a tree”, but you’re never entirely convinced she’s happy about the situation.

Jones adds beguiling touches – from the cascading strings when Vaughan sings “a thousand violins begin to play”, to the beautifully muted saxophone line, played by Zoot Sims.

When Vaughan died in 2019, Jones posted a long tribute on his Facebook page, using his pet name for her – Sassy.

“Dear sweet Sassy was all about sophistication and chord changes and, man, I’m telling you she thought like a horn and SANG like a horn!” he wrote.

“We had quite the journey together, & I will never forget each moment we had, because every moment was a special one.”

• Listen to Misty

“Check your egos at the door,” said the hand-written sign that Quincy Jones pinned to the door of his recording studio in 1985.

The occasion was the recording of We Are The World – a star-studded charity single that aimed to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.

Written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, the record featured vocals from Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen, Dionne Warwick and Bob Dylan, all recorded in a single night.

Herding the singers was a massive headache, as the recent Netflix documentary The Greatest Night In Pop revealed.

At one point, Stevie Wonder insisted that some of the lyrics should be rewritten in Swahili – despite the fact that the people of Ethiopia, who would be the main beneficiaries of the famine-relief fundraiser, largely speak other languages.

Jones oversaw the whole session with the patience and wisdom of a producer who’d seen it all.

The results aren’t particularly great – the song is sickly and overlong – but the fact that it’s coherent at all is a testament to his skill as a producer, arranger, mentor and referee.

In the end, the song raised more than $63m ($227m or £178m adjusted for inflation); and Jones looked back on it as one of his proudest achievements.

“I have never before or since experienced the joy I felt that night working with this rich, complex human tapestry of love, talent, and grace,” he wrote in his 2002 autobiography.

• Listen to We Are The World

When the air strike hit, Mohammed was handing out hot food to elderly neighbours – something he and his friends had been doing since Israel’s latest invasion of Lebanon on 1 October.

The civil engineer, 29, was standing about 5m (16ft) away from the explosion, which destroyed a house in his village in southern Lebanon.

Layers of skin were scorched from his forehead and his cheeks, leaving his face raw and pink. His hands were charred. His abdomen has third-degree burns. Two weeks on he radiates pain, and trauma, but wants to tell his story.

“It was all black, smoke everywhere,” he says in a low voice. “It took about a minute. Then I started to recognise what is around me. I noticed my two friends were still alive but bleeding a lot. It took about five minutes for the people to get us out.”

Mohammed recounts the horrors from his bed in the Nabih Berri government hospital, which is perched on a hilltop in Nabatieh. It is one of the biggest cities in the south, and just 11km (seven miles) from the border with Israel, as the crow flies. Before the war it was home to about 80,000 people.

Mohammed says there was no warning before the strike – “not at all, not to us, not to our neighbours, not to the person inside the house that was hit.”

That person was a policeman, he says, who was killed in the attack.

“We are not military,” he says, “we are not terrorists. Why are we being hit? The areas that are being hit are all civilian areas.”

Mohammed will return home to his village, Arab Salim, when he is discharged, though it remains under fire. “I don’t have anywhere else to go,” he says. “If I could [leave] I would. There’s no place.”

As we tour the hospital, another air strike sends staff rushing to a balcony, to check what has been hit this time. The hospital offers a panoramic view of grey smoke billowing from high ground about 4km away.

Shortly afterwards, a few floors down in the emergency room, the wail of a siren warns of casualties arriving – from that air strike. It had hit Mohammed’s village, Arab Salim.

A woman is rushed in on a stretcher, with blood streaming down her face. She is followed by her husband, who hits a wall in frustration before slumping over in shock. Doctors disappear behind closed doors to examine her.

Within minutes the hospital director, Dr Hassan Wazni, tells staff she has a ruptured artery and must be moved to a specialised vascular centre in a hospital further north.

“She needs it immediately,” he says, as cries of pain come from the examining room. “Talk to Saida [a nearby town]. If it’s OK, let’s take her immediately, because she can’t wait.”

The hospital receives 20-30 casualties from Israeli air strikes a day. Most are civilians, but no-one is turned away. “We take all patients, and all injured, and all martyrs who come,” he says. “We don’t discriminate between them.”

Dr Wazni has not left the hospital since the war began. Behind his desk in his office, he opens a packet of cigarillos. “I think it’s OK to break some rules in a war,” he says with an apologetic smile.

He is struggling to pay wages and come up with 1,200 litres of fuel per day to run the generators that power the hospital. “We get nothing from the government,” he says. “It doesn’t have it.”

His fuel is espresso, which he offers us repeatedly.

With 170 beds, Nabih Berri is the main public hospital in the city, but now has only a skeleton staff, and 25 patients. The sick and the wounded brought here are transferred quickly to hospitals in safer areas further North. Staff say there have been “many strikes “close to Nabih Berri. During our visit there’s broken glass inside the foyer.

Nabatieh has been under fire for more than a month.

The municipality building was blown up two weeks ago, killing the mayor, Ahmad Kahil, and 16 others. At the time he was having a meeting to co-ordinate aid distribution. When we pass by the ruins, bundles of flat bread remain visible on the floor of a wrecked ambulance.

The massive strike brought down several neighbouring buildings – a city block is missing from the landscape.

Also missing is an Ottoman era market – the heart of Nabatieh – which was destroyed on the same day. Centuries of history were crushed into rubble, heritage turned to dust.

The old market, or souk, was treasured by Hussein Jaber, 30, who is part of the government’s emergency services. He and his men, some of them volunteers, take us there for a brief visit. They drive at speed – the only way to travel in Nabatieh.

“We were born and raised here,” Hussein says, gesturing around at slabs of concrete and twisted metal. “We have been here since we were children. The souk means a great deal to us. It is really sad to see it like this. It holds memories of the past and the beautiful days we spent with the people of this city.”

Like Dr Wazni, Hussein and his colleagues have remained with the people, despite the risks. More than 110 paramedics and first responders have been killed in Israeli attacks in Lebanon in the past year, according to Lebanese government figures – most of them in the past month. Some attacks involve “apparent war crimes”, according to the international campaign group, Human Rights Watch.

Hussein lost a colleague and a friend this month, in an air strike 50m from their civil defence station, where they sleep with mattresses up against the windows. The dead man, Naji Fahes, was 50 years old and had two children.

“He was enthusiastic and strong and loved to help others,” Hussein tells me. “Even though he was older than us, he was the one rushing to go on missions, to be with the people and to rescue them.”

He died, as he lived.

When the air strike happened, Naji Fahes was standing outside the station, ready to go on a mission.

As Hussein speaks, we have company. An Israeli drone circles in the skies overhead, then gets lower and louder. The insistent buzzing of the drone competes with his voice. “We hear it 90% of the time,” he says. “We think it’s directly above us now. Most probably it’s watching us.”

As for Hezbollah, its presence in the city is out of sight.

The Israel Defence forces (IDF) told us it is “operating solely against the Hezbollah terrorist organisation, not against the Lebanese population.”

Israel says its fight is “against the Hezbollah terrorist organisation, embedded within civilian population and infrastructure”.

A spokesman said it “takes many measures to mitigate civilian harm including advance warnings”, though there was no warning for the air strike that wounded Mohammed, or the attack that killed the mayor.

In five and a half hours in this once bustling city we saw two people out in the open, on foot. Both rushed away, unwilling to speak. During our visit a drone was broadcasting messages from the Israeli army – instructing people to leave immediately.

It’s estimated that only a few hundred remain here unwilling or unable to move elsewhere. They are mainly the old and the poor, and they will live or die with their city.

And Hussein and his team will be here, to come to their aid. “We are like a safety net for the people,” he says. “We will stay, and we will carry on. We will be next to the civilians. Nothing will stop us.”

Attempts to secure a peace deal in Gaza and secure the release of hostages held by Hamas may have been compromised by leaked and falsified documents involving a close aide to the prime minister, an Israeli court has said.

In its partial lifting of a gagging order, the court in the town of Rishon LeZion said Eli Feldstein and three others were under investigation.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied wrongdoing by his staff, but opposition figures and hostage families have accused his government of sabotaging negotiations.

The leaking of the documents – to Britain’s Jewish Chronicle and Germany’s tabloid Bild – came at a crucial time for hostage negotiations.

The documents claimed Hamas was planning to smuggle Israeli hostages to Egypt – intent on scuppering any proposed ceasefire deal.

Some commentators say the revelations were politically useful for Netanyahu’s hardline position on the talks, which have made almost no progress.

Over 100 hostages out of 251 taken by Hamas on 7 October 2023 remain unaccounted for.

After the stories were published in September, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched an inquiry to discover the source of the leaks.

This eventually led to the arrest of Eli Feldstein, along with the three others, whose identities have not been revealed.

Mr Feldstein had been working as a government spokesperson and was often seen accompanying the prime minister on visits. He had previously worked for the far-right Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and before that he served as an IDF spokesperson.

Following news of his arrest, two leading opposition politicians held a press conference.

Benny Gantz, who until recently was in Netanyahu’s war cabinet, said that if sensitive security information was used for a “political survival campaign”, it would not only be a criminal offense, but “a crime against the nation”.

Speaking at the same event, the leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, said that if the prime minister knew about the leaks, “he is complicit in one of the most serious security offenses” and that if he didn’t know, he is not fit for office.

The revelations also led to strong criticism from the families of the hostages, who have become increasingly frustrated with the government’s failure to secure the release of their loved ones.

They said it implied an active campaign to discredit them, calling it “a moral low that has no depth. This is a fatal injury to the remnants of trust between the government and its citizens”.

The documents were published in European newspapers, allegedly to circumvent military censorship laws in Israel.

The Jewish Chronicle (JC) was engulfed in a scandal after it emerged it had published stories based on a single anonymous source. The freelance writer behind the pieces was fired, with the articles eventually being taken down.

The articles claimed that Yahya Sinwar was surrounded by a ring of around 20 hostages and that plans had been discovered to smuggle both the captives and the Hamas leader into Egypt. Leading Israeli security journalists questioned the veracity of the reports.

A number of high-profile writers resigned from the paper, accusing it of lacking journalistic standards.

Jonathan Freedland, Hadley Freeman and David Aaronovitch announced they were quitting their columns over what Freedland described as a “great disgrace” at the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper.

At the time, the JC said it conducted a “thorough investigation” into one of its freelance journalists, Elon Perry, “after allegations were made about aspects of his record”.

It said it was “not satisfied” with some of the claims made by the writer, and therefore had deleted his articles and ended its association with him.

Elon Perry told BBC News the JC “made a huge mistake with its statement”. He said he could not reveal his source to JC editors and described a “witch-hunt against me caused by jealousy”.

The Bild articles, meanwhile, were based on a different set of intelligence documents. While they were found to be authentic, leading security journalist Ronan Bergman found their significance had been greatly exaggerated.

It was the publication of this story that triggered the investigation by the IDF and security services, ultimately leading to the arrests.

Netanyahu has sought to distance himself from the allegations, saying the arrested spokesperson had never had access to classified information.

Despite that, this is a growing scandal that has further damaged the already frayed relationship between the government and the hostage families.

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.

The Moldovan Central Electoral Commission confirmed Sandu’s victory on Monday morning.

Sandu won 55% of the vote, according to preliminary results, and in a late-night speech on Sunday she promised to be president for all Moldovans.

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

During the day 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.

In a joint statement congratulating Sandu on her re-election, the European Commission and the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell said there had been “unprecedented interference by Russia”.

As polls closed, both 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.

Turnout at 54% was high, especially among expat voters at polling stations abroad.

Stoianoglo took an initial lead on the night and was the more successful candidate in Moldova itself with more than 51% of the vote. Sandu won in the capital Chisinau, and she 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.

Donald Trump’s campaign team has defended the Republican candidate for president after he told supporters: “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news – and I don’t mind that so much”.

At a Pennsylvania rally on Sunday, Trump also called the media “bloodsuckers”.

The attacks on the media are not new. Since arriving on the political scene nearly a decade ago, Trump has sometimes mocked reporters at his rallies.

He made his comments while complaining about the bulletproof glass that now surrounds him at his outdoor rallies following an assassination attempt in July.

“I have a piece of glass over here, and I don’t have a piece of glass there,” Trump said at the rally. “And I have this piece of glass here, but all we have really over here is the fake news. And to get me somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much. I don’t mind that.”

Since the 13 July rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the US Secret Service has positioned bulletproof glass around Trump at outdoor rallies.

An audience member was killed at that rally and a bullet grazed the former president’s ear. The Secret Service killed the gunman.

The president has previously complained about the new security measures, but Sunday’s rally marked the first time he connected the security measures with his attacks on the press.

Earlier at the event, he said: “The media is so damn bad – it’s unbelievable”.

He specifically criticised certain news outlets. “ABC, ABC, fake news, CBS, ABC, NBC,” he said. “These are, these are, in my opinion, in my opinion, these are seriously corrupt people.”

• Follow live updates from the campaign’s final stages
• Reasons why both Harris and Trump are confident before the vote
• Who’s leading the polls?

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung later defended the comments, saying they were about the threats made against him.

“The president’s statement about protective glass placement has nothing to do with the media being harmed, or anything else,” Cheung said.

“It was about threats against him that were spurred on by dangerous rhetoric from Democrats. In fact, President Trump was stating that the media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield.”

Since first running for president in 2016, Trump has repeatedly criticised the press – calling them “dishonest,” “not good people,” and “scum”.

During the 2024 campaign, he has been accused of divisive rhetoric against his opponents more generally. Rival Democrats have criticised him for railing at his rallies against “the enemy from within” – which Trump has said refers to “radical left lunatics” and a couple of Democratic lawmakers.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How to win the electoral college
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: How this election could change the world
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

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

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

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

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

• LIVE: Follow updates as election day nears
• All you need to know about election night
• When will we know who has won?

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 go to the polls on 5 November to choose their next president.

US election results have sometimes been declared within hours of the polls closing, but this year’s close contest could mean a longer wait.

In some presidential races the victor has been named late on election night, or early the next morning. This time, the tight race in many states could mean media outlets wait longer before projecting who has won.

Democrat Kamala Harris, the current vice-president, and Republican Donald Trump, the former president, have been running neck-and-neck for weeks.

Narrow victories could also mean recounts. In key swing state Pennsylvania, for example, a state-wide recount would be required if there’s a half-percentage-point difference between the votes cast for the winner and loser. In 2020, the margin was just over 1.1 percentage points.

Legal challenges are also possible. More than 100 pre-election lawsuits have already been filed, including challenges to voter eligibility and voter roll management, by Republicans.

Other scenarios that could cause delays include any election-related disorder, particularly at polling locations.

On the other hand, vote-counting has been sped up in some areas including the crucial state of Michigan, and far fewer votes will be cast by mail than in the last election, which was during the Covid pandemic.

• Follow live: Final sprint across key states
• US election polls: Who is winning – Harris or Trump?

The 2020 election took place on Tuesday 3 November. However, US TV networks did not declare Joe Biden the winner until late morning on Saturday 7 November, after the result in Pennsylvania became clearer.

In other recent elections, voters have had a much shorter wait.

In 2016, when Trump won the presidency, he was declared the winner shortly before 03:00 EST (08:00 GMT) the day after the election.

In 2012, when Barack Obama secured a second term, his victory was projected before midnight on polling day itself.

However, the 2000 election between George W Bush and Al Gore was a notable exception.

The vote was held on 7 November, but the two campaigns went to war over a tight contest in Florida and the race was not decided until 12 December. The US Supreme Court voted to end the state’s recount process, which kept Bush in place as winner and handed him the White House.

• Visual guide – Harris and Trump’s paths to victory
• The moment I decided on my vote

Across the country, the first polls will close at 18:00 EST (23:00 GMT) on Tuesday evening and the last polls will close at 01:00 EST (06:00 GMT) early on Wednesday.

But this race is expected to come down to results from seven swing states which experts believe could plausibly be won by Harris or Trump. These are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

19:00 EST (00:00 GMT) – Polls close in Georgia and five other states, and partially in two more states. This is also when US TV networks are likely to begin making their first calls of the night, in less competitive states like Kentucky.

19:30 EST (00:30 GMT) – Polls close across three states, including North Carolina.

20:00 EST (01:00 GMT) – Polls close in Pennsylvania, 15 other states and the District of Columbia, as well as partially in Michigan and four other states.

21:00 EST (02:00 GMT) – All remaining polls close in Michigan. Voting will also end in Arizona, Wisconsin and 12 other states.

22:00 EST (03:00 GMT) – Polls close across Nevada and two other states, and partially in two others.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How to win the electoral college
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: How this election could change the world
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

Typically, the votes cast on election day are tallied first, followed by early and mail ballots, those that have been challenged, and then overseas and military ballots.

Local election officials – sometimes appointed, sometimes elected – verify, process and count individual votes, in a process known as canvassing.

Verifying ballots includes comparing the number cast with the number of active voters; removing, unfolding and examining every single ballot for tears, stains or other damage; and documenting and investigating any inconsistencies.

Counting ballots involves feeding each one into electronic scanners that tabulate their results. Some circumstances require manual counts or double-checked tallies.

Every state and locality has rigorous rules about who can participate in the canvass, the order in which votes are processed and which parts are open to the public, including how partisan observers can monitor and intervene in vote-counting.

Once every valid vote has been included in the final results, and after processes such as recounts have been completed, the election results are certified – first in local jurisdictions, then at the state-wide level.

A state executive, typically the governor, certifies what’s known as a slate of electors to represent their state in the electoral college. These electors meet in their respective states on 17 December to cast their votes and send them to Washington.

On 6 January, a new US Congress meets in a joint session to count the electoral votes, with the current vice-president presiding.

After the 2020 election, Trump refused to concede and rallied supporters to march on the US Capitol as Congress was meeting to certify Biden’s victory.

He urged his vice-president, Mike Pence, to reject the results – but Pence refused.

Even after the riot was cleared and members of Congress regrouped, 147 Republicans voted unsuccessfully to overturn Trump’s loss.

Electoral reforms since then have made it harder for lawmakers to object to certified results sent to them from individual states. They have also clarified that the vice-president has no power to unilaterally reject electoral votes.

Nevertheless, election watchers expect that efforts to delay certification of the 2024 vote could take place at the local and state level.

Trump, his running mate JD Vance and top Republican leaders on Capitol Hill have refused on several occasions to state unequivocally that they will accept the results if he loses.

The president-elect will begin their term in office after being inaugurated on Monday, 20 January 2025, in the grounds of the US Capitol complex.

It will be the 60th presidential inauguration in US history.

The event will see the new president sworn in on a pledge to uphold the Constitution and then deliver their inaugural address.

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?

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.

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.”

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

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

The US government has also alleged that foreign actors, including Russia, are spreading fake videos to undermine confidence in the electoral process.

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

Many posts alleging election irregularities support the Trump campaign’s false claim that the former president won the 2020 election and suggestions that he will potentially be cheated out of victory again on 5 November.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s happened before.

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

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• SIMPLE GUIDE: All you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: Vote weighs on minds of Ukraine’s frontline soldiers
• PATH TO 270: The states they need to win – and why
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The BBC contacted True the Vote for comment.

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

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

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

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

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

The effect of this is unpredictable.

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

“Music is sacred to me,” Quincy Jones once said. “Melody is God’s voice.”

He certainly had the divine touch.

Jones, who had died at the age of 91, was the right-hand man to both Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson, and helped to shape the sound of jazz and pop over more than 60 years.

His recordings revolutionised music by crossing genres, promoting unlikely collaborations and shaping modern production techniques.

Here are 10 songs that showcase his versatility and brilliance in the studio, and his ability to draw the best out of the musicians he worked with.

Michael Jackson met Quincy Jones on the set of the 1978 movie The Wiz, and asked him to produce his next album. That record was Off The Wall – a disco extravaganza that established Jackson as a solo star.

They teamed up again for 1982’s Thriller, which arguably remade the pop business. Not only did it produce seven top 10 singles; but it crossed racial barriers, appealing equally to black and white audiences.

Key to the success was Billie Jean, a dark tale about the groupies Jackson met while touring with his brothers. As a producer, Jones wasn’t keen on the track at first – arguing with Jackson about the long instrumental opening.

“I said, ‘Michael we’ve got to cut that intro,’” he later recalled.

“He said, ‘But that’s the jelly! That’s what makes me want to dance.’ And when Michael Jackson tells you, ‘That’s what makes me want to dance,’ well, the rest of us just have to shut up.”

With those words ringing in his ears, Jones kept the arrangement lean and funky. He even instructed sound engineer Bruce Swedien to create a drum sound with a “sonic personality” that no-one had ever heard before. The result is one of the most recognisable intros in the history of pop.

• Listen to Billie Jean

“The friendship was so strong. You can’t describe it,” said Jones of his partnership with Frank Sinatra – which extended far beyond the recording studio.

“Seven double Jack Daniels in an hour… [Sinatra] invented partying.”

After establishing their relationship on 1964’s It Might As Well Be Swing, Jones helped Sinatra re-arrange his signature songs for a four-week residency at the Copa Room in The Sands hotel, Las Vegas.

“It was probably the most exciting engagement I have ever done in my life, since I started performing,” Sinatra later recalled.

Accompanied by the Count Basie Orchestra, the star sounds perfectly at ease, breezing around standards like I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Fly Me To The Moon and You Make Me Feel So Young.

But it’s Come Fly With Me that most perfectly captures the vitality of Jones’s new arrangements, especially in the charismatic interplay between Sinatra and the brass section.

No wonder that it was chosen as the show’s opening number – as captured on the award-winning live album, Sinatra At The Sands.

• Listen to Come Fly With Me (Live)

Lesley Gore was just a teenager when her vocal demos made their way into Quincy Jones’s hands in the early 1960s. Up to that point, he’d been working with jazz singers like Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan – but he heard something he liked on Gore’s tape.

“She had a mellow, distinctive voice and sang in tune, which a lot of grown up rock ‘n’ roll singers couldn’t do, so I signed her,” he wrote in his autobiography.

For their first session, Jones picked It’s My Party out of a pile of 200 demos and got to work. He double-tracked Gore’s voice, adding little flourishes of brass and unexpected chord changes that perfectly evoke the song’s adolescent angst.

He then rush-released the single, after discovering that Phil Spector had plans to record the same song with the Crystals. It duly topped the US charts and went to number nine in the UK.

• Listen to It’s My Party

Recorded by The Lovin’ Spoonful, Summer In The City is a 1960s rock classic, full of ominous organ chords and powerful drum hits that capture the sticky filth of an oppressive heatwave.

Quincy Jones version, recorded for his 1973 album You’ve Got It Bad Girl, is almost unrecognisable as the same song. Lazily chilled-out, the Hammond organ is played with a featherlight touch, and the drums are gently brushed.

Most of the lyrics are excised and, when they arrive at the 2’30” mark, they’re sung with almost heavenly serenity by Valerie Simpson (of Ashford and Simpson fame).

Originally released as a b-side, it’s become one of Jones’s most influential songs. According to WhoSampled.com, it’s been sampled on 87 other songs, including tracks by Massive Attack, Eminem, Nightmares on Wax and The Roots.

• Listen to Summer In The City

Another example of how Jones’s skill as an arranger could completely change a song.

Mad About The Boy was written by Sir Noël Coward, for the 1932 revue Words and Music. In the original, it was sung by four different women, each expressing their love for an unnamed film star (rumoured to be Douglas Fairbanks Jr) as they wait in line to see one of his films.

It’s funny and quirky and clever – but when Dinah Washington covered the song in 1961, Jones slowed it down and switched the time signature from 4/4 to 6/8, allowing the singer to prowl through the lyrics with a newfound carnality.

Overlooked at the time, it gained a new lease of life in 1992 when it was used to soundtrack a Levis advert and crept into the UK charts for the first time.

• Listen to Mad About The Boy

Written in just 20 minutes, Soul Bossa Nova was inspired by an early-60s fad for Brazilian music, sparked by the success of João Gilberto and Stan Getz’s Desafinado.

Jones is in his element here – with chirruping flutes and big trombone slides that capture the joie de vivre of the carnival. He also makes prominent use of a cuíca, the Brazilian drum that produces what sounds like a very happy monkey in the opening bars.

The bossa-craze may have been short-lived, but Jones’s song endured, most memorably in the opening dance sequence of Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery.

• Listen to Soul Bossa Nova

From the beginning, Jones and Jackson planned to make Thriller a blockbuster pop album.

“We went through 800 songs to get to nine,” Jones said. “That’s not casual.”

The work was exhausting. At one point, they were working in three studios simultaneously… until the speakers caught fire.

Beat It was crucial to the project – because it was designed to get Jackson played on US rock radio, an unheard of prospect in the heavily-segregated music industry of the 1980s.

Jones had told Jackson to write “a black version” of The Knack’s My Sharona – the 1979 hit song that sold more then 10 million copies. But Jackson was one step ahead. He had a demo that fit the bill, albeit without a hook or lyrics.

While Jackson worked on those elements (you can hear his first, wordless attempt at the melody on his YouTube channel), Jones called on Eddie Van Halen to perform the guitar solo.

“He came in and he stacked up his Gibson [guitars],” Jones later recalled.

“I said, ‘I’m not going to sit here and try to tell you what to play… Let’s try three or four takes. Some of it will be over-animated, some of it will be long, and we’ll sculpt it.

“And he played his ass off.”

The song, with its West Side Story-inspired video, landed just as MTV took off, making Jackson a permanent fixture in living rooms across America.

But for all the commercial focus of the Thriller project, Jones always maintained that the music came first.

“I’ve never, ever in my life done music for money or fame – because that’s when God walks out of the room,” he said.

• Listen to Beat It

Jones discovered guitarist George Johnson and bassist Louis Johnson when he heard them playing on a demo by Chaka Khan’s sister, Taka Boom.

He hired them to play on the soundtrack for the celebrated TV mini-series Roots, placed them in his touring band, and helmed their 1976 debut album Look Out For #1 (including a sublime cover of The Beatles’ Come Together).

But the brothers didn’t achieve mainstream success until 1977, with the release of Strawberry Letter #23.

Originally recorded by Shuggie Otis, Jones’s version toughens up the production, with a strutting bassline and soaring backing vocals – but George Johnson struggled to recreate Shuggie’s original guitar solo, which was full of complicated triplet notes.

Frustrated, Jones called up session musician Lee Ritenour for help.

“Quincy was walking down the hallway tearing his hair out,” Ritenour later recalled. “He said, ‘I’m going to lunch, Ritenour. Get it done.’

Released in the middle of the punk and disco boom, the song’s romantic psychedelia still found an audience – reaching number 13 in the charts. It was later re-popularised by Quentin Tarantino in the film Jackie Brown.

• Listen to Strawberry Letter #23

Early in his career, Jones was one of the most in-demand arrangers in jazz, working with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee.

In 1958, he recorded an entire album with Sarah Vaughan in Paris, backed by a 55-piece orchestra. Among the highlights is the lovestruck ballad Misty – originally recorded by pianist Erroll Garner, and made famous by Johnny Mathis.

Unlike their syrupy and sentimental versions, Vaughan and Jones (along with producer Jack Tracy) give the lyrics some pathos. She might be “as helpless as a kitten up a tree”, but you’re never entirely convinced she’s happy about the situation.

Jones adds beguiling touches – from the cascading strings when Vaughan sings “a thousand violins begin to play”, to the beautifully muted saxophone line, played by Zoot Sims.

When Vaughan died in 2019, Jones posted a long tribute on his Facebook page, using his pet name for her – Sassy.

“Dear sweet Sassy was all about sophistication and chord changes and, man, I’m telling you she thought like a horn and SANG like a horn!” he wrote.

“We had quite the journey together, & I will never forget each moment we had, because every moment was a special one.”

• Listen to Misty

“Check your egos at the door,” said the hand-written sign that Quincy Jones pinned to the door of his recording studio in 1985.

The occasion was the recording of We Are The World – a star-studded charity single that aimed to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.

Written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, the record featured vocals from Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen, Dionne Warwick and Bob Dylan, all recorded in a single night.

Herding the singers was a massive headache, as the recent Netflix documentary The Greatest Night In Pop revealed.

At one point, Stevie Wonder insisted that some of the lyrics should be rewritten in Swahili – despite the fact that the people of Ethiopia, who would be the main beneficiaries of the famine-relief fundraiser, largely speak other languages.

Jones oversaw the whole session with the patience and wisdom of a producer who’d seen it all.

The results aren’t particularly great – the song is sickly and overlong – but the fact that it’s coherent at all is a testament to his skill as a producer, arranger, mentor and referee.

In the end, the song raised more than $63m ($227m or £178m adjusted for inflation); and Jones looked back on it as one of his proudest achievements.

“I have never before or since experienced the joy I felt that night working with this rich, complex human tapestry of love, talent, and grace,” he wrote in his 2002 autobiography.

• Listen to We Are The World

Vice-President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are locked in an extraordinarily tight race for the White House. They are courting each and every vote – with so-called “persuadable” Americans a particular prize.

Throughout the campaign, the BBC has been speaking to undecided voters who for one reason or another hadn’t made up their minds.

We went back to them just before election day, and while most had come to a decision, others were still on the fence.

First, a voter who plans to vote for Harris or Trump but isn’t sure which one. She will decide, she says, when she walks into the ballot booth.

• Harris v Trump poll tracker
• The moment I decided who to vote for
• When will we know who has won the US election?
• Visual guide – Harris and Trump’s paths to victory

I have no freaking clue man. It’s so hard. When I voted for Trump, it came down to who would I trust with my kid alone and it wasn’t [President Joe] Biden.

I’m still undecided.

All of my family is voting for Kamala and my friends are voting for Trump.

I’m going to vote for one of them. I’ve got no idea which one.

I’m still super-duper undecided. I think I’m leaning toward Kamala over Trump, if I think about who I would trust alone in a room with my daughter.

I’m going to make up my mind when I go into the ballot booth.

Especially having seen what’s transpired over the course of the last two weeks, I think it’s moved from a fear of an erratic prideful person to the actions of someone that [if elected president] I truly would worry for the future of American political discourse.

In the rhetoric from that Madison Square Garden [event] – and I know they’re technically not [Trump] but his campaign chose them, they had to pre-vet the speeches – someone literally called Kamala Harris the anti-Christ.

I feel OK about voting for Kamala. It’s probably not the proudest vote I’ve ever cast, but I do feel like she’s at the very least a level-headed person who will surround herself with other level-headed people who I would trust.

I have definite plans of who I’m going to vote for, but I can’t tell you the candidate’s name because I don’t know the candidate’s name. I’m voting for a third party.

Hopefully that [candidate] is an adult. I’m not happy with either of our [major] presidential candidates.

I know the third-party candidate doesn’t stand a chance to get in. It’s just to send a signal to Washington that I’m not playing their game and if they want me to vote Democratic or Republican, they better put somebody in there with brains.

One of them is a bully who wants to own the country and the other one wants to give the whole thing away.

I believe that the immigration issue has not been fixed during the Biden presidency. So I am looking for a change.

Kamala is trying to run on a “change” platform, but it is difficult for her to do so when she is coming from the same administration. I haven’t heard her talk about much of a plan.

I believe Trump has surrounded himself with competent leaders such as Tulsi [Gabbard], RFK, and [JD] Vance.

I don’t hear Kamala address any of the above issues. She is not an eloquent orator – and does not seem to have much of a plan to improve our country.

Since the debate, I’ve really seen [Harris] take a more neo-con war stance.

So Liz Cheney, John Bolton, these are the people she’s going around touring with and doing campaign events with, and if you look at their geo-political history, they’re really hawkish when it comes to Iran.

And that’s just a position I cannot get behind at this point, given our problems in America.

I’m going to be putting America first, and when we’re talking about people who are actively promoting that, they’re going to be sending arms and funds to these foreign nations that don’t have our interests at heart. That’s just a core conviction of mine, that we need to reinvest those funds into America.

My mind would have been changed to maybe vote for Harris if I had heard more from her that was substantial.

Nothing she said, I felt, throughout the campaign really sounded like it had any substance, and there were some key issues I don’t support her position on.

I would say the same for Trump, so I’m going to stick with third party.

If enough voters in swing states decided to go third party, Democrats and Republicans would have to realise they have to choose candidates who we can support.

After Trump went after the Puerto Rican community during one of his rallies, I thought that was very inappropriate. I felt like that was something he shouldn’t have done, especially when running for election.

It will be good to see, if [Harris] does become president, how she does, and [to] have our first female president.

I hope elections in the future are less aggressive and become more of a debate instead of a fight.

I ended up casting an empty ballot for president. It was tough but I felt like no candidate really offered any policy that resonated with me.

It didn’t feel like any candidate offered anything that was very substantial.

I don’t think Kamala’s plans broke away from what Joe Biden has been doing so far and Trump made some claims that he would resolve the conflict without actually specifying what he would do.

A lot of times, [Trump] makes several big claims and then never follows up on them. I’m still waiting for Mexico to pay for that border wall.

In the lead-up to election day, BBC Voter Voices is hearing from Americans around the country about what matters to them.

Are you an American voter? Want to join in? Apply to be featured in future BBC stories here.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How to win the electoral college
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: How this election could change the world
• 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%, 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%, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

All five characters have private accounts, and no friends.

• Election polls – is Harris or Trump ahead?

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

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

Soon, she was being recommended political content, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• SIMPLE GUIDE: All you need to know about the vote
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: Vote weighs on minds of Ukraine’s frontline soldiers
• PATH TO 270: The states they need to win – and why
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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.”

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.

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.

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.

American voters go to the polls on 5 November to choose their next president.

US election results have sometimes been declared within hours of the polls closing, but this year’s close contest could mean a longer wait.

In some presidential races the victor has been named late on election night, or early the next morning. This time, the tight race in many states could mean media outlets wait longer before projecting who has won.

Democrat Kamala Harris, the current vice-president, and Republican Donald Trump, the former president, have been running neck-and-neck for weeks.

Narrow victories could also mean recounts. In key swing state Pennsylvania, for example, a state-wide recount would be required if there’s a half-percentage-point difference between the votes cast for the winner and loser. In 2020, the margin was just over 1.1 percentage points.

Legal challenges are also possible. More than 100 pre-election lawsuits have already been filed, including challenges to voter eligibility and voter roll management, by Republicans.

Other scenarios that could cause delays include any election-related disorder, particularly at polling locations.

On the other hand, vote-counting has been sped up in some areas including the crucial state of Michigan, and far fewer votes will be cast by mail than in the last election, which was during the Covid pandemic.

• Follow live: Final sprint across key states
• US election polls: Who is winning – Harris or Trump?

The 2020 election took place on Tuesday 3 November. However, US TV networks did not declare Joe Biden the winner until late morning on Saturday 7 November, after the result in Pennsylvania became clearer.

In other recent elections, voters have had a much shorter wait.

In 2016, when Trump won the presidency, he was declared the winner shortly before 03:00 EST (08:00 GMT) the day after the election.

In 2012, when Barack Obama secured a second term, his victory was projected before midnight on polling day itself.

However, the 2000 election between George W Bush and Al Gore was a notable exception.

The vote was held on 7 November, but the two campaigns went to war over a tight contest in Florida and the race was not decided until 12 December. The US Supreme Court voted to end the state’s recount process, which kept Bush in place as winner and handed him the White House.

• Visual guide – Harris and Trump’s paths to victory
• The moment I decided on my vote

Across the country, the first polls will close at 18:00 EST (23:00 GMT) on Tuesday evening and the last polls will close at 01:00 EST (06:00 GMT) early on Wednesday.

But this race is expected to come down to results from seven swing states which experts believe could plausibly be won by Harris or Trump. These are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

19:00 EST (00:00 GMT) – Polls close in Georgia and five other states, and partially in two more states. This is also when US TV networks are likely to begin making their first calls of the night, in less competitive states like Kentucky.

19:30 EST (00:30 GMT) – Polls close across three states, including North Carolina.

20:00 EST (01:00 GMT) – Polls close in Pennsylvania, 15 other states and the District of Columbia, as well as partially in Michigan and four other states.

21:00 EST (02:00 GMT) – All remaining polls close in Michigan. Voting will also end in Arizona, Wisconsin and 12 other states.

22:00 EST (03:00 GMT) – Polls close across Nevada and two other states, and partially in two others.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How to win the electoral college
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: How this election could change the world
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

Typically, the votes cast on election day are tallied first, followed by early and mail ballots, those that have been challenged, and then overseas and military ballots.

Local election officials – sometimes appointed, sometimes elected – verify, process and count individual votes, in a process known as canvassing.

Verifying ballots includes comparing the number cast with the number of active voters; removing, unfolding and examining every single ballot for tears, stains or other damage; and documenting and investigating any inconsistencies.

Counting ballots involves feeding each one into electronic scanners that tabulate their results. Some circumstances require manual counts or double-checked tallies.

Every state and locality has rigorous rules about who can participate in the canvass, the order in which votes are processed and which parts are open to the public, including how partisan observers can monitor and intervene in vote-counting.

Once every valid vote has been included in the final results, and after processes such as recounts have been completed, the election results are certified – first in local jurisdictions, then at the state-wide level.

A state executive, typically the governor, certifies what’s known as a slate of electors to represent their state in the electoral college. These electors meet in their respective states on 17 December to cast their votes and send them to Washington.

On 6 January, a new US Congress meets in a joint session to count the electoral votes, with the current vice-president presiding.

After the 2020 election, Trump refused to concede and rallied supporters to march on the US Capitol as Congress was meeting to certify Biden’s victory.

He urged his vice-president, Mike Pence, to reject the results – but Pence refused.

Even after the riot was cleared and members of Congress regrouped, 147 Republicans voted unsuccessfully to overturn Trump’s loss.

Electoral reforms since then have made it harder for lawmakers to object to certified results sent to them from individual states. They have also clarified that the vice-president has no power to unilaterally reject electoral votes.

Nevertheless, election watchers expect that efforts to delay certification of the 2024 vote could take place at the local and state level.

Trump, his running mate JD Vance and top Republican leaders on Capitol Hill have refused on several occasions to state unequivocally that they will accept the results if he loses.

The president-elect will begin their term in office after being inaugurated on Monday, 20 January 2025, in the grounds of the US Capitol complex.

It will be the 60th presidential inauguration in US history.

The event will see the new president sworn in on a pledge to uphold the Constitution and then deliver their inaugural address.

With just one day to go, the race for the White House is deadlocked – both at the national level and in the all-important battleground states.

The polls are so close, within the margin of error, that either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris could actually be two or three points better off – enough to win comfortably.

There is a compelling case to make for why each may have the edge when it comes to building a coalition of voters in the right places, and then ensuring they actually turn out.

Let’s start with the history-making possibility that a defeated president might be re-elected for the first time in 130 years.

• Harris v Trump poll tracker
• Live updates from the campaign’s closing stages
• When will we know if Harris or Trump has won?

The economy is the number one issue for voters, and while unemployment is low and the stock market is booming, most Americans say they are struggling with higher prices every day.

Inflation hit levels not seen since the 1970s in the aftermath of the pandemic, giving Trump the chance to ask “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

In 2024, voters around the world have several times thrown out the party in power, partly due to the high, post-Covid, cost of living. US voters also seem hungry for change.

Only a quarter of Americans say they are satisfied with the direction the country is going in and two-thirds have a poor economic outlook.

Harris has tried to be the so-called change candidate, but as vice-president has struggled to distance herself from an unpopular Joe Biden.

Despite the fallout from the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol, a string of indictments and an unprecedented criminal conviction, Trump’s support has remained stable all year at 40% or above.

While Democrats and “Never-Trump” conservatives say he is unfit for office, most Republicans agree when Trump says he’s the victim of a political witch-hunt.

With both sides so dug in, he just needs to win over enough of the small slice of undecided voters without a fixed view of him.

Beyond the state of the economy, elections are often decided by an issue with an emotional pull.

Democrats will hope it’s abortion, while Trump is betting it’s immigration.

After encounters at the border hit record levels under Biden, and the influx impacted states far from the border, polls suggest voters trust Trump more on the immigration – and that he’s doing much better with Latinos than in previous elections.

Trump’s appeal to voters who feel forgotten and left behind has transformed US politics by turning traditional Democratic constituencies like union workers into Republicans and making the protection of American industry by tariffs almost the norm.

If he drives up turnout in rural and suburban parts of swing states this can offset the loss of moderate, college-educated Republicans.

Trump’s detractors say he undermines America’s alliances by cosying up to authoritarian leaders.

The former president sees his unpredictability as a strength, however, and points out that no major wars started when he was in the White House.

Many Americans are angry, for different reasons, with the US sending billions to Ukraine and Israel – and think America is weaker under Biden.

A majority of voters, especially men who Trump has courted through podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, see Trump as a stronger leader than Harris.

Despite Trump’s advantages, he remains a deeply polarising figure.

In 2020, he won a record number of votes for a Republican candidate, but was defeated because seven million more Americans turned out to support Biden.

This time, Harris is playing up the fear factor about a Trump return. She’s called him a “fascist” and a threat to democracy, while vowing to move on from “drama and conflict”.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll in July indicated that four in five Americans felt the country was spiralling out of control. Harris will be hoping voters – especially moderate Republicans and independents – see her as a candidate of stability.

• Visual guide – Harris and Trump’s paths to victory
• The moment I decided on my vote

Democrats were facing near-certain defeat at the point Biden dropped out of the race. United in their desire to beat Trump, the party quickly rallied around Harris. With impressive speed from a standing start, she delivered a more forward-looking message that excited the base.

While Republicans have tied her to Biden’s more unpopular policies, Harris has rendered some of their Biden-specific attack lines redundant.

The clearest of these is age – polls consistently suggested voters had real concerns about Biden’s fitness for office. Now the race has flipped, and it is Trump who’s vying to become the oldest person to ever win the White House.

This is the first presidential election since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and the constitutional right to an abortion.

Voters concerned about protecting abortion rights overwhelmingly back Harris, and we’ve seen in past elections – notably the 2022 midterms – that the issue can drive turnout and have a real impact on the result.

This time around, 10 states, including the swing state Arizona, will have ballot initiatives asking voters how abortion should be regulated. This could boost turnout in Harris’s favour.

The historic nature of her bid to become the first female president may also strengthen her significant lead among women voters.

The groups Harris is polling more strongly with, such as the college-educated and older people, are more likely to vote.

Democrats ultimately perform better with high-turnout groups, while Trump has made gains with relatively low-turnout groups such as young men and those without college degrees.

Trump, for example, holds a huge lead among those who were registered but didn’t vote in 2020, according to a New York Times/Siena poll.

A key question, then, is whether they will show up this time.

It’s no secret that American elections are expensive, and 2024 is on track to be the most expensive ever.

But when it comes to spending power – Harris is on top. She’s raised more since becoming the candidate in July than Trump has in the entire period since January 2023, according to a recent Financial Times analysis, which also noted that her campaign has spent almost twice as much on advertising.

This could play a role in a razor-tight race that will ultimately be decided by voters in swing states currently being bombarded by political ads.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: How to win the electoral college
• EXPLAINER: What Harris or Trump would do in power
• GLOBAL: How this election could change the world
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• POLLS: Who is winning the race for the White House?

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

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.

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
• When will we know who has won?

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

“Music is sacred to me,” Quincy Jones once said. “Melody is God’s voice.”

He certainly had the divine touch.

Jones, who had died at the age of 91, was the right-hand man to both Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson, and helped to shape the sound of jazz and pop over more than 60 years.

His recordings revolutionised music by crossing genres, promoting unlikely collaborations and shaping modern production techniques.

Here are 10 songs that showcase his versatility and brilliance in the studio, and his ability to draw the best out of the musicians he worked with.

Michael Jackson met Quincy Jones on the set of the 1978 movie The Wiz, and asked him to produce his next album. That record was Off The Wall – a disco extravaganza that established Jackson as a solo star.

They teamed up again for 1982’s Thriller, which arguably remade the pop business. Not only did it produce seven top 10 singles; but it crossed racial barriers, appealing equally to black and white audiences.

Key to the success was Billie Jean, a dark tale about the groupies Jackson met while touring with his brothers. As a producer, Jones wasn’t keen on the track at first – arguing with Jackson about the long instrumental opening.

“I said, ‘Michael we’ve got to cut that intro,’” he later recalled.

“He said, ‘But that’s the jelly! That’s what makes me want to dance.’ And when Michael Jackson tells you, ‘That’s what makes me want to dance,’ well, the rest of us just have to shut up.”

With those words ringing in his ears, Jones kept the arrangement lean and funky. He even instructed sound engineer Bruce Swedien to create a drum sound with a “sonic personality” that no-one had ever heard before. The result is one of the most recognisable intros in the history of pop.

• Listen to Billie Jean

“The friendship was so strong. You can’t describe it,” said Jones of his partnership with Frank Sinatra – which extended far beyond the recording studio.

“Seven double Jack Daniels in an hour… [Sinatra] invented partying.”

After establishing their relationship on 1964’s It Might As Well Be Swing, Jones helped Sinatra re-arrange his signature songs for a four-week residency at the Copa Room in The Sands hotel, Las Vegas.

“It was probably the most exciting engagement I have ever done in my life, since I started performing,” Sinatra later recalled.

Accompanied by the Count Basie Orchestra, the star sounds perfectly at ease, breezing around standards like I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Fly Me To The Moon and You Make Me Feel So Young.

But it’s Come Fly With Me that most perfectly captures the vitality of Jones’s new arrangements, especially in the charismatic interplay between Sinatra and the brass section.

No wonder that it was chosen as the show’s opening number – as captured on the award-winning live album, Sinatra At The Sands.

• Listen to Come Fly With Me (Live)

Lesley Gore was just a teenager when her vocal demos made their way into Quincy Jones’s hands in the early 1960s. Up to that point, he’d been working with jazz singers like Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan – but he heard something he liked on Gore’s tape.

“She had a mellow, distinctive voice and sang in tune, which a lot of grown up rock ‘n’ roll singers couldn’t do, so I signed her,” he wrote in his autobiography.

For their first session, Jones picked It’s My Party out of a pile of 200 demos and got to work. He double-tracked Gore’s voice, adding little flourishes of brass and unexpected chord changes that perfectly evoke the song’s adolescent angst.

He then rush-released the single, after discovering that Phil Spector had plans to record the same song with the Crystals. It duly topped the US charts and went to number nine in the UK.

• Listen to It’s My Party

Recorded by The Lovin’ Spoonful, Summer In The City is a 1960s rock classic, full of ominous organ chords and powerful drum hits that capture the sticky filth of an oppressive heatwave.

Quincy Jones version, recorded for his 1973 album You’ve Got It Bad Girl, is almost unrecognisable as the same song. Lazily chilled-out, the Hammond organ is played with a featherlight touch, and the drums are gently brushed.

Most of the lyrics are excised and, when they arrive at the 2’30” mark, they’re sung with almost heavenly serenity by Valerie Simpson (of Ashford and Simpson fame).

Originally released as a b-side, it’s become one of Jones’s most influential songs. According to WhoSampled.com, it’s been sampled on 87 other songs, including tracks by Massive Attack, Eminem, Nightmares on Wax and The Roots.

• Listen to Summer In The City

Another example of how Jones’s skill as an arranger could completely change a song.

Mad About The Boy was written by Sir Noël Coward, for the 1932 revue Words and Music. In the original, it was sung by four different women, each expressing their love for an unnamed film star (rumoured to be Douglas Fairbanks Jr) as they wait in line to see one of his films.

It’s funny and quirky and clever – but when Dinah Washington covered the song in 1961, Jones slowed it down and switched the time signature from 4/4 to 6/8, allowing the singer to prowl through the lyrics with a newfound carnality.

Overlooked at the time, it gained a new lease of life in 1992 when it was used to soundtrack a Levis advert and crept into the UK charts for the first time.

• Listen to Mad About The Boy

Written in just 20 minutes, Soul Bossa Nova was inspired by an early-60s fad for Brazilian music, sparked by the success of João Gilberto and Stan Getz’s Desafinado.

Jones is in his element here – with chirruping flutes and big trombone slides that capture the joie de vivre of the carnival. He also makes prominent use of a cuíca, the Brazilian drum that produces what sounds like a very happy monkey in the opening bars.

The bossa-craze may have been short-lived, but Jones’s song endured, most memorably in the opening dance sequence of Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery.

• Listen to Soul Bossa Nova

From the beginning, Jones and Jackson planned to make Thriller a blockbuster pop album.

“We went through 800 songs to get to nine,” Jones said. “That’s not casual.”

The work was exhausting. At one point, they were working in three studios simultaneously… until the speakers caught fire.

Beat It was crucial to the project – because it was designed to get Jackson played on US rock radio, an unheard of prospect in the heavily-segregated music industry of the 1980s.

Jones had told Jackson to write “a black version” of The Knack’s My Sharona – the 1979 hit song that sold more then 10 million copies. But Jackson was one step ahead. He had a demo that fit the bill, albeit without a hook or lyrics.

While Jackson worked on those elements (you can hear his first, wordless attempt at the melody on his YouTube channel), Jones called on Eddie Van Halen to perform the guitar solo.

“He came in and he stacked up his Gibson [guitars],” Jones later recalled.

“I said, ‘I’m not going to sit here and try to tell you what to play… Let’s try three or four takes. Some of it will be over-animated, some of it will be long, and we’ll sculpt it.

“And he played his ass off.”

The song, with its West Side Story-inspired video, landed just as MTV took off, making Jackson a permanent fixture in living rooms across America.

But for all the commercial focus of the Thriller project, Jones always maintained that the music came first.

“I’ve never, ever in my life done music for money or fame – because that’s when God walks out of the room,” he said.

• Listen to Beat It

Jones discovered guitarist George Johnson and bassist Louis Johnson when he heard them playing on a demo by Chaka Khan’s sister, Taka Boom.

He hired them to play on the soundtrack for the celebrated TV mini-series Roots, placed them in his touring band, and helmed their 1976 debut album Look Out For #1 (including a sublime cover of The Beatles’ Come Together).

But the brothers didn’t achieve mainstream success until 1977, with the release of Strawberry Letter #23.

Originally recorded by Shuggie Otis, Jones’s version toughens up the production, with a strutting bassline and soaring backing vocals – but George Johnson struggled to recreate Shuggie’s original guitar solo, which was full of complicated triplet notes.

Frustrated, Jones called up session musician Lee Ritenour for help.

“Quincy was walking down the hallway tearing his hair out,” Ritenour later recalled. “He said, ‘I’m going to lunch, Ritenour. Get it done.’

Released in the middle of the punk and disco boom, the song’s romantic psychedelia still found an audience – reaching number 13 in the charts. It was later re-popularised by Quentin Tarantino in the film Jackie Brown.

• Listen to Strawberry Letter #23

Early in his career, Jones was one of the most in-demand arrangers in jazz, working with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee.

In 1958, he recorded an entire album with Sarah Vaughan in Paris, backed by a 55-piece orchestra. Among the highlights is the lovestruck ballad Misty – originally recorded by pianist Erroll Garner, and made famous by Johnny Mathis.

Unlike their syrupy and sentimental versions, Vaughan and Jones (along with producer Jack Tracy) give the lyrics some pathos. She might be “as helpless as a kitten up a tree”, but you’re never entirely convinced she’s happy about the situation.

Jones adds beguiling touches – from the cascading strings when Vaughan sings “a thousand violins begin to play”, to the beautifully muted saxophone line, played by Zoot Sims.

When Vaughan died in 2019, Jones posted a long tribute on his Facebook page, using his pet name for her – Sassy.

“Dear sweet Sassy was all about sophistication and chord changes and, man, I’m telling you she thought like a horn and SANG like a horn!” he wrote.

“We had quite the journey together, & I will never forget each moment we had, because every moment was a special one.”

• Listen to Misty

“Check your egos at the door,” said the hand-written sign that Quincy Jones pinned to the door of his recording studio in 1985.

The occasion was the recording of We Are The World – a star-studded charity single that aimed to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.

Written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, the record featured vocals from Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen, Dionne Warwick and Bob Dylan, all recorded in a single night.

Herding the singers was a massive headache, as the recent Netflix documentary The Greatest Night In Pop revealed.

At one point, Stevie Wonder insisted that some of the lyrics should be rewritten in Swahili – despite the fact that the people of Ethiopia, who would be the main beneficiaries of the famine-relief fundraiser, largely speak other languages.

Jones oversaw the whole session with the patience and wisdom of a producer who’d seen it all.

The results aren’t particularly great – the song is sickly and overlong – but the fact that it’s coherent at all is a testament to his skill as a producer, arranger, mentor and referee.

In the end, the song raised more than $63m ($227m or £178m adjusted for inflation); and Jones looked back on it as one of his proudest achievements.

“I have never before or since experienced the joy I felt that night working with this rich, complex human tapestry of love, talent, and grace,” he wrote in his 2002 autobiography.

• Listen to We Are The World

Barcelona has been hit by flooding on Monday, as search and rescue efforts continue following devastating flooding around Valencia last week.

Spain’s state meteorological agency has placed parts of Catalonia on red alert for torrential rain, with local media showing footage of cars partially submerged on a highway.

Parts of the city’s El Prat airport, the second largest in the country, have become flooded. More than 80 flights have been cancelled or delayed, while rail services have been suspended.

A similar weather event, which hit the Valencia region with a year’s worth of rain, has caused at least 217 deaths. On Monday, rescuers focused their efforts on searching for missing people in underground car parks.

The storm caught many victims in their vehicles on roads and in underground spaces, such as car parks, tunnels and garages, where rescue operations are particularly difficult.

It is feared shoppers and workers were trapped inside the car park at a shopping mall in Aldaia, on the outskirts of Valencia, as floodwater overwhelmed the area.

Police have confirmed that no victims were located in the first 50 vehicles inspected at the site.

But reports suggest these vehicles were found near the entrance to the car park, with much of the rest of it still submerged and yet to be explored.

Among the dead were a British couple in their 70s, whose family confirmed they had been found dead in their car days after the flash floods hit Valencia. So far no deaths have been reported in Catalonia.

On Monday morning, Spain’s interior minister refused to say how many were still missing.

Outside the Bonaire shopping mall in Aldaia, rotting piles of debris lined the roads while noisy generators pumped water from the mall car park.

Spanish police were using drones to get an initial view of the inside, a police spokesperson said.

When the BBC asked a local police officer how much longer the operation would take, he said he could not give an estimate, but that teams would stay as long as necessary.

As is the case in many parts of the region that have been devastated by the floods, there is a vacuum of information.

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

On Sunday, the king and queen of Spain were pelted with mud and other objects by angry protesters during a visit to the town of Paiporta – one of the worst-affected in the Valencia region.

Objects were also thrown at Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who was quickly evacuated.

The Civil Guard has opened an investigation into the chaotic scenes, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told public broadcaster TVE.

He blamed “marginal groups” for instigating the violence where mud spattered the monarchs’ face and clothes.

In a news conference on Monday, the chief of Spain’s Military Emergencies Unit (UME) said it had pre-deployed 500 troops to Valencia so they could begin working as soon as they were authorised to.

General Francisco Javier Marcos said that when he saw the situation worsen, he sent alerts to 1,000 soldiers, who travelled overnight “so that by dawn the next day, people of Valencia could see that the armed forces were there”.

He added: “You might say we didn’t intervene rapidly. The weather prevented that partially, and secondly, it was a matter of order and discipline.

“You might say that doesn’t justify being slow – well look, you can’t bring more chaos to an already very chaotic situation.”

Local authorities in Valencia have extended travel restrictions for another two days to facilitate the work of the emergency services, cancelled school classes and urged people to work from home.

Gen Marcos said gridlock on some roads was making it hard to distribute food to the 69 affected municipalities.

He said that the number of troops on the ground had been “scaled up” – with 7,800 due by 20:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on Monday. These were being supported by 17,000 volunteers and 5,000 army soldiers offering logistical support, he said.

A warship carrying 104 marine infantry soldiers as well as trucks with food and water docked in Valencia’s port on Monday.

Gen Marcos said the UME was “doing everything we can”, including working double shifts.

He added: “We must be disciplined and we must be patient. I know that’s hard, because pain and emotion means that’s not easy.”

One night 50 years ago, on 21 November 1974, five men boarded a train from Birmingham New Street station heading for the Lancashire port of Heysham to catch a ferry to Belfast. They were going to the funeral of an IRA bomber who had blown himself up in Coventry the week before.

The train left shortly before 8pm. Around 20 minutes later, a bomb exploded at a pub in Birmingham city centre called The Mulberry Bush. It was followed by a second explosion at The Tavern in the Town, another pub nearby. Twenty-one people were killed and 220 injured.

The five men who had left the city by train – and a friend who waved them off at the station – were detained hours later on suspicion of being behind the bombings. They would become known as the Birmingham Six.

At a trial in 1975, they were each sentenced to life for the murders of 21 people.

Yet in 1991, their convictions were quashed and the men were released from prison, largely thanks to Chris Mullin, an investigative journalist, who by that time was also a Labour MP. During the original trial, Mullin had been tipped off that there might be something flawed with the convictions, and some time later he started digging.

“I realised from the start that poking holes in police evidence alone wasn’t enough,” he says today. “I’d need to track down the real bombers and they’d be alive and well in Ireland…”

It took several years to prove the mens’ innocence, but few could have imagined that decades on there would still be so many questions to answer or that now, a full 50 years since the bombings, no one has been brought to justice for what’s believed by many to be the largest unsolved mass murder in modern British history.

Today there are continued calls for a public inquiry into the pub bombings – and that might be inching closer to becoming a reality.

Andy Street, former Mayor of the West Midlands, who worked closely with the families of the victims of the bombings and liaised with the Home Office, told the BBC in September: “I do believe the government could decide to grant the public inquiry. I’ve got good evidence to believe that’s the situation they’re in, so there is a decision that can be taken.”

Street believed they were getting close to a decision before the change of government in July. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper declined to comment but the Home Office told the BBC that “on 22 October, Security Minister Dan Jarvis confirmed to Parliament that he and the home secretary will consider requests for a public inquiry as soon as possible.”

If the public inquiry does open, it could start to answer what really happened that night – and why no one has been brought to justice.

The Pub Bombings

A new BBC podcast explores what happened on the night and in the 50 years since

Mullin has his own views on what really happened. He began his investigation by visiting known IRA men in prison before finding a number of others who hadn’t been in prison on the night of the bombings. “That was a trickier task,” he explains. “But a surprising number of people were helpful. They did all know that the wrong people were inside. And that did play on their conscience.”

Mullin described the accounts of his meetings with the four people he concluded were the real bombers in his book, Error of Judgement, which was published in 1986. But he’d given assurances he would never reveal their names, referring to them only as X, Y, Z and the “Young Planter”.

However, while Mullin’s investigation helped free the Birmingham Six, it didn’t bring about any further prosecutions.

While the IRA have never officially admitted being responsible, they are widely believed to have been behind the attacks. In the early 1970s, they had brought their campaign to the streets of Britain. There had already been some horrific attacks in 1974 by the time the pub bombings occurred, but none that had targeted civilians in the same way.

At 8.11pm on the evening of the Birmingham bombings, a man with an Irish accent had telephoned the Birmingham Post and Mail to say that two bombs were being planted in the city centre, but the warning was vague – it didn’t even mention the pubs by name. Minutes later, the bombs exploded.

John Plimmer had been having a drink at the Tavern in the Town moments before the explosion. Today he says the memories of that night have never left him. “Fifty years on means nothing. To me, it was like yesterday. What had been all lit with bright lights, and full of gaiety and joyous celebration, was now pitch black with a sickly smell of cordite.”

The passing of time has inevitably made the prospect of solving it harder for the police – potential witnesses have died, and memories fade. Added to that, multiple pieces of evidence – including a third, unexploded bomb that was found on the same evening – have been lost.

Yet there is one benefit that the passing of time has brought: the fact that certain revelations have emerged about who might have carried out the bombings, including a former IRA bomber naming people he said carried out the attacks.

The West Midlands Police reopened the investigation after the Birmingham Six were released in 1991, looking for any new leads and examining old evidence, but closed it down again in 1994. The chief constable at the time, Ron Hadfield, said: “The West Midlands Police have done everything that was humanly possible to try to bring to court the perpetrators of those horrendous offences 20 years ago.”

After that, not a great deal happened for a number of years. But in 2010, the sister of one of the victims started a campaign for justice, known as Justice for the 21. The first target was to get the inquest into the deaths of the 21 victims reopened – it had never been finished in the 1970s because the bombings had been subject to a criminal prosecution that resulted in a conviction.

Julie Hambleton’s older sister Maxine was killed in the Tavern in the Town bombing. Julie – who was 11 at the time of the attack – told me she regrets waiting so long to act, but admits: “I wasn’t strong enough to face it before.”

Thanks in part to their campaigning, the inquest eventually happened in 2019, concluding that the victims had been unlawfully killed.

But their families were frustrated by the limited scope and didn’t feel they’d learned much from it. As Hambleton told me: “It was a waste of time.”

There was one surprising development at the inquest, though. A witness who was a convicted IRA bomber, known only as “Witness O”, testified to say he’d been told by the leader of the IRA (in itself an interesting point, as many believed the IRA no longer existed) that he could reveal the names of four alleged perpetrators: Mick Murray, James Francis Gavin, Seamus McLoughlin and Michael Hayes.

On the eve of the inquest, Mullin named three of the four people he believed were responsible for the attacks, the men he’d referred to in his book as X, Y and Z: Murray, Gavin and Hayes respectively. Mullin said he felt able to name them now because the first two were dead and the third, Hayes, had never really cooperated with him so he felt he didn’t owe him a duty of confidentiality.

Mullin has, to this day, refused to name the fourth person he believes is involved, the man he called the “Young Planter” – because he’s still alive. The fourth man named by Witness O, Seamus McLoughlin, is believed to have been the head of the Birmingham IRA at the time, so it seems likely he would at least have known what was planned. He has since died, and there’s no suggestion he’s the Young Planter.

These were all men who were known to the police already, but would being named by a former IRA man change anything, even if it was 45 years after the attacks? Given that three were dead, in their case, no. But what about the fourth, Michael Hayes?

In an interview with a BBC journalist in 2017, Hayes accepted what he called “collective responsibility” for the Birmingham pub bombings. But he was vague about his exact role on the night, repeating “no comment” in response to questions.

There is a fifth name out there too: Michael Patrick Reilly. In a 2018 documentary broadcast on ITV, it was suggested that Reilly was the “Young Planter”. Mullin would not confirm either way when this was put to him. And Witness O was asked about Reilly but said he’d never heard of him.

Reilly, who served a sentence in England in the 1970s for conspiring to cause explosions (but not the pub bombings) – has always denied any involvement in the pub bombings. The BBC, and other outlets, reported that he’d been arrested in 2020 and released without charge.

While the police have never confirmed this, Assistant Chief Constable Damian Barratt from West Midlands Police told me that “as recently as 2023, we provided files of evidence in relation to [Reilly and Hayes] to the Crown Prosecution Service” – but they had concluded the evidence was insufficient to proceed any further.

Insufficient evidence seems to be the primary reason that no one has faced justice for all these years. There are some, however, who suggest there may be another reason.

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement brought to an end 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland, and led to the release of around 220 paramilitary prisoners. In more recent years, another part of the negotiations has come out concerning so-called “On the Runs”. These were the people who were wanted for Troubles-related crimes but hadn’t been prosecuted.

It has been suggested by Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six and others that as part of the Agreement, some of the real bombers were offered letters of immunity guaranteeing they couldn’t be prosecuted. ACC Barratt said the police were not aware of this.

And there’s another theory being mooted by people from all sorts of sectors – including former IRA members I’ve spoken to and campaigners for justice and their supporters – that the reason this case hasn’t ever been solved is that there’s too much at stake for the authorities if all the details were to come out.

Some have even made the accusation that the authorities knew that the bombings were going to happen and allowed them to do so for political gain, notably getting new anti-terrorism laws through and turning the public against the IRA.

In response to these allegations, the Home Office told the BBC they could find “nothing to indicate any attempt by the Government, or state agency, to cover up information about the bombings”.

These are all just theories, but we do now know that there were many informers in the IRA. And the British state has been accused of not taking action over a number of unlawful killings and attacks during the Troubles.

The story of Stakeknife – the codename for the British Army’s IRA spy Freddie Scappaticci, who was unmasked in 2003 – is informative. As a member of the IRA’s internal security unit in the 1980s, he was implicated in multiple killings of people identified as informers, all while on the payroll of the Army.

There is no suggestion that any elements of the British state were involved in the Birmingham bombings, and the jury in the 2019 inquest found that “on the basis of evidence available” they didn’t think the police had advance warning. But, to many, the question of whether the police had an informer in the Birmingham IRA unit – and whether or not they had notice of the bombings prior to the warning call – are just two of many questions that remain.

Finding answers hasn’t been easy though, and accessing files has not been straightforward, which is why there has been mounting pressure for a public inquiry. Some argue public inquiries are not a good use of money and time, particularly for historic cases – the Bloody Sunday inquiry in 2017 cost £210m.

In their statement, the spokesperson for the Home Office added that they “will continue engagement with the families of the victims and their representatives.”

Paul Bridgewater, whose father Paul Anthony Davies was killed in the blasts three months before Paul was born, says: “We’ll be fighting till the day we die and then there’ll be other people fighting it. My daughter, who’s 25, knows all about it, and she’ll take the lead. We’re not going to go away.”

Even now, Julie Hambleton hasn’t given up hope of an inquiry. This, she says, is the only way the families will ever get answers to the questions they want.

“Grenfell’s had it, Hillsborough – quite rightly,” she tells me, “but where’s ours? It’s been 50 years.”

Bangladesh is ramping up payments to Adani Power after the Indian conglomerate cut electricity supplies by half, reportedly over an unpaid $800m bill.

Two senior government officials told the BBC they are already processing partial payments to Adani, which supplies 10% of the electricity used by Bangladesh.

“We have addressed payment glitches and already issued a $170 million [£143m] letter of credit to Adani group,” a senior Bangladesh Power Development Board official told the BBC.

Adani supplies Bangladesh from its 1600 megawatt coal-fired plant in eastern India. The company hasn’t responded to BBC queries about cuts to its supply to Bangladesh, which suffers regular power shortages.

Officials say the company has threatened to suspend all supplies if the money owed to it is not cleared by 7 November. But the Bangladesh Power Development Board official said they did “not believe it would not come to a stage where full supplies are cut off”.

Bangladesh officials told the BBC they will make payments gradually and regularly and are confident of resolving the payment crisis.

“We are shocked and surprised that despite us ramping up payments, supplies have been cut. We are ready to repay and will make alternate arrangements, but will not let any power producer hold us hostage and blackmail us,” said Fouzul Kabir Khan, energy adviser to the interim government.

Bangladesh stepped up repayments from $35m in July, to $68m in September and $97m in October, he said.

The country is already suffering from increased power shortages in rural areas.

Bangladesh has been struggling to generate dollar revenues to pay for costly essential imports like electricity, coal and oil. Foreign currency reserves fell during months of student-led protests and political turmoil that ousted the Sheikh Hasina government in August.

The interim government which replaced her has sought an additional $3bn loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in addition to its existing $4.7bn bailout package.

Adani’s power deal with Bangladesh, signed in 2015, was one of the many under Sheikh Hasina, which the current interim government has called opaque. A national committee is now reassessing 11 previous deals, including the one with Adani, which has often been criticised as expensive.

Besides Adani Power, other Indian state-owned firms also sell power to Bangladesh, including NTPC Ltd and PTC India Ltd. Power Development Board officials confirmed that partial payments of money owed to other Indian power suppliers are also being made.

Bangladesh is restarting some of the gas-fired and oil-fired power plants to bridge the supply shortfall, although experts say it will increase the cost of power. With winter approaching, power demands on the grid is expected to ease as air conditioners are switched off.

“Other coal-fired plants are running at 50% capacity and the country is unable to buy enough coal owing to the dollar crisis, so it is important to continue readymade power supply from Adani. It is marginally more expensive than local producers but it is a crucial supply,” said Dr Ajaj Hossain, energy expert and a retired professor.

Bangladesh is planning to commission its first nuclear power plant in December to diversify its energy mix. Built with Russian assistance, it is costing $12.65bn, mostly financed by long-term Russian loans.

Quincy Jones, the celebrated US musician and producer who worked with Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and many others, has died at the age of 91.

Jones’ publicist, Arnold Robinson, said he “passed away peacefully” on Sunday night at his home in Bel Air.

“Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing. And although this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the great life that he lived and know there will never be another like him,” the family said in a statement.

Jones was best known as the producer of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album.

Over a career spanning more than 75 years, he won 28 Grammy Awards and was named as one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century by Time magazine.

He worked closely with Sinatra and reworked the crooner’s classic Fly Me To The Moon, taking it from a waltz to a swing.

For the film The Wiz, Jones found himself working alongside a 19-year-old Michael Jackson. He went on to produce Jackson’s album Off the Wall and the pop star’s follow-ups Thriller – which sold 34 million copies int he US alone – and Bad.

In 1985, Jones gathered 46 of America’s most popular singers of the time, including Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner and Cyndi Lauper, to record We Are the World.

Jones co-wrote the song to raise money for those suffering from a devastating famine in Ethiopia. The record was the US equivalent to Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas.

The hit reached number one in the UK and the US and was performed at Live Aid.

Jones also composed the soundtrack to more than 50 films and TV programmes including the 1969 British film, The Italian Job.

Michael Caine, who starred in The Italian Job, paid tribute to Jones on X, calling him “a titan in the musical world”.

“He was a wonderful and unique human being, lucky to have known him.”

Sir Elton John also praised Jones and said “nobody had a career as incredible” as him, writing: “He played with the best and he produced the best. What a guy. Loved him.”

TV producer Shonda Rhimes called him “a legend, a visionary, a pioneer”.

On the big screen, Jones produced the film The Color Purple, which introduced the public to two then unknown performers – Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg.

Posting a tribute on Instagram, Goldberg said he was “one of a kind”.

On the small screen, he was one of the producers behind the hit TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

But it was music where Jones excelled – as well as winning multiple Grammys, including a legend award in 1992, he was also recognised by the Emmys, Tonys and Oscars.

Jones was married three times and had seven children, including music producer Quincy Jones III and actress Rashida Jones, known for the US version of The Office.

Jones’ family said the music producer was “truly one of a kind” and “through his music and his boundless love, Quincy Jones’ heart will beat for eternity”.

One of the first to pay tribute was playwright Jeremy O’Harris, who wrote on X that Jones’ “contributions to American culture were limitless”, noting he was the first black person nominated for an Oscar for best score among his other achievements.

Rapper LL Cool J, who briefly dated Jones’ daughter Kidada Jones, said on Instagram that Jones was “a father and example at a time when I truly needed a father”.

He added: “Mentor. Role model. King. You gave me opportunities and shared wisdom. Music would not be music without you.”

Singer Victoria Monét said that Jones’ “legacy will live on forever and ever” and musician Nile Rodgers posted on X: “Rest in Power”.

Ice T also paid tribute and wrote: “Genius is a description loosely used but Rarely deserved. Point blank, Quincy was the MAN. I won my 1st Grammy with Quincy and I live with his Wisdom daily.”

Singer Darius Rucker said we had “lost one of the all time greats”, while British DJ Tony Blackburn wrote on X that Jones was a “musical genius”.

Montreux Jazz Festival CEO Mathieu Jaton, who worked alongside Quincy for many years, said the spirit of Jones “will forever resonate” with the festival’s history.

He added that Jones, as a co-producer in the 1990s, “helped elevate the festival to new heights”.

At least 10 people have been killed after a volcano erupted in eastern Indonesia in the early hours of Monday, officials have said.

Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, located on Flores Island in East Nusa Tenggara province, erupted at 23:57 local time, according to the Indonesian Center for Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation (PVMG).

Hadi Wijaya, a PVMG spokesperson, said fiery lava and rocks had hit the villages about 4km (two miles) from the crater, burning and damaging residents’ houses.

According to local officials, the eruption has affected seven villages.

PVMG said fires had “occurred in residential areas due to the ejection of incandescent material” from the volcano.

It has raised the status of the volcano to the highest alert level, warning that a 7km (four-mile) radius from the crater must be cleared.

“We have started evacuating residents since this morning to other villages located around 20km (13 miles) from the crater,” local official Heronimus Lamawuran told Reuters.

Video footage shared with BBC News by eyewitnesses shows people covered in volcanic ash, rock showers and homes ablaze, as well as the scorched aftermath of the disruption.

A spokesperson from Indonesia’s disaster agency warned of potential flash floods and cold lava flows in the coming days.

They added that the local government had declared a state of emergency for the next 58 days, meaning the central government could help provide aid to 10,000 affected residents.

Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki – one of a pair of prominent volcanic peaks at the eastern end of the island of Flores – has been erupting on and off since last December, and there was already an official warning to stay more than 3km away from it.

The prolonged volcanic activity there this year has badly affected the local economy.

Hundreds of people have left their homes and have been sheltering in schools, while cashew nut farmers have complained that their crops have been ruined by the huge quantities of ash which have fallen on the surrounding area.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an area of high seismic activity atop multiple tectonic plates, and has about 130 active volcanoes.

Many communities live dangerously close to the volcanoes in order to cultivate the fertile soil they provide.