The number of data centres in the UK is set to increase by almost a fifth, according to figures shared with BBC News.

Data centres are giant warehouses full of powerful computers used to run digital services from movie streaming to online banking – there are currently an estimated 477 of them in the UK.

Construction researchers Barbour ABI have analysed planning documents and say that number is set to jump by almost 100, as the growth in artificial intelligence (AI) increases the need for processing power.

The majority are due to be built in the next five years.

However, there are concerns about the huge amount of energy and water the new data centres will consume.

Some experts have warned it could drive up prices paid by consumers.

More than half of the new data centres would be in London and neighbouring counties.

Many are privately funded by US tech giants such as Google and Microsoft and major investment firms.

A further nine are planned in Wales, one in Scotland, five in Greater Manchester and a handful in other parts of the UK, the data shows.

While the new data centres are mostly due for completion by 2030, the biggest single one planned would come later – a £10-billion AI data centre in Blyth, near Newcastle, for the American private investment and wealth management company Blackstone Group.

It would involve building 10 giant buildings covering 540,000 square meters – the size of several large shopping centres – on the site of a former Blyth Power Station.

Works are set to begin in 2031 and last for more than three years.

Microsoft is planning four new data centres in the UK at a total cost of £330 million, with an estimated completion between 2027 and 2029 – two in the Leeds area, one near Newport in Wales, and a five-storey site in Acton, north west London.

And Google is building two data centres, totalling £450m, spread over 400,000 sq m in north east London in the Lee Valley water system.

By some analyses, the UK is already the third-largest nation for data centres behind the US and Germany.

The government has made clear it believes data centres are central to the UK’s economic future – designating them critical national infrastructure.

But there are concerns about their impact, including the potential knock-on effect on people’s energy bills.

It is not known what the energy consumption of the new centres will be as this data is not included in the planning applications, but US data suggests they are can be considerably more powerful than older ones.

Dr Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at machine learning firm Hugging Face, explains that in the US “average citizens in places like Ohio are seeing their monthly bills go up by $20 (£15) because of data centres”.

She said the timeline for the new data centres in the UK was “aggressive” and called for “mechanisms for companies to pay the price for extra energy to power data centres – not consumers”.

According to the National Energy System Operator, NESO, the projected growth of data centres in Great Britain could “add up to 71 TWh of electricity demand” in the next 25 years, which it says redoubles the need for clean power – such as offshore wind.

There are also growing concerns about the environmental impact of these enormous buildings.

Many existing data centre plants require large quantities of water to prevent them from overheating – and most current owners do not share data about their water consumption.

Stephen Hone, chief executive of industry body the Data Centre Alliance, says “ensuring there is enough water and electricity powering data centres isn’t something the industry can solve on its own”.

But he insisted “data centres are fixated with becoming as sustainable as possible”, such as through dry-cooling methods.

Such promises of future solutions have failed to appease some.

In Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, residents are objecting to the construction of a £3.8bn cloud and AI centre on greenbelt land, describing the area as the “lungs” of their home.

And in Dublin there is currently a moratorium on the building of any new data centres because of the strain existing ones have placed on Ireland’s national electricity provider.

In 2023 they accounted for one fifth of the country’s energy demand.

Last month, Anglian Water objected to plans for a 435 acre data centre site in North Lincolnshire. The developer says it aims to deploy “closed loop” cooling systems which would not place a strain on the water supply.

The planning documents suggest that 28 of the new data centres would be likely to be serviced by troubled Thames Water, including 14 more in Slough, which has already been described as having Europe’s largest cluster of the buildings.

The BBC understands Thames Water was talking to the government earlier this year about the challenge of water demand in relation to data centres and how it can be mitigated.

Water UK, the trade body for all water firms, said it “desperately” wants to supply the centres but “planning hurdles” need to be cleared more quickly.

Ten new reservoirs are being built in Lincolnshire, the West Midlands and south-east England.

A spokesperson for the UK Government said data centres were “essential” and an AI Energy Council had been established to make sure supply can meet demand, alongside £104bn in water infrastructure investment.

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“Putin is supposed to be in jail, and he just comes to Alaska like that.”

Hanna Correa is amongst a sea of Alaskans waving Ukrainian flags on road leading into Anchorage.

“When I entered through that parking lot, and I see a lot of Americans, they’re supporting, it made me cry,” she says.

Ms Correa, 40, left Ukraine in 2019 for love, and six years later, the future of her country could be decided in her adopted home town.

US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are set to touch down at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, a 30 minute drive away. Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky is not invited, something Ms Correa says is “pretty sad”.

Among those protesting against their arrival is Christopher Kelliher, a 53-year-old military veteran and Alaskan native.

“It’s gross, it makes you want to take a shower,” he says of the meeting.

“Putin doesn’t need to be in our state, much less our country. We have an idiot in the White House that will kowtow to this guy.”

• Follow live coverage of the meeting here
• Left out of Alaska talks, exhausted Ukrainians fear an unjust peace

This region’s history with Moscow gives Friday’s summit added significance. The US purchased Alaska from the Russians in 1867 for $7.2m (£1.48m).

Critics called the purchase ‘Seward’s Folly’, arguing the land amounted to a frozen wasteland. But later discoveries of rare earth minerals and abundant oil and gas put paid to that label.

Ornate churches are among the most visible symbols of Alaska’s Russian heritage. The St Tikhon Orthodox Church in Anchorage has been holding three days of prayer ahead of leaders’ arrival.

Priest Nicholas Cragle, an American who recently moved to Alaska after living in Russia for seven years, says the conflict is “particularly painful and close to the hearts” of parishioners.

“We’re hoping that this meeting will lead to something… lead to a culmination of this conflict,” says Mr Cragle.

That feeling is shared by fishermen ankle-deep in creek bed on the outskirts of town, drawn to the area by the allure of some of the world’s finest salmon.

“I think it’s a good idea [the summit], I wish Zelensky would be out here too… get this thing over with,” says Don Cressley, who lives in the Alaskan city of North Pole and is visiting on a fishing trip with his grandson.

He wants an end to the war “because of the destruction they’re doing to all the cities, all the buildings, making everybody more homeless, taking their foods away, their supplies away, their living right away,”.

Donald Trump, he says, is doing an “awesome job” in ceasefire negotiations.

While the US president often talks warmly of his relationship with Vladimir Putin, superpower tensions persist and are more keenly felt here.

Moscow’s military planes are routinely detected flying near the coast of Alaska. And in January, Canadian and American fighter jets were scrambled after multiple Russian jets were spotted in the Arctic, according to the North American Aerospace Defence Command.

That breeds a sense of unease for some Alaskans who live closer to Russia than Washington DC.

“Although the Cold War is over between Russia and the US, they’re constantly patrolling our airways,” Anchorage resident Russell Wilson tells me while fishing.

“If the president doesn’t put the hammer down, we could be the next Ukraine.”

However other Alaskans consider a return to Cold War hostilities are far-fetched fantasy.

I ask Army veteran Christopher Kelliher if he is concerned about a Russian invasion. “Not really, everybody in Alaska owns a gun,” he replies.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister and by far the dominant force in its politics, has not budged from what he believes is the essential truth about the war in Gaza.

He has given Israel – and the outside world – a consistent message since Hamas attacked Israel almost two years ago. He stated it clearly when he ordered the first big ground offensive of the war into the Gaza Strip on 28 October 2023, three weeks after the attacks, and since then he has repeated the themes many times.

“We will fight to defend our homeland. We will fight and not retreat. We will fight on land, at sea and in the air. We will destroy the enemy above ground and below ground. We will fight and we will win.

“This will be a victory of good over evil, of light over darkness, of life over death. In this war we will stand steadfast, more united than ever, certain in the justice of our cause.”

His speech adopted the cadences of Winston Churchill’s rallying call in June 1940 of “we shall fight on the beaches,” after Britain’s defeat by Germany in northern France and the evacuation of more than 338,000 allied soldiers from Dunkirk.

Before Churchill told the British in his celebrated peroration that “we shall never surrender,” he had not spared them from the truth that they had suffered a “colossal military disaster”.

Hamas inflicted Israel’s worst defeat in a single day on 7 October, and the horror that it could break open the borders, and kill and take so many hostages, is still very real in Israel. It is a big factor shaping attitudes to the war, the way it is being fought, and how it might end.

Very few Israelis have ever doubted that their cause is just, but Netanyahu’s statement that they would be “more united than ever” could not have been further from the condition of Israel almost two years later.

Israel is as divided now as at any time in its history, and Netanyahu, a deeply divisive figure when Hamas attacked, is presiding over fault lines in Israel that have opened into chasms.

On the edge of the anti-Netanyahu demonstration in Tel Aviv, several hundred Israelis stood silently, each holding a placard with the name of a Palestinian child killed by Israel in Gaza.

Many of the signs had a photograph of a smiling girl or boy, next to the day they were born and the day they were killed. Children who did not have a photo were represented by a drawing of a flower.

The silent demonstrations to stop the killing are getting bigger – some are held outside airbases, where they try to catch the eye of pilots arriving for bombing raids into Gaza – but the demonstrators still hold a minority view.

Timina Peretz, one of the organisers, says they started after Israel broke the last ceasefire with Hamas on 18 March and went back to war.

“We realised how many children died just in the same week. I refuse to stay silent while it’s happening, a genocide and starvation of people…

“On the street, we’re getting a lot of good reactions, like people saying, ‘thank you’. And we have many people cursing us and [getting] really offended and upset from these images.”

I asked if they get called traitors. “Of course, they do a lot of them, they say that if we think the way we think, or we act the way we act, we should just go… to live in Gaza.

“They can’t understand how the basic idea of criticising the state is something that is rooted in democracy.”

Opinion polls taken since the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) went back to war in Gaza in March, breaking the last ceasefire, suggest that a large majority of Jewish Israelis are not troubled by Palestinian suffering in Gaza.

A sample recorded in the last three days of July by the Israeli Democracy Institute says that 78% of Jewish Israelis, who make up four-fifths of the population, believe that given the restrictions of the fighting, Israel “is making substantial efforts to avoid causing unnecessary suffering to Palestinians in Gaza”.

The pollsters also chose a more personal question, asking whether individuals were “troubled or not troubled by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza?”

Some 79% of Jewish Israelis surveyed said they were not troubled. Meanwhile 86% of those in Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority who were asked the same question said they were very or somewhat troubled.

Netanyahu, his ministers and spokespeople insist that Hamas, the United Nations, witnesses, aid workers and foreign governments are telling lies about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

In a news conference conducted in English for the international media on 10 August, Netanyahu condemned reports of starvation in Gaza. He wanted “to puncture the lies… the only ones that are being starved in Gaza are our hostages”.

He has, for many years, equated criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Accounts of hunger, and IDF soldiers killing Palestinians struggling to find food that have been believed and condemned by Israel’s allies, including Britain, France and Germany, should he said be viewed in the context of the long history of the persecution of Jews in Europe.

“We were said to be spreading vermin to Christian society, we were said to be poisoning the wells, we were said to slaughter Christian children for their blood.

“And as these lies spread around the globe, they were followed by horrific, horrific massacres, pogroms, displacements, finally culminating the worst massacre of them all – the Holocaust.

“Today the Jewish state is being maligned in a similar way.”

Ms Peretz blames the Israeli media for not showing the suffering and deaths of Palestinians.

That subject went closer to the heart of the national conversation when it was raised on a popular Saturday evening television talk show hosted by Eyal Berkovic, the former West Ham United football player.

One of the regular guests was an Israeli journalist called Emmanuelle Elbaz-Phelps. They had been discussing, as they had previously, the suffering of the hostages and their families, and Israeli soldiers who had been killed fighting in Gaza.

Then, she told me, she felt it was her duty as a journalist to mention something that was not often spoken about on Israeli TV.

“I just [said] that the war is also killing a lot of Palestinians in Gaza, which is a very simple statement, no political point of view. There was no patience to listen to it.”

Voices were raised. Eyal Berkovic has made a name for himself as a TV host by not holding back.

Ms Elbaz-Phelps, who also works as a correspondent for French TV, recalled his response. “He said, I do not have to worry about the people in Gaza, they are my enemies. To which I responded, you can let me say that I worry about the horrific images coming out of there.

“And he said, for sure, you can finish your point. This is very representative of the Israeli public opinion.”

She defended the work of Israeli journalists. “I think 95% of what the world knows about Israel’s government and decisions is brought by the Israeli journalists,” she argues.

“But I think there is a huge difference when you talk about something and when you show something, and you will see images of Gaza from above that mainly are going to show the people how IDF is winning the war on the ground.

“You don’t have human stories, you don’t have faces… because Israelis are in pain, and the stories also are happening inside of Israel.”

Ms Elbaz-Phelps believes the reason is that Israelis are still dealing with their trauma, after 7 October.

“The word outside is covering Gaza and talking about the suffering of the population in Gaza. Which is right, but there is not, I think, acknowledgement of how much the Israeli people is living in a trauma.

“We are not in a post-traumatic area. We are in a trauma time. Hostages are dying inside the tunnels of Hamas. [People are] begging the government to find a way and make a hostage deal.

“Only when the hostages will come home, then maybe the healing can start. The pain of the Israeli public, how much they’re still on 7 October, is something that is not completely grasped outside of Israel.”

Around 20 Israeli hostages are still believed to be alive in Gaza. Israelis of all political persuasions were horrified by recent videos posted by their captors showing two badly emaciated young men in tunnels under Gaza.

Their fate is front and centre of the attitudes of most Israelis to the war.

I met the pollster Dahlia Scheindlin, who has often criticised Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in her column in the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz, in “hostage square” next to Israel’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv.

Since October 2023, this has been the centre of the hostage families’ campaign to get their people out of Gaza.

“The reason why the majority of Israelis consistently support ending the war is to get the hostages back,” she says.

Speaking about the lack of concern in Israel for the people in Gaza, she tells me: “It’s because a large portion of Israelis believe that the suffering has been exaggerated or even partly fabricated by Hamas.”

Israelis, she continues, are inclined to believe that the problem is the messaging. “Israelis have been obsessed with PR for a long time. They call it Hasbara.

“That inclination to blame criticism of Israel on poor public communications has gone into overdrive during the war, and [is] on steroids [in] relation to the accusations of starvation.

“The far-right wing calls it the campaign of fabrication. They think [even the way] the Israeli media is starting to cover it is amplifying Hamas’ narrative.

“But I think mainstream Israelis are sort of suppressing it because it’s too hard for them to cope with. This is the kind of thing you hear people say in private conversation.

“They are too consumed with the hostages or their own family members who are fighting in Gaza, and they just can’t handle the sense that Israel might be doing something wrong.”

Outside the secular Israeli mainstream of Tel Aviv and the cities on the Mediterranean coast, I have found few doubts about the justice of Israel’s conduct of the war.

Deep in the occupied West Bank, down a dirt road, is a Jewish settlement called Esh Kodesh, which is part of a complex of small settlements. Just a generation ago these were a collection of caravans on hilltops, but they are now well established.

Aaron Katzoff, a father of seven who is originally from Los Angeles, has created a winery and a bar called “Settlers,” which feels like a small piece of the American west. He labels his wine “liquid prophecy”.

It is a social centre, not just for his community but for an overwhelmingly right-wing and religiously-observant clientele who make special journeys there.

Many of the customers were armed when I visited. A soldier with a dusty uniform sat eating a burger and drinking red wine with his M-16 cradled on his lap. Others had left their assault weapons behind the bar. A woman had a 9mm pistol in a holster strapped on over her flowery dress. The young men at the corner table were, Aaron said, decompressing after a stint in Gaza.

Aaron still does reserve duty as an IDF officer and has fought in Gaza. He has no doubts about the justice of Israel’s actions.

“Come down to a tunnel in Gaza,” he told me. “See what it means not to have oxygen and in the humidity and heat try to fight terrorists that are hiding behind women and children and shoot at you…

“It’s very easy to sit in an air conditioning room and judge people who do that, war is not easy.”

What, I asked him, about ending the war now, as so many Israelis want.

“Sometimes you can’t always get there now… You want everything to be Wonderland… but the world’s not like that.

“Things take time, and it’s sad, but that’s reality.”

In the months leading up to 7 October 2023, thousands of Israelis had been demonstrating in the streets against plans to change the judicial system in what they saw as an assault on democracy.

“This has been an unpopular government since well before the war,” argues Ms Scheindlin.

“Once the war began, by contrast to most other countries where you see a rallying of support for the government, there was a complete collapse of support.”

Enough of Netanyahu’s political base on Israel’s right wing accepts his insistence that the war cannot end until total victory over Hamas, for him to have rebuilt his poll ratings from rock bottom. But he is still trailing opposition parties.

They have pointed to evidence that they say shows he is prolonging the war to stay in office. As a private citizen he would face a national inquiry into the security failures that gave Hamas its opening on 7 October 2023.

His long running trial on corruption charges serious enough to carry a potential prison sentence would also accelerate from its current glacial pace.

Ultranationalists in his coalition, the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and the national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have threatened to topple his government if he makes any kind of deal with Hamas.

They want not just the defeat of Hamas, but the annexation of Gaza, the removal of Palestinians and their replacement by Jewish settlers.

The families of the hostages, meanwhile, have appealed to Netanyahu to do a deal with Hamas before the men still being held die.

But the prime minister, doubling down on his theme of a fight until total victory, announced a new offensive that has appalled many hostage families and been condemned by many of Israel’s allies.

Netanyahu’s plans were also opposed by the current leadership of the IDF. Its chief of staff General Eyal Zamir made it known that he opposes the Netanyahu plan for a new offensive in Gaza, reportedly telling the cabinet that it would endanger the hostages and worsen the humanitarian crisis.

Zamir was appointed in March when his predecessor resigned after falling out with the prime minister over the conduct of the war.

Now the Israeli media is speculating that Netanyahu will force Zamir to resign. One report says Zamir is convinced he’s been “marked for dismissal” for challenging Netanyahu’s plan.

The war has also widened Israel’s most bitter division, between the secular population and the religious right. Shuttling between demonstrations by secular Israelis in Tel Aviv and their religious fellow citizens in Jerusalem can feel like commuting between two different countries.

War is always painful. But for some in Israel’s hardline religious nationalist right wing, it is also an opportunity, even a time of miracles that heralds the coming of the messiah.

Orit Strock, a minister from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, said last summer that the war had turned events in their direction. “From my point of view, this is like a miracle period,” she said.

Some see an opening granted by God to transform Israel into a state ruled by the Torah, the law of God as revealed to Moses and laid out in the five books of the Hebrew scriptures.

War also can speed up their desire to change the map. They believe God gave all the land between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan to the Jews.

No space can be allowed for the shrinking number of Palestinians who still believe it might be possible to make peace with Israel by creating an independent state in Gaza and the West Bank, with a capital in east Jerusalem.

Smotrich has said the Jewish state should be on both sides of the river Jordan, taking in Jordan and stretching up to Damascus, the Syrian capital.

Extending religious law is not government policy, nor is expanding Israel’s borders across the River Jordan. But blocking a Palestinian state is a cornerstone of the Netanyahu coalition.

And the coalition can only stay in government as long as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir agree to support it. That gives them a disproportionate influence over the prime minister.

On 6 May Smotrich laid out his vision for Gaza and the West Bank, which Palestinians want for a state. Most western governments, including the United Kingdom, see Palestinian statehood alongside Israel as the only way to escape a conflict that has lasted more than a century for control of the land Arabs and Jews both want.

Instead, Smotrich said that within six months Gaza’s population would be confined to a narrow piece of land. The rest of the territory would be “totally destroyed” and “empty”.

Palestinians in Gaza would be “totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places”.

In the occupied old city of Jerusalem on Sunday 3 August, many Palestinians shut shops and businesses and stayed off the streets as Israeli Jews marked Tisha B’Av.

It is a day of mourning for the destruction by the Babylonians of Jerusalem’s first Jewish Temple and of its second one by the Romans.

The area where the Temples stood later became the third holiest place for Muslims, now dominated by al-Aqsa mosque where Muslims believe the prophet Muhammad ended his night journey from Mecca, and the golden rotunda of the Dome of the Rock where he ascended to heaven.

To try to keep the peace in an area that is a religious and national symbol for Israelis and Palestinians, a set of laws and customs, known as the status quo, is supposed to be observed.

One rule bans Jewish prayer within al-Aqsa compound, known by Palestinians as the Noble Sanctuary. It has been flouted in recent years with the encouragement of Ben-Gvir.

On Tisha B’Av he went there himself to lead prayers, an action that in the fragile and tense holy city was seen by some as a provocative political move.

Dozens of his followers – and heavily armed police that he commands as national security minister – followed as he strode through the narrow street of the Old City, through the gates of the place Israelis call the Temple Mount.

As well as praying, he made a speech linking his presence and prayers in Jerusalem to the war in Gaza and the way he wants to change Israel.

The videos of the two starving Israeli hostages were, he said, an attempt to put the state of Israel under pressure, which had to be resisted.

“From Temple Mount – the place where we proved that sovereignty and governance can be done – from here of all places we should send a message and make sure that today itself we conquer the whole of Gaza Strip, announce sovereignty of the whole of Gaza Strip, take down every Hamas man and encourage voluntary emigration.

“Only this way will we return the hostages and win the war.”

After Ben-Gvir had left, a big crowd of his young religious supporters stayed on to pray in a long, covered arcade.

The sound of their prayers echoed off the vaulted stone roof. Two young women, Ateret and Tamar, sad about the religious commemoration but seemingly excited by the future, explained why they believed the Temple Mount was the heart of Judaism.

Ateret said the destruction of the Temples meant, “it’s like having a body, but your heart is not there.

“We just want to say that we want our hostages back. We want everybody to have peace. This is the heart of the whole world, not only our hearts. When God will be here the world will have peace.”

They explained they prayed every day for the construction of a third Temple on the site. “This is our house for thousands of years, and now we’re back here, we want our house.”

When I asked what would happen to the Muslim holy places that stand there now, they said they didn’t know.

Ateret and Tamar seemed to be gentle souls, suffused with religious fervour.

According to senior diplomatic sources, the nightmare for security services in both Israel and its Arab neighbours is that a violent Jewish extremist might try to damage al-Aqsa mosque to bring on the third temple, an act that would risk igniting the region.

On the other end of the political spectrum is Avrum Burg, a writer and strong critic of Netanyahu, who used to be one of Israel’s most prominent centre-left politicians. He was speaker of the Knesset, the parliament, from 1999 to 2003 and before that he chaired the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organisation, two venerable Zionist institutions.

Today, he is among those who do not see the war as a miraculous chance to transform the country.

Israelis, Mr Burg reflects, are “somewhere between religious excitement and psychological despair”.

There is no middle ground, he argues. “A few Israelis, a majority of government, believe that we’re living in a miraculous time. It’s an opportunity. It’s God given. It is a once in a lifetime opening in order to realign, reorganise, re-something with history.

“And so many Israelis feel and sense – what for? What does that mean? Why do I have to pay the price? It’s a meaningless war. In between, there is no Israel. Israel is a fragmented, broken, torn apart social fabric.”

That psychological despair – and anger – at Israel’s government can be found at the regular demonstrations calling for Netanyahu’s resignation.

At one, on a hot and humid night in Tel Aviv, secular opponents of the government waved the blue and white Star of David flag, chanted and banged drums until they stood silent for the national anthem.

After, they listened to speeches from retired veteran commanders of the army and the police demanding a ceasefire.

Backstage, Nava Rosalio, the organiser of many mass rallies against the Netanyahu government, spelled out their position.

“We wish to replace Netanyahu’s government, but specifically to bring back all hostages in a deal at once, ending Netanyahu’s war in Gaza, which at this point has become completely political and serving nothing but his own political survival, of Netanyahu and his partners.”

I suggested some might accuse her of repeating the Hamas position. (For more than a year Hamas negotiators have offered to return all the hostages if the IDF pulled out of Gaza and the US and others guaranteed that the Israel would not go back to war once it had its people back. Israel, however, insists that Hamas must be fully disarmed, play no future role in Gaza and that Israel would retain security control in Gaza with the freedom to decide what comes next.)

But Ms Rosalio dismissed the suggestion that a ceasefire deal could be any kind of a win for Hamas. “That’s for propaganda. We have a great army… which can stay outside of the Gaza Strip and just protect the border.

“There is no reason to stay either, unless they imagine or wish to conquer Gaza and to transfer the people of Gaza.

“We just don’t believe the excuse of we’re protecting you, the people of Israel. If you wish to protect us, you would have ended this war to allow the people of Israel to rehabilitate, for society to recover.

“We are torn from inside.”

In the last three weeks I have travelled between the two sides of Israel, from leftists in Tel Aviv silently protesting the killing of Palestinian children, displaying the “psychological despair” described by Avrum Burg, the former speaker of parliament.

But on the other side of Israel, I have witnessed an overwhelming sense that Israel should ignore the mounting pressure and condemnation by some of its allies as well as its enemies, a feeling that its actions are justified by everything Hamas did on 7 October and the continued imprisonment of Israeli hostages in brutal conditions in tunnels.

Israel’s prime minister, still backed in public by US President Donald Trump despite murmurings that he is becoming exasperated by Netanyahu’s refusal to make a hostage deal possible, is planning another offensive and accuses Israel’s allies of deep seated antisemitism.

Messianic religious Zionists who support him believe God is with them and granting miracles.

Deep in the West Bank, overlooking the Jordan Valley, Aaron Katzoff and his friends in the Settlers wine bar believe they are fulfilling the prophecies of the scriptures, as they drink wine from grapes he says proudly were grown using the methods of Biblical times.

His relaxed and happy customers believe the secular liberals protesting against Netanyahu in Tel Aviv are yesterday’s Israelis. Now, the future of their state is in their hands, and in God’s – and they are confident it will all end well.

Japanese vlogger Hayato Kato’s 1.9 million followers are used to his funny clips about exploring China, where he has been living for several years.

But on 26 July he surprised them with a sombre one.

“I just watched a movie about the Nanjing Massacre,” he said, referring to the Japanese army’s six-week rampage through Nanjing in late 1937, which, by some estimates, killed more than 300,000 civilians and Chinese soldiers. Around 20,000 women were reportedly raped.

Dead To Rights, or Nanjing Photo Studio, is a star-studded tale about a group of civilians who hide from Japanese troops in a photo studio. Already a box office hit, it is the first of a wave of Chinese movies about the horrors of Japanese occupation that are being released to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two. But a sense of unfinished history – often amplified by Beijing – persists, fuelling both memory and anger.

Speaking in Chinese on Douyin, China’s domestic version of TikTok, Kato recounted scenes from the film: “People were lined up along the river and then the shootings began… A baby, the same age as my daughter, was crying in her mother’s arms. A Japanese soldier rushed forward, grabbed her, and smashed her into the ground.”

He said he had seen many people on the Japanese internet denying the Nanjing Massacre had happened, including public figures, even politicians. “If we deny it, this will happen again,” he continued, urging Japanese people to watch the movies and “Iearn about the dark side of their history”.

The video quickly became one of his most popular, with more than 670,000 likes in just two weeks.

But the comments are less positive. The top-liked one quotes what has already become an iconic line from the movie, uttered by a Chinese civilian to a Japanese soldier: “We are not friends. We never were.”

For China, Japan’s brutal military campaign and occupation are among the darkest chapters of its past – and the massacre in Nanjing, then the capital, an even deeper wound.

What has made it fester is the belief that Japan has never fully owned up to its atrocities in places it occupied – not just China, but also Korea, what was then Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia. One of the most painful points of contention involves “comfort women” – the approximately 200,000 women who were raped and forced to work in Japanese military brothels. To this day, the survivors are still fighting for an apology and compensation.

In his video, Kato seems to acknowledge that it’s not a subject of conversation in Japan: “Unfortunately these anti-Japanese war movies are not shown in Japan publicly, and Japanese people are not interested to watch them.”

When the Japanese Emperor announced on 15 August that he would surrender, his country had already paid a terrible cost – more than 100,000 had been killed in bombing raids on Tokyo, before two atom bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Japan’s defeat, however, was welcomed in large parts of Asia, where the Imperial Japanese Army had claimed millions of lives. For them, 15 August carries both freedom and lingering trauma – in Korea the day is called ‘gwangbokjeol’, which translates to the return of light.

“While the military war has ended, the history war continues,” says Professor Gi-Wook Shin, of Stanford University, explaining the two sides remember those years differently, and those differences add to the tension. While the Chinese see Japanese aggression as a defining, and devastating, moment in their past, Japanese history focuses on its own victimhood – the destruction caused by the atom bombs and post-war recovery.

“People I know in Japan don’t really talk about it,” says a Chinese man who has been living in Japan for 15 years, and wished to remain anonymous.

“They see it as something in the past, and the country doesn’t really commemorate it – because they also view themselves as victims.”

He calls himself a patriot, but he says that hasn’t made things difficult for him personally because their reluctance to talk about it means they “avoid such sensitive topics”.

“Some believe the Japanese army went to help China build a new order – with conflicts occurring in that process. Of course, there are also those who acknowledge that it was, in fact, an invasion.”

China fought Japan for eight years, from Manchuria in the north-east to Chongqing in the south-west. Estimates of the Chinese who died range from 10 to 20 million. The Japanese government says around 480,000 of its soldiers died in that time.

Those years have been well-documented in award-winning literature and films – they were also the subject of Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s work.

That period is now being revisited under a regime that holds patriotism as central to its ambitions: “national rejuvenation” is how Xi Jinping describes his Chinese dream. While the Party heavily censors its own history, from the Tiananmen Square massacre to more recent crackdowns, it encourages remembering a more distant past – with an outside enemy.

Xi even revised the date the war with Japan started – the Chinese government now counts the first incursions into Manchuria in 1931, which makes it a 14-year war, rather than eight years of full-fledged conflict.

Under him, Beijing has also been commemorating the end of World War Two on a bigger scale. On 3 September, the day Japan formally surrendered, there will be a major military parade in Tiananmen Square.

Also in September, a highly-anticipated new release will focus on the notorious Unit 731, a branch of the Japanese Army that conducted lethal human experiments in occupied Manchuria. The date of release – 18 September – is the day Japan attempted its first invasion of Manchuria.

That is apart from Dongji Rescue, a film inspired by the real-life efforts of Chinese fishermen who saved hundreds of British prisoners of war during Japanese raids; and Mountains and Rivers Bearing Witness, a documentary from a state-owned studio about Chinese resistance.

And they seem to be striking a nerve.

“That one generation fought a war on behalf of three, and endured suffering for three. Salute to the martyrs,” a popular RedNote post on Nanjing Photo Studio reads.

“We are not friends…”, the now-famous line from the movie, “is not just a line” between the two main characters, says a popular review that has been liked by more than 10,000 users on Weibo.

It is “also from millions of ordinary Chinese people to Japan. They’ve never issued a sincere apology, they are still worshipping [the war criminals], they are rewriting history – no-one will treat them as friends”, the comment says, referring to some Japanese right-wing figures’ dismissive remarks.

Tokyo has issued apologies, but many Chinese people believe they are not profuse enough.

“Japan keeps sending a conflicting message,” Prof Shin says, referring to instances where leaders have contradicted each other in their statements on Japan’s wartime history.

For years, in Chinese history classes, students have been shown a photo of former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling before a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970. The Chinese expect a similar gesture from Japan.

This wasn’t always the case, though.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, the turbulence in China did not end. For the next three years, the Nationalist Kuomintang – then the ruling government and the main source of Chinese resistance against Japan – fought a civil war against Mao Zedong’s Communist Party forces.

That war ended with Mao’s victory and the Kuomintang’s retreat to Taiwan. Mao, whose priority was to build a communist nation, avoided focusing on Japanese war crimes. Commemorations celebrated the Party’s victory and criticised the Kuomintang. He also needed Japan’s support on the international stage. Tokyo, in fact, was one of the first major powers to recognise his regime.

It wasn’t until the 1980s – after Mao’s death – that the Japanese occupation returned to haunt the relationship between Beijing and Tokyo. By then, Japan was a wealthy Western ally with a booming economy. Revisions to Japanese textbooks began to spark controversy, with China and South Korea accusing Japan of whitewashing its wartime atrocities. China had just begun to open up, and South Korea was in transition from military rule to democracy.

As Chinese leaders moved away from Mao – and his destructive legacy – the trauma of what happened under Japanese attack became a unifying narrative for the Communist Party, says Yinan He, associate professor of international relations at Lehigh University in the US.

“After the Cultural Revolution, Chinese people for the large part were disillusioned by communism,” she told the BBC. “Since communism lost its appeal, you need nationalism. And Japan is [an] easy target because that’s the most recent external [aggressor].”

She describes a “choreographed representation of the past”, where commemorations of 1945 often downplay the contributions of the US and the Kuomintang, and are accompanied by growing scrutiny of Japan’s official stance on its wartime actions.

What hasn’t helped is the denial of war crimes – prominent right-wing Japanese don’t accept the Nanjing massacre ever happened, or that Japanese soldiers forced so many women into sexual slavery – and recent visits by officials to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honours Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals.

This hostility between China and Japan has spilled over into everyday lives as nationalism online peaks – Chinese and Japanese people have been attacked in each other’s countries. A Japanese schoolboy was killed in Shenzhen last year.

China’s economic rise and assertiveness in the region and beyond has changed the dynamic between the two countries again. It has surpassed Japan as a global power. The best time to seek closure – the 1970s, when the countries were closer – has passed, Prof He says.

“They simply said, let’s forget about that, let’s set that aside. They’ve never dealt with the history – and now the problem has come back to haunt them again.”

Global talks to develop a landmark treaty to end plastic pollution have once again failed.

The UN negotiations, the sixth round of talks in just under three years, were due to end on Thursday but countries continued to negotiate into the night in the hopes of breaking a deadlock.

There remained a split between a group of more than 100 nations calling for curbs on production of plastic, and oil states pushing for a focus on recycling.

Speaking in the early hours, Cuban delegates said that countries had “missed a historic opportunity but we have to keep going”.

The talks were convened in 2022 in response to the mounting scientific evidence of the risks of plastic pollution to human health and the environment.

Despite the benefits of plastic to almost every sector, scientists are particularly concerned about potentially toxic chemicals they contain, which can leach out as plastics break down into smaller pieces.

Microplastics have been detected in soils, rivers, the air and even organs throughout the human body.

Countries had an original deadline to get a deal over the line at the end of December last year, but failed to meet this.

The collapse of the latest talks means they fall further behind.

Speaking on behalf of the island states, the northern Pacific nation of Palau, said on Friday: “We are repeatedly returning home with insufficient progress to show our people.”

“It is unjust for us to face the brunt of yet another global environmental crisis we contribute minimally to,” it added.

The core dividing line between countries has remained the same throughout: whether the treaty should tackle plastics at source – by reducing production – or focus on managing the pollution that comes from it.

The largest oil-producing nations view plastics, which are made using fossil fuels, as a vital part of their future economies, particularly as the world begins to move away from petrol and diesel towards electric cars.

The group, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, argue that better waste collection and recycling infrastructure is the best way of solving the problem, a view shared by many of the producers themselves.

“Plastics are fundamental for modern life – they go in everything,” said Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, a trade association for the plastic production industry in the United States.

“Focusing on ending plastic pollution should be the priority here, not ending plastic production,” he added, warning that attempts to substitute plastics with other materials could lead to “unintended consequences”.

But many researchers warn that this approach is fundamentally flawed. Global recycling rates are estimated at only about 10%, with limits on how far that can rise.

“Even if we manage to boost that over the next few decades to 15, 20, 30%, it would remain a substantial amount that is polluting the environment and damaging human health,” said Dr Costas Velis, associate professor in Waste and Resource Engineering at Imperial College London.

“Therefore, we do need to improve recycling… but we cannot really hope that this is going to solve all the aspects of plastic,” he added.

Plastic production has already risen from two million tonnes in 1950 to about 475 million in 2022 – and it is expected to keep rising without extra measures.

Nearly 100 countries, which include the UK and EU, had been pushing for curbs to production in the treaty and more consistent design globally to make recycling easier.

This could be as simple as requiring plastic bottles to be one colour – when dyes are used the products only fetch half the value of clear bottles.

This approach was supported by major plastic packagers, including Nestle and Unilever, who are part of the Business Coalition headed up by the Ellen McArthur Foundation.

The Coalition also said countries should better align their schemes to add a small levy on plastic products to help pay for recycling efforts, known as extended producer responsibility.

The group estimates that could double revenues for countries to $576bn (£425bn) between now and 2040.

Talks were due to end on Thursday but countries continued to negotiate into the night in the hopes of breaking a deadlock.

The chair, Luis Vayas from Ecuador, did produce a new text which seemed to align more closely with the request of the UK group.

Speaking at the final meeting the EU delegation he said: “We see the outcome of this session as a good basis of future negotiations.”

However, the oil states remained deeply unhappy. Saudi Arabia said it found the process of negotiating “problematic” whilst Kuwait said its views were “not reflected”.

But many environmental groups, reacting to the collapse, railed against what they see as prioritisation of profit by oil states over the health of the planet.

Graham Forbes, Greenpeace head of delegation to the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations, said: “The inability to reach an agreement in Geneva must be a wakeup call for the world: ending plastic pollution means confronting fossil fuel interests head on.

“The vast majority of governments want a strong agreement, yet a handful of bad actors were allowed to use process to drive such ambition into the ground.”

Sign up for our Future Earth newsletter to keep up with the latest climate and environment stories with the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt. Outside the UK? Sign up to our international newsletter here.

California’s Democratic governor has unveiled a high-stakes plan to redraw voting lines in America’s most populous state, in order to counter similar efforts by Republicans in Texas.

Gavin Newsom called for a special election to be held in November, in which voters would be asked to approve lawmakers redrawing congressional districts before national midterms in 2026.

He billed the move as an emergency measure in response to a Donald Trump-backed plan in Texas, which could see the Republicans pick up five more seats in the finely-balanced House.

It is the latest development in a gerrymandering fight that runs the risk of setting off a political arms race for control of the US Congress.

The governor – whose term in office ends next year and is rumoured to have presidential ambitions – said it would neutralise an attempt by Trump and other Republicans to “rig the system”.

“We’re working through a very transparent, temporary and public process,” Newsom said.

“We’re putting the maps on the ballot and we’re giving the power to the people.”

He continued: “We have got to recognise the cards that we have been dealt and we have got to meet fire with fire.”

Newsom’s proposal would see California retain its current congressional maps if Texas and other states pulled out of any changes.

The tit-for-tat move seeks to cancel out projected gains by Republicans in Texas if the state approves a redistricting effort sought by Trump and the state’s governor Greg Abbott.

Republicans in Texas have so far been blocked from approving new maps, as Democratic lawmakers have physically left the state, denying its legislative body the two-thirds attendance it needs to proceed with a vote.

Abbott has threatened to arrest the Democrats, who are staying in Illinois, and said he would call continuous special sessions of the state’s legislature until the proposal passes.

Like other states, California typically redraws congressional districts once a decade when new population data is released by the US Census. California convenes a commission of independent citizens to do so.

The proposal in Texas to make changes mid-decade has triggered a nationwide political row, as the changes could give Republicans an easier path to keep control of the US House of Representatives and prevent challenges from Democrats that they’d face under current political maps. If Democrats gain control of the House, it could block much of Trump’s legislative agenda.

Gerrymandering – the redrawing of electoral boundaries to favour a political party – has been carried out by both Democrats and Republicans across the US for decades, and is legal as long as it does not amount to racial discrimination, the Supreme Court has ruled.

Trump has said Texas is “entitled” to redraw maps and called on the FBI to put pressure on the state’s Democrats to return home, paving the way for a vote.

Some are expected to return to the state as early as this weekend, saying they feel their cross-country relocation has helped generate more attention on the issue nationally.

According to US media, some made the decision to return after seeing California’s plans to counter Texas’s new maps.

Democrats in California – which elected 43 Democrats and nine Republicans at the last election – have not published a detailed new map, or indicated exactly how many extra seats they would envision winning under the changes. The newly redrawn political boundaries would be released in a map in the coming days, the governor said.

Newsom announced his plan – which he dubbed the Election Rigging Response Act – with a coalition of Democratic leaders. He also called for new federal standards to prevent political meddling in voting boundaries.

It is unclear if California’s voters will approve Newsom’s plan. Earlier this week, a Politico-Citrin Center Possibility Lab survey suggested Californians support retaining its independent districting system.

Only 36% of respondents backed returning congressional redistricting authority to state lawmakers.

Speaking to Fox on Thursday, Trump called Newsom “an incompetent governor”.

He also said he was considering encouraging Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to redraw districts in the state, so that Republicans could win more seats there.

The president said other states had drawn “ridiculous” voting districts that are shaped like “rattlesnakes”.

Two planes have collided on the airfield at Manchester Airport.

The EasyJet aircraft clipped wings during taxiing at about 06:30 BST, an airport spokesman said. There have been no reports of injuries.

Passengers have since disembarked from both planes which had been due to take off for Paris and Gibraltar respectively.

Flights have resumed at the airport following a brief suspension for a safety assessment which found minor damage to the planes.

Tynisha Chaudhry, who was on the Gibraltar-bound flight with her partner, compared the collision to a car crash.

“We felt the whole plane shudder – it was a massive hit.”

She said “a lot of fire engines” and other safety staff attended the scene, as passengers waited onboard during inspections.

The atmosphere among passengers was “okay” but some younger passengers and their parents became “tense” before they were allowed to return to the terminal, she added.

An EasyJet spokesperson said: “EasyJet can confirm that the wing tips of two aircraft came into contact whilst taxiing to the runway at Manchester Airport this morning.

“The aircraft returned to stand to disembark customers who have been provided with refreshment vouchers whilst replacement aircraft are arranged to operate the flights.

“We apologise to customers for the delay to their flights.

“The safety of our passengers and crew is our highest priority.”

Mali’s military rulers say they have arrested a French national on suspicion of spying for his country in an attempt to destabilise the African nation.

In a statement read on national television late on Thursday, the junta alleged that Yann Vezilier was working “on behalf of the French intelligence service”. Mr Vezilier is yet to comment on the accusation.

His picture was also broadcast, alongside those of a number of army generals arrested recently for allegedly planning to overthrow the military government.

“The conspiracy has been foiled with the arrests of those involved,” Mali’s Security Minister Gen Daoud Aly Mohammedine said in the televised address.

France, Mali’s former colonial ruler, is also yet to comment on the man’s arrest and allegations of destabilisation.

The West African nation has been gripped by a security crisis fuelled by an Islamist insurgency since 2012 – one of the reasons given for the military takeover but attacks by jihadist groups have continued and even increased.

• How an al-Qaeda offshoot became one of Africa’s deadliest militant groups

Following days of speculation about the alleged coup plot, Gen Mohammedine confirmed that “fringe elements of the Malian armed security forces” had been detained for seeking to “destabilise the institutions of the republic”.

“These soldiers and civilians” were said to have obtained “the help of foreign states”, the minister said.

The French national acted “on behalf of the French intelligence service, which mobilised political leaders, civil society actors and military personnel” in Mali, the minister added.

He also confirmed the arrest of two army generals, including Gen Abass Dembele, the former governor of the Mopti region, who was recently dismissed from his position.

At least 55 soldiers have been arrested so far in connection with the alleged attempted coup, security sources told AFP.

Gen Mohammedine said a full investigation was under way to identify “possible accomplices” and that “the situation is completely under control”.

Political tension has been rising in recent weeks, which have seen the arrest of former Prime Ministers Moussa Mara and Choguel Maïga over accusations of harming the reputation of the state and embezzlement.

Mara, a recent outspoken critic of the military government, has been in detention since 1 August, while Maïga is facing judicial sanctions.

In May, the junta dissolved all political parties following rare anti-government protests, which Mara described as a severe blow to reconciliation efforts initiated by the military leaders last year.

Junta leader Gen Asimi Goïta, who seized power in both 2020 and 2021, had promised elections last year, but these have never been held.

In July, the transition period was extended by five years, clearing him to continue leading the country until at least 2030.

Alongside its neighbours Niger and Burkina Faso, it has enlisted the help of Russian allies to contain the jihadist attacks in the region after breaking ties with France – but there has been no significant improvements in security.

• The region with more ‘terror deaths’ than rest of world combined
• Why young Africans are celebrating military takeovers
• Three military-run states leave West African bloc – what will change?
• Mali signs trade deal with Russia as ties strengthen

US President Donald Trump’s summit with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Friday is a blockbuster moment in world politics that calls to mind several memorable previous meetings.

These events have tended to deliver major news headlines, as well as some glimpses into the intriguing, unpredictable and much-scrutinised personal relationship between the two leaders.

Looking back at the images also gives clues as to how they might approach Friday’s head-to-head in Alaska, during which they will discuss ending the war in Ukraine.

The two bring very different approaches to private meetings, according to former officials who have dealt with either or both leaders behind closed doors.

Their first meeting came in July 2017, at a G20 summit in Germany. It was just months after Trump entered the White House, while Putin already had decades of political experience under his belt.

In front of the world’s cameras, the two exchanged warm words, and a businesslike handshake, which set the tone for a generally respectful relationship. In the years to come, the duo went on to express their mutual admiration – although Trump recently told the BBC he was “disappointed” with Putin over the bloodshed in Ukraine.

In fact, Ukraine was raised in that very first meeting, when Trump highlighted Russia’s efforts to destabilise its neighbour. Three years before, Moscow had illegally annexed the Crimean peninsula.

Fast-forward to 2025 – with Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine into its fourth year – and Trump is eager to play the role of peacemaker by negotiating a ceasefire.

Trump said on Wednesday there would be “very severe consequences” if the Russian leader did not agree to end the war. At other times, he has taken a softer tone, and has said he simply envisages the meeting to be a “feel-out” exercise.

Trump and Putin again came face-to-face once more in 2017, at an economic forum in Vietnam. They were pictured chatting among other world leaders, and one snap appeared to show Putin talking directly into his opposite number’s ear.

Trump will be familiar with Putin’s ability to dominate conversations with lengthy, quickly spoken monologues that give his conversant few opportunities to respond, according to diplomats who described the Russian leader’s style to the BBC.

“Everything in all meetings with Putin is about power,” observed Sir Laurie Bristow, the UK ambassador to Russia from 2016 to 2020. “Who is in control of the timing, the substance, the agenda, the tone – the point is that you never quite know what you’re going to get.”

As a result, Sir Laurie said, “the interpreters can find it hard to keep up”, and it was vital from Trump’s perspective that he brought one of his own. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff allegedly relied on Kremlin translators during a meeting of his own earlier this year.

Former Trump aide Fiona Hill agreed with Sir Laurie, recalling in an interview with the Telegraph her own experiences of dealing with Putin: “He does make fun of Trump. He uses the Russian language in a way that can be quite sarcastic and ironic. It’s totally lost in translation.”

Perhaps the most overt public display of friendliness between Trump and Putin came when they met for closed-door talks in Helsinki, Finland, in July 2018.

Trump defended Russia over accusations of interference in the 2016 US presidential election, and sided with Putin over the assessments of his own intelligence agencies. The move earned him cross-party condemnation back home in the US.

The Helsinki meeting also produced a memorably informal image of Putin gifting Trump a football from the recent men’s World Cup, which had been hosted by Russia.

Such gestures on Putin’s part were always carefully calculated, according to Sir Tony Brenton, another former British ambassador to Russia. Sir Tony recalled Putin showing “Russian old-world courtesy” during meetings in which he was present in the mid-2000s, although “there was always a degree of reserve underneath it, and he was never a very spontaneous character”.

He added: “The footballs and the smiles, the jokes and that sort of stuff… he’s not naturally a ‘hail fellow well met’ guy, but he does work at it when he thinks it’s important for the relationship.”

The pair met for further G20 summits in Argentina, in November 2018, and in Japan in June 2019.

John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser with whom he later fell out, was present on the latter occasion. He told the BBC he was struck by the men’s differing attitudes to detail, which he put down to Putin’s training in the Soviet intelligence service.

Of Putin, he said: “I’ve never seen him any way other than being prepared, very calm, very reasonable in his presentation, and I think that’s part of his KGB training.”

By contrast, Bolton said, Trump’s approach to private meetings was similar to his press conferences in public, in that he was prone to freewheeling statements that could surprise even his own aides. “He doesn’t really prepare for them because he doesn’t really think he needs to; he doesn’t think he needs the background information. I’m sure they’re preparing briefing materials as we always did, and he won’t read them.”

Trump believed that a healthy personal relationship with another leader would mean a healthy state-to-state relationship, Bolton said – and Putin knew this. “He will use his KGB training to try and manipulate Trump. He’s done it before and he’ll do it again.”

Trump himself has downplayed expectations ahead of Friday’s meeting in Alaska, remarking: “I think it’ll be good. But it might be bad.”

• ANALYSIS: What do Putin and Trump each want from summit?
• EXPLAINER: Where in Alaska is Trump meeting Putin and why?
• VISUALS: The war-ravaged Ukrainian territories in maps
• VERIFY: Russian attacks on Ukraine double since Trump inauguration
• GROUND REPORT: Left out of talks, exhausted Ukrainians fear unjust peace

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will travel to Friday’s summit in the US state of Alaska with contrasting priorities as they prepare for talks on ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Putin has been consistent on his desire to win Ukrainian territory, while Trump has made no secret of his desire to act as a global peacemaker.

But both men may also sense other opportunities, such as diplomatic rehabilitation on the world stage on the part of Putin. Second-guessing Trump’s aims is harder, as he has recently made vacillating statements about his Russian counterpart.

Here’s a fuller look at what the two leaders might want from the meeting.

The first thing Putin wants from this summit is something he’s already been given.

And that’s recognition.

Recognition from the world’s most powerful country, America, that Western efforts to isolate the Kremlin leader have failed.

The fact that this high-level meeting is happening is testament to that, as is the joint press conference that the Kremlin has announced. The Kremlin can argue that Russia is back at the top table of global politics.

“So much for being isolated,” crowed the tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets earlier this week.

Not only has Putin secured a US-Russia summit, but a prime location for it. Alaska has much to offer the Kremlin.

First, security. At its closest point, mainland Alaska is just 90km (55 miles) from Russia’s Chukotka. Vladimir Putin can get there without flying over “hostile” nations.

Second, it’s a long way – a very long way – from Ukraine and Europe. That sits well with the Kremlin’s determination to sideline Kyiv and EU leaders, and deal directly with America.

There’s historical symbolism, too. The fact that Tsarist Russia sold Alaska to America in the 19th Century is being used by Moscow to justify its attempt to change borders by force in the 21st Century.

“Alaska is a clear example that state borders can change, and that large territories can switch ownership,” wrote Moskovsky Komsomolets.

But Putin wants more than just international recognition and symbols.

He wants victory. He’s been insisting that Russia keep all the land it has seized and occupied in four Ukrainian regions (Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson) and that Kyiv withdraw from the parts of those regions still under Ukrainian control.

For Ukraine this is unacceptable. “Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier,” says the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

The Kremlin knows that. But if it secures Trump’s support for its territorial demands, the calculation may be that rejection by Ukraine would result in Trump cutting all support for Kyiv. Meanwhile, Russia and the US would get on with boosting relations and developing economic cooperation.

But there is another scenario.

Russia’s economy is under pressure. The budget deficit is rising, income from oil and gas exports falling.

If economic problems are pushing Putin to end the war, the Kremlin may compromise.

For now, there’s no sign of that – with Russian officials continuing to insist that Russia holds the initiative on the battlefield.

• Follow live updates ahead of the Trump-Putin summit
• European leaders tentatively hopeful after call with Trump ahead of summit

Trump famously promised during his 2024 presidential campaign that ending the Ukraine war would be easy and that he could do it in a matter of days.

That promise has hung over the American president’s efforts to resolve the conflict, as he has alternated between frustration with the Ukrainians and the Russians since returning to the White House in January.

He harangued Zelensky at a dramatic White House meeting in February, and later temporarily suspended military aid and intelligence sharing with the war-torn nation.

In recent months, he’s been more critical of Putin’s intransigence and willingness to attack civilian targets, setting a series of deadlines for new sanctions on the Russians and other nations that do business with them. Last Friday was the most recent deadline, and as with all the ones before it, Trump ultimately backed away.

Now he’s hosting the Russian president on American soil and talking about “land-swapping”, which Ukraine fears may consist of land concessions in exchange for peace.

So, any discussion about what Trump wants during his Friday talks with Putin is muddied by the president’s vacillating statements and actions.

This week, Trump has made a concerted effort to lower the expectations for this meeting – perhaps a tacit acknowledgement of the limited possibilities of a breakthrough with only one party in the war present.

On Monday, he said the summit would be a “feel-out” meeting. He suggested that he would know if he could reach a deal with the Russian leader “probably in the first two minutes”.

“I may leave and say good luck, and that’ll be the end,” he added. “I may say this is not going to be settled.”

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reinforced this message, calling the summit a “listening session”. But by midweek, he was once again talking up the prospects of a deal, saying that he thinks both Zelensky and Putin want peace.

With Trump, it’s often best to expect the unexpected. And Zelensky and European leaders spoke to him on Wednesday in an effort to ensure that he doesn’t strike a deal with Putin that Ukraine won’t – or can’t – accept.

One thing has been clear practically all year, however: Trump would welcome the chance to be the man who ends the war.

In his inaugural address, he said he wanted his proudest legacy to be that of a “peacemaker”. It is no secret that he longs for the international recognition of a Nobel Peace Prize.

In the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump boasted of all the global conflicts he feels he has successfully resolved since taking office in January. But when asked about the war in Ukraine, he offered a rare acknowledgement of the challenge he now faces.

“I thought the easiest one would be this one,” he said. “It’s actually the most difficult.”

Trump is not one to get bogged down in details. But if there is an opportunity for him to claim that he has made progress toward peace during the talks in Anchorage, he will take it.

Putin, always a savvy negotiator, may seek a way to let Trump do just that – on Russia’s terms, of course.

• EXPLAINER: Where in Alaska is Trump meeting Putin and why?
• VISUALS: The war-ravaged Ukrainian territories in maps
• VERIFY: Russian attacks on Ukraine double since Trump inauguration
• GROUND REPORT: Left out of Alaska talks, Ukrainians fear an unjust peace

US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are set to meet in Anchorage on Friday to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine.

The venue for the high-profile meeting is Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson – a US military installation on the northern edge of Alaska’s most-populated city.

White House officials have said the base satisfied security requirements for hosting two world leaders. And, during the height of summer tourism, there were few other options for the hastily arranged meeting.

Three rounds of talks between Russia and Ukraine this summer, held at Trump’s behest, have yet to bring the two sides any closer to peace.

Here is what we know about the base, and what we can expect from the meeting.

With roots tracing back to the Cold War, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson is Alaska’s largest military base. The 64,000 acre installation is a key US site for Arctic military readiness.

Snow-capped mountains, icy lakes and picturesque glaciers frame the base, which regularly shivers through temperatures as low as -12C (15F) in winter. However the leaders can expect comparatively pleasant temperatures of around 16C (61F) on Friday.

When Trump visited the base during his first term, in 2019, he said the troops there “serve in our country’s last frontier as America’s first line of defence”.

More than 30,000 people live on the site, accounting for approximately 10% of the population of Anchorage.

Built in 1940, the base was a critical air defence site and central command point to ward off threats from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

At its peak in 1957, it hosted 200 fighter jets, and multiple air traffic control and early warning radar systems, earning it the nickname of “Top Cover for North America”.

The base continues to grow today due to its strategic location and training facilities.

• Follow live coverage of the build-up to the meeting here

The US purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, lending a historical resonance to the meeting. It became a US state in 1959.

Russian presidential assistant Yuri Ushakov pointed out that the two countries are neighbours, with only the Bering Strait separating them.

“It seems quite logical for our delegation simply to fly over the Bering Strait and for such an important and anticipated summit of the leaders of the two countries to be held in Alaska,” Ushakov said.

The last time Alaska took centre-stage in an American diplomatic event was in March 2021, when Joe Biden’s newly minted diplomatic and national security team met their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage.

The sit-down turned acrimonious, with the Chinese accusing the Americans of “condescension and hypocrisy”.

In Anchorage there are few signs of the impending high-stakes meeting, except for the international media that have descended on the area.

Journalists are rubbing elbows with holidaymakers from the “lower 48” states on visits to the Alaskan wilderness during the height of the tourist season.

Trump has been pushing hard – without much success – to end the war in Ukraine.

As a presidential candidate, he pledged that he could end the war within 24 hours of taking office. He has also repeatedly argued that the war “never would have happened” if he had been president at the time of Russia’s invasion in 2022.

Last month, Trump told the BBC that he was “disappointed” by Putin.

Frustrations grew and Trump set an 8 August deadline for Putin to agree to an immediate ceasefire or face more severe US sanctions.

As the deadline hit, Trump instead announced he and Putin would meet in person on 15 August.

The meeting comes after US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff held “highly productive” talks with Putin in Moscow on Wednesday, according to Trump.

Ahead of the meeting, the White House sought to play down speculation that the bilateral could yield a ceasefire. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described it as a “listening exercise”.

Speaking to Fox News Radio on Thursday, Trump said there is a “25% chance that this meeting will not be a successful meeting”.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Trump would enter the meeting with the goal of reaching a ceasefire deal, but a wider peace agreement would take more time.

“To achieve a peace, I think we all recognise that there’ll have to be some conversation about security guarantees,” he told reporters at the state department on Thursday. “There’ll have to be some conversation about… territorial disputes and claims, and what they’re fighting over.”

• Trump says he will try to get back territory for Ukraine in talks with Putin
• Zelensky could still join Trump and Putin, but rest of Europe is shut out

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is not expected to attend. Trump said on Monday: “I would say he could go, but he’s been to a lot of meetings.”

Trump did, however, say that Zelensky would be the first person he would call afterwards.

Trump and Zelensky met virtually on Wednesday and were joined by several European leaders.

Putin had requested that Zelensky be excluded, although the White House has previously said that Trump was willing to hold a trilateral in which all three leaders were present.

On Thursday, Trump reiterated that his meeting with Putin could lead to a second meeting which could include Zelensky.

Zelensky has said any agreements without input from Ukraine would amount to “dead decisions”.

While both Russia and Ukraine have long said that they want the war to end, both countries want things that the other harshly opposes.

Trump said on Monday he was “going to try to get some of that [Russian-occupied] territory back for Ukraine”. But he also warned that there might have to be “some swapping, changes in land”.

Ukraine, however, has been adamant that it will not accept Russian control of regions that Moscow has seized, including Crimea.

Zelensky pushed back this week against any idea of “swapping” territories.

“We will not reward Russia for what it has perpetrated,” the Ukrainian president said.

Meanwhile, Putin has not budged from his territorial demands, Ukraine’s neutrality and the future size of its army.

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in part, over Putin’s belief the Western defensive alliance, Nato, was using the neighbouring country to gain a foothold to bring its troops closer to Russia’s borders.

Ultimately, Putin’s “central objective lies in obtaining… the geopolitical ‘neutralisation’ of Ukraine,” according to analyst Tatyana Stanovaya.

“It is extremely difficult to convey what is truly at stake… as people often simply cannot accept that Putin might want so much – and be serious about it. Unfortunately, he can.”

The Trump administration has been attempting to sway European leaders on a ceasefire deal that would hand over swathes of Ukrainian territory to Russia, the BBC’s US partner CBS News has reported.

The agreement would allow Russia to keep control of the Crimean peninsula, and take the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which is made up of Donetsk and Luhansk, according to sources familiar with the talks.

Russia illegally occupied Crimea in 2014 and its forces control the majority of the Donbas region.

Under the deal, Russia would have to give up the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, where it currently has some military control.

• ANALYSIS: What do Putin and Trump each want?
• EXPLAINER: Where in Alaska are they meeting and why?
• VISUALS: The war-ravaged Ukrainian territories in maps
• VERIFY: Russian attacks on Ukraine double since Trump inauguration
• GROUND REPORT: Left out of Alaska talks, Ukrainians fear an unjust peace

They call it “dronocide”: new training to deal with what is now the greatest threat to a Ukrainian soldier’s life on the battlefield – drones.

These machines saturate the front line and cause the largest number of casualties, according to Ukraine. If Donald Trump can’t make Vladimir Putin agree to a ceasefire at their meeting in Alaska on Friday, then this training in eastern Ukraine might be essential to saving lives on the front.

The continuing preparation for battle suggests few in Ukraine are expecting this war to stop any time soon. The training is not especially sophisticated: their defence is a shotgun. The soldiers go through drills to hit fast-moving targets – shooting first from the ground, and then while on the move. Ihor, their experienced instructor, tells the men a shotgun is currently their most effective means to bring down a drone at close range.

Ihor has been fighting on Ukraine’s eastern front since 2014, the year Russia illegally annexed Crimea and sent troops into the Donbas region. His call sign is “The Knifer”. He also trains troops in hand-to-hand combat.

Ihor’s been trying to help stop the Russian advance for the past ten years. He bristles at any suggestion that Ukraine will have to give up territory as part of any “land swap”.

“Neither me nor my comrades are ready for this,” he tells me. He says they’d rather continue fighting until “we liberate our territories”.

That doesn’t seem likely, with some Ukrainian front line units now well below strength. One soldier told us renewed efforts to mobilise more troops had been a “disaster”. They know they’re still outgunned and outnumbered.

Ukrainian troops also admit they’re tired and losing ground. It’s an undeniable fact. But this training shows they’re not giving up.

Oleksii, one of the soldiers honing his skill with a shotgun, says he’s already lost his father and friends in the war.

He admits “the war must be stopped one way or another”. But as for the suggestion that Ukraine hands over more territory to Russia, he says: “It wouldn’t be my suggestion, I don’t like this idea.”

Ukrainian troops point out that Russia is also taking heavy losses, suffering around 1,000 casualties – dead or injured – every day. Russia’s resources are slowly being exhausted too.

The views from the front are reflected in Ukraine’s towns and cities. Civilians are also suffering the consequences of this war more directly, not least with the recent ramping up of Russian missile and drone attacks across the country. Last month Russia launched more than 6,000 drones at Ukraine. In July 2024 that figure was much lower – just over 400.

In the streets of the capital Kyiv there’s no doubt they want to see an end to the war. “If we don’t stop, we will lose even more territory and people,” Oleksandr says. He uses the analogy of gambling in a casino: “The more you play, the more you lose.”

Volodymyr, another passer-by, is downbeat about the prospect of the talks between Presidents Trump and Putin. He believes Ukraine will probably have to give up more territory in return for a ceasefire. “We don’t have the resources,” he says. “All our boys are in heaven or in hospital.”

President Zelensky has already expressed his frustration that Ukraine’s voice will not be heard in Alaska. He’s also made clear he won’t be surrendering Ukrainian territory. “It’s not my private property,” he said earlier this week. But some recent polls suggest that more Ukrainians are resigned to the fact that they might have to sacrifice land for peace.

The bottom line though is that few believe Russia really wants peace. Oleksandr Merezhko, an MP and Chairman of Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Committee, thinks the Alaska meeting is just a PR stunt for President Putin.

“Putin doesn’t have any desire to reach a compromise,” Merezhko says. “He thinks he’s winning the war. He is not going to back down.”

Merezhko also dismisses President Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine will have to “sign something”.

“Absolutely not,” he says. “I don’t believe any agreement which leads to our destruction can be imposed on Ukraine.” He says it’s both morally and legally wrong to sacrifice people’s homes for peace.

But many Ukrainians have already lost their homes and lives. According to the UN, more than 13,000 civilians have been killed in the country, while 3.5 million Ukrainians have been forced to leave their homes.

More than 500 of those displaced people are now living in a temporary village, just outside the capital. Their new homes are metal containers, rather than bricks and mortar. Many are the elderly who fled the fighting in the East. There’s a small play area for children who’ll probably never see the towns and villages they were born in. Their old homes are now in occupied territory.

The face of 78-year-old Hennadii wells up with tears when he tells me doesn’t think he’ll ever see the grave of his mother again. He tells me he still misses what he had to leave behind. “I liked fishing there, I had a small plot of land, my grapes and my walnut tree,” he says. “And now it doesn’t exist.”

No one we talk to here expresses much confidence about the talks between Presidents Trump and Putin. “I really hope there will be something good after those talks but I don’t have much hope,” says Valeria, an 18-year-old student whose family lost their home.

But 78-year-old Valentina is more defiant. Her husband was killed by a Russian missile. “This is our land and our people are dying for it,” she says. “How can we give it up? No way.”

In Alaska Presidents Trump and Putin will be talking about Ukraine’s future – without Ukrainian representation, and over their heads.

Ukraine may gradually be losing this war, but it’s not yet been defeated. That makes it harder for anyone else to force through a peace it cannot accept.

Japanese vlogger Hayato Kato’s 1.9 million followers are used to his funny clips about exploring China, where he has been living for several years.

But on 26 July he surprised them with a sombre one.

“I just watched a movie about the Nanjing Massacre,” he said, referring to the Japanese army’s six-week rampage through Nanjing in late 1937, which, by some estimates, killed more than 300,000 civilians and Chinese soldiers. Around 20,000 women were reportedly raped.

Dead To Rights, or Nanjing Photo Studio, is a star-studded tale about a group of civilians who hide from Japanese troops in a photo studio. Already a box office hit, it is the first of a wave of Chinese movies about the horrors of Japanese occupation that are being released to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two. But a sense of unfinished history – often amplified by Beijing – persists, fuelling both memory and anger.

Speaking in Chinese on Douyin, China’s domestic version of TikTok, Kato recounted scenes from the film: “People were lined up along the river and then the shootings began… A baby, the same age as my daughter, was crying in her mother’s arms. A Japanese soldier rushed forward, grabbed her, and smashed her into the ground.”

He said he had seen many people on the Japanese internet denying the Nanjing Massacre had happened, including public figures, even politicians. “If we deny it, this will happen again,” he continued, urging Japanese people to watch the movies and “Iearn about the dark side of their history”.

The video quickly became one of his most popular, with more than 670,000 likes in just two weeks.

But the comments are less positive. The top-liked one quotes what has already become an iconic line from the movie, uttered by a Chinese civilian to a Japanese soldier: “We are not friends. We never were.”

For China, Japan’s brutal military campaign and occupation are among the darkest chapters of its past – and the massacre in Nanjing, then the capital, an even deeper wound.

What has made it fester is the belief that Japan has never fully owned up to its atrocities in places it occupied – not just China, but also Korea, what was then Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia. One of the most painful points of contention involves “comfort women” – the approximately 200,000 women who were raped and forced to work in Japanese military brothels. To this day, the survivors are still fighting for an apology and compensation.

In his video, Kato seems to acknowledge that it’s not a subject of conversation in Japan: “Unfortunately these anti-Japanese war movies are not shown in Japan publicly, and Japanese people are not interested to watch them.”

When the Japanese Emperor announced on 15 August that he would surrender, his country had already paid a terrible cost – more than 100,000 had been killed in bombing raids on Tokyo, before two atom bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Japan’s defeat, however, was welcomed in large parts of Asia, where the Imperial Japanese Army had claimed millions of lives. For them, 15 August carries both freedom and lingering trauma – in Korea the day is called ‘gwangbokjeol’, which translates to the return of light.

“While the military war has ended, the history war continues,” says Professor Gi-Wook Shin, of Stanford University, explaining the two sides remember those years differently, and those differences add to the tension. While the Chinese see Japanese aggression as a defining, and devastating, moment in their past, Japanese history focuses on its own victimhood – the destruction caused by the atom bombs and post-war recovery.

“People I know in Japan don’t really talk about it,” says a Chinese man who has been living in Japan for 15 years, and wished to remain anonymous.

“They see it as something in the past, and the country doesn’t really commemorate it – because they also view themselves as victims.”

He calls himself a patriot, but he says that hasn’t made things difficult for him personally because their reluctance to talk about it means they “avoid such sensitive topics”.

“Some believe the Japanese army went to help China build a new order – with conflicts occurring in that process. Of course, there are also those who acknowledge that it was, in fact, an invasion.”

China fought Japan for eight years, from Manchuria in the north-east to Chongqing in the south-west. Estimates of the Chinese who died range from 10 to 20 million. The Japanese government says around 480,000 of its soldiers died in that time.

Those years have been well-documented in award-winning literature and films – they were also the subject of Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s work.

That period is now being revisited under a regime that holds patriotism as central to its ambitions: “national rejuvenation” is how Xi Jinping describes his Chinese dream. While the Party heavily censors its own history, from the Tiananmen Square massacre to more recent crackdowns, it encourages remembering a more distant past – with an outside enemy.

Xi even revised the date the war with Japan started – the Chinese government now counts the first incursions into Manchuria in 1931, which makes it a 14-year war, rather than eight years of full-fledged conflict.

Under him, Beijing has also been commemorating the end of World War Two on a bigger scale. On 3 September, the day Japan formally surrendered, there will be a major military parade in Tiananmen Square.

Also in September, a highly-anticipated new release will focus on the notorious Unit 731, a branch of the Japanese Army that conducted lethal human experiments in occupied Manchuria. The date of release – 18 September – is the day Japan attempted its first invasion of Manchuria.

That is apart from Dongji Rescue, a film inspired by the real-life efforts of Chinese fishermen who saved hundreds of British prisoners of war during Japanese raids; and Mountains and Rivers Bearing Witness, a documentary from a state-owned studio about Chinese resistance.

And they seem to be striking a nerve.

“That one generation fought a war on behalf of three, and endured suffering for three. Salute to the martyrs,” a popular RedNote post on Nanjing Photo Studio reads.

“We are not friends…”, the now-famous line from the movie, “is not just a line” between the two main characters, says a popular review that has been liked by more than 10,000 users on Weibo.

It is “also from millions of ordinary Chinese people to Japan. They’ve never issued a sincere apology, they are still worshipping [the war criminals], they are rewriting history – no-one will treat them as friends”, the comment says, referring to some Japanese right-wing figures’ dismissive remarks.

Tokyo has issued apologies, but many Chinese people believe they are not profuse enough.

“Japan keeps sending a conflicting message,” Prof Shin says, referring to instances where leaders have contradicted each other in their statements on Japan’s wartime history.

For years, in Chinese history classes, students have been shown a photo of former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling before a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970. The Chinese expect a similar gesture from Japan.

This wasn’t always the case, though.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, the turbulence in China did not end. For the next three years, the Nationalist Kuomintang – then the ruling government and the main source of Chinese resistance against Japan – fought a civil war against Mao Zedong’s Communist Party forces.

That war ended with Mao’s victory and the Kuomintang’s retreat to Taiwan. Mao, whose priority was to build a communist nation, avoided focusing on Japanese war crimes. Commemorations celebrated the Party’s victory and criticised the Kuomintang. He also needed Japan’s support on the international stage. Tokyo, in fact, was one of the first major powers to recognise his regime.

It wasn’t until the 1980s – after Mao’s death – that the Japanese occupation returned to haunt the relationship between Beijing and Tokyo. By then, Japan was a wealthy Western ally with a booming economy. Revisions to Japanese textbooks began to spark controversy, with China and South Korea accusing Japan of whitewashing its wartime atrocities. China had just begun to open up, and South Korea was in transition from military rule to democracy.

As Chinese leaders moved away from Mao – and his destructive legacy – the trauma of what happened under Japanese attack became a unifying narrative for the Communist Party, says Yinan He, associate professor of international relations at Lehigh University in the US.

“After the Cultural Revolution, Chinese people for the large part were disillusioned by communism,” she told the BBC. “Since communism lost its appeal, you need nationalism. And Japan is [an] easy target because that’s the most recent external [aggressor].”

She describes a “choreographed representation of the past”, where commemorations of 1945 often downplay the contributions of the US and the Kuomintang, and are accompanied by growing scrutiny of Japan’s official stance on its wartime actions.

What hasn’t helped is the denial of war crimes – prominent right-wing Japanese don’t accept the Nanjing massacre ever happened, or that Japanese soldiers forced so many women into sexual slavery – and recent visits by officials to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honours Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals.

This hostility between China and Japan has spilled over into everyday lives as nationalism online peaks – Chinese and Japanese people have been attacked in each other’s countries. A Japanese schoolboy was killed in Shenzhen last year.

China’s economic rise and assertiveness in the region and beyond has changed the dynamic between the two countries again. It has surpassed Japan as a global power. The best time to seek closure – the 1970s, when the countries were closer – has passed, Prof He says.

“They simply said, let’s forget about that, let’s set that aside. They’ve never dealt with the history – and now the problem has come back to haunt them again.”

Finding international films that might appeal to the US market is an important part of the work XYZ Films.

Maxime Cottray is the chief operating officer at the Los Angeles-based independent studio.

He says the US market has always been tough for foreign language films.

“It’s been limited to coastal New York viewers through art house films,” he says.

It’s partly a language problem.

“America is not a culture which has grown up with subtitles or dubbing like Europe has,” he points out.

But that language hurdle might be easier to clear with a new AI-driven dubbing system.

The audio and video of a recent film, Watch the Skies, a Swedish sci-fi film, was fed into a digital tool called DeepEditor.

It manipulates the video to make it look like actors are genuinely speaking the language the film is made into.

“The first time I saw the results of the tech two years ago I thought it was good, but having seen the latest cut, it’s amazing. I’m convinced that if the average person if saw it, they wouldn’t notice it – they’d assume they were speaking whatever language that is,” says Mr Cottray.

The English version of Watch The Skies was released in 110 AMC Theatres across the US in May.

“To contextualise this result, if the film were not dubbed into English, the film would never have made it into US cinemas in the first place,” says Mr Cottray.

“US audiences were able to see a Swedish independent film that otherwise only a very niche audience would have otherwise seen.”

He says that AMC plans to run more releases like this.

DeepEditor was developed by Flawless, which is headquartered in Soho, London.

Writer and director Scott Mann founded the company in 2020, having worked on films including Heist, The Tournament and Final Score.

He felt that traditional dubbing techniques for the international versions of his films didn’t quite match the emotional impact of the originals.

“When I worked on Heist in 2014, with a brilliant cast including Robert De Niro, and then I saw that movie translated to a different language, that’s when I first realised that no wonder the movies and TV don’t travel well, because the old world of dubbing really kind of changes everything about the film,” says Mr Mann, now based in Los Angeles.

“It’s all out of sync, and it’s performed differently. And from a purist filmmaking perspective, a very much lower grade product is being seen by the rest of the world.”

Flawless developed its own technology for identifying and modifying faces, based on a method first presented in a research paper in 2018.

“DeepEditor uses a combination of face detection, facial recognition, landmark detection [such as facial features] and 3D face tracking to understand the actor’s appearance, physical actions and emotional performance in every shot,” says Mr Mann.

The tech can preserve actors’ original performances across languages, without reshoots or re-recordings, reducing costs and time, he says.

According to him, Watch the Skies was the world’s first fully visually-dubbed feature film.

As well as giving an actor the appearance of speaking another language, DeepEditor can also transfer a better performance from one take into another, or swap a new line of dialogue, while keep the original performance with its emotional content intact.

Thanks to the explosion of streaming platforms such as Netflix and Apple, the global film dubbing market is set to increase from US$4bn (£3bn) in 2024 to $7.6bn by 2033, according to a report by Business Research Insights.

Mr Mann won’t say how much the tech costs but says it varies per project. “I’d say it works out at about a tenth of the cost of shooting it or changing it any other way.”

His customers include “pretty much all the really big streamers”.

Mr Mann believes the technology will enable films to be seen by a wider audience.

“There is an enormous amount of incredible kind of cinema and TV out there that is just never seen by English speaking folks, because many don’t want to watch it with dubbing and subtitles,” says Mr Mann.

The tech isn’t here to replace actors, says Mann, who says voice actors are used rather than being replaced with synthetic voices.

“What we found is that if you make the tools for the actual creatives and the artists themselves, that’s the right way of doing it… they get kind of the power tools to do their art and that can feed into the finished product. That’s the opposite of a lot of approaches that other tech companies have taken.”

However, Neta Alexander, assistant professor of film and media at Yale University, says that while the promise of wider distribution is tempting, using AI to reconfigure performances for non-native markets risks eroding the specificity and texture of language, culture, and gesture.

“If all foreign films are adapted to look and sound English, the audience’s relationship with the foreign becomes increasingly mediated, synthetic, and sanitised,” she says.

“This could discourage cross-cultural literacy and disincentivise support for subtitled or original-language screenings.”

Meanwhile, she says, the displacement of subtitles, a key tool for language learners, immigrants, deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and many others, raises concerns about accessibility.

“Closed captioning is not just a workaround; it’s a method of preserving the integrity of both visual and auditory storytelling for diverse audiences,” says Prof Alexander.

Replacing this with automated mimicry suggests a disturbing turn toward commodified and monolingual film culture, she says.

“Rather than ask how to make foreign films easier for English-speaking audiences, we might better ask how to build audiences that are willing to meet diverse cinema on its own terms.”

King Charles III has honoured those whose “service and sacrifice” helped to bring an end to World War Two in a personal message marking the 80th anniversary of VJ Day.

In an audio message recorded earlier this month, the King vowed that those who fought and died in the Pacific and Far East “shall never be forgotten”.

The King and Queen, alongside Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, will later attend a service of remembrance at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire to commemorate the anniversary.

VJ Day, or Victory over Japan Day, is commemorated on 15 August each year, and marks the date in 1945 when Japan surrendered to the Allied forces, ending the war.

An estimated 71,000 soldiers from Britain and the Commonwealth died fighting in the war against Japan, including upwards of 12,000 prisoners of war held in Japanese captivity.

The King’s message started by reflecting on the moment 80 years ago that his grandfather, King George VI, announced to the nation and Commonwealth that the war was over.

“For the millions of families gathered around their wireless sets, and for their loved ones still serving far from home, it was the message a battle-weary world had long prayed for,” the King said.

“On this day of profound remembrance, I speak to you in that same spirit of commemoration and celebration as we honour anew all those whose service and sacrifice saw the forces of liberty prevail.”

The King noted that while the final victory in the Pacific was achieved under the strategic command of America, the war in South East Asia had reached its climax under the leadership of his great uncle, Lord Mountbatten.

Working with General William Slim, Mountbatten achieved the defeat of the Japanese offensive towards India and the reconquest of Burma.

But Slim’s soldiers became known as the “Forgotten Army”, because people back home in Britain were more focused on events in Europe.

The King acknowledged this in his message, but said that as Patron of the Burma Star Memorial Fund, “it has been my privilege to reassure the remaining veterans that they and their fallen comrades shall never be forgotten”.

King Charles also paid tribute to the Allied pilots, who he praised for displaying “their own fearless bravery”, the prisoners of war who endured years of captivity, and civilian populations of occupied territories who also faced “grievous hardships”.

“Their experience reminds us that war’s true cost extends beyond battlefields, touching every aspect of life – a tragedy all-too vividly demonstrated by conflicts around the world today,” the King observed.

• Explore: More on VJ Day
• Ex-prisoner of war recalls ‘torpedo after torpedo’
• Historic aircraft to take part in VJ Day flypast

He also acknowledged the “immense price” paid by the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The atomic bombings of the two Japanese cities in August 1945 killed more than 200,000 people – some from the immediate blast and others from radiation sickness and burns.

“But in recalling so much suffering, we must not lose sight of how great was the cause and how sweet the victory,” the King said.

He said that countries and communities had come together as part of the war effort, learning to coordinate across distances, faiths and cultural divides.

“Together they proved that, in times of war and in times of peace, the greatest weapons of all are not the arms you bear, but the arms you link. That remains a vital lesson for our times,” he said.

“So to the families of all those who served, and to that sadly dwindling band of veterans among us still, please know that the courage and camaraderie displayed in humanity’s darkest hour is a flame that shall blaze for eternity – a beacon that honours our past and guides our future.”

VJ Day 80 commemorations started on Thursday evening with a sunset ceremony at the Memorial Gates in central London to pay tribute to Commonwealth personnel who served and died in the Far East.

A lightshow, images and stories from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s digital story-sharing platform For Evermore were projected on to the Memorial Gates.

Lord Boateng, chairman of the Memorial Gates Council, laid a wreath on behalf of the King during Thursday’s ceremony.

As dawn broke at the Cenotaph, Friday’s commemorations began with military bagpipers playing the lament Battle’s O’er in the Far East section of the National Memorial Arboretum and at Edinburgh Castle.

A piper also performed at a Japanese peace garden in west London to reflect the reconciliation which has taken place between the UK and Japan in the decades since the war ended.

At Friday’s service, a national two-minute silence will conclude with a flypast from the RAF Red Arrows.

It will be followed by a reception in which the King and Queen will meet veterans who served in the Far East during the Second World War, along with their families.

Events to commemorate the 80th anniversary of VJ Day will conclude with a reception for veterans at Windsor Castle later in the Autumn.

Events are being held across Japan to mark the 80th anniversary of its defeat at the end of World War Two.

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba stressed the importance of “peace” amid global conflicts at a government ceremony in Tokyo.

“We should never repeat the devastation of war. We will never ever make a mistake in choosing the path to take,” Ishiba said.

“The remorse and lessons from that war should once again be engraved deeply in our hearts,” he said.

He is the first Japanese prime minister to have used the word “remorse” in the annual ceremony since 2012.

Thousands of people braved the heat to pay their respects at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.

The site honours 2.5 million mostly Japanese soldiers who perished since the late 19th century, but also enshrines convicted war criminals.

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Instagram users have told the BBC of their confusion, fear and anger after having their accounts suspended, often for being wrongly accused by parent company Meta of breaching the platform’s child sex abuse rules.

For months, tens of thousands of people around the world have been complaining Meta has been banning their Instagram and Facebook accounts in error.

They say they have been wrongly accused of breaching site rules – including around child sexual exploitation.

More than 500 of them have contacted the BBC to say they have lost cherished photos and seen businesses upended – but some also speak of the profound personal toll it has taken on them, including concerns that the police could become involved.

Meta acknowledged a problem with the erroneous banning of Facebook Groups in June, but has denied there is wider issue on Facebook or Instagram at all.

It has repeatedly refused to comment on the problems its users are facing – though it has frequently overturned bans when the BBC has raised individual cases with it.

Here are some of the stories users have shared with BBC News.

Yassmine Boussihmed, 26, from the Netherlands, spent five years building an Instagram profile for her boutique dress shop in Eindhoven.

In April, she was banned over account integrity. Over 5,000 followers, gone in an instant. She lost clients, and was devastated.

“I put all of my trust in social media, and social media helped me grow, but it has let me down,” she told the BBC.

This week, after the BBC sent questions about her case to Meta’s press office, her Instagram accounts were reinstated.

“I am so thankful,” she said in a tearful voice note.

Five minutes later, her personal Instagram was suspended again – but the account for the dress shop remained.

Lucia, not her real name, is a 21-year-old woman from Austin, Texas.

She was suspended from Instagram for just over two weeks for breaching Meta’s policy on child sexual exploitation (CSE), abuse and nudity.

As with all the other cases, she was not told what post breached the platform’s rules.

That has left wondering if a picture she posted of herself and her 21-year-old friend wearing bikini tops somehow triggered the artificial intelligence (AI) moderation tools, as she thinks they “look a little bit younger”.

She also uses her account to interact with under 18s, such as sending Reels to her younger sister.

“It is deeply troubling to have an accusation as disgusting as this one,” she told BBC News.

“Given that I have a desire to work in juvenile justice as an attorney and advocate on behalf of children, I am appalled to have been suspended for something I know I did not do and would never do.”

She appealed, and then about seven hours after the BBC highlighted Lucia’s case to Meta’s press office, her account was restored with no explanation.

Over 36,000 people have signed a petition accusing Meta of falsely banning accounts; thousands more are in Reddit forums or on social media posting about it.

Their central accusation – Meta’s AI is unfairly banning people, with the tech also being used to deal with the appeals. The only way to speak to a human is to pay for Meta Verified, and even then many are frustrated.

Meta has not commented on these claims.Instagram states AI is central to its “content review process” and Meta has outlined how technology and humans enforce its policies.

Duncan Edmonstone, from Cheshire, has stage four ALK+ lung cancer. The 55-year-old finds solace in the support network he has on private Facebook groups.

For 12 days at the end of June, he was banned for breaking cybersecurity guidelines before being reinstated.

“The support groups are my lifeline, and there are actual examples of where advice from group members has made a difference to other patient’s treatment,” he said.

“I draw satisfaction and meaning, in a life that is probably going to be cut short, from helping other people in that group.”

Ryan – not his real name – has been banned, reinstated, and banned again from Instagram over the past few months.

The former teacher from London was thrown off the platform in May after he was accused of breaching the CSE policy.

He spent a month appealing. In June, the BBC understands a human moderator double checked and concluded Ryan had breached the policy.

Then his account was abruptly restored at the end of July.

“We’re sorry we’ve got this wrong,” Instagram said in an email to him, adding that he had done nothing wrong.

Ryan was left flabbergasted.

“‘Sorry we called you a paedophile for two months – here is your account back,'” is how he characterised the tone of the message.

But that wasn’t the end of the story.

Hours after the BBC contacted Meta’s press office to ask questions about his experience, he was banned again on Instagram and, for the first time, Facebook.

“I am devastated and I don’t know what to do,” he told the BBC.

“I can’t believe it has happened twice.”

His Facebook account was back two days later – but he was still blocked from Instagram.

Ryan says he has been left feeling deeply isolated – and worried the police are going to “knock on the door”.

His experience mirrors those of other Instagram users who told the BBC of the “extreme stress” of having their accounts banned after being wrongly accused of breaching the platform’s rules on CSE.

Despite taking action on Yassmine, Lucia and Ryan’s accounts, Meta has not made any comment to the BBC.

In common with all big technology firms, it has come under pressure from authorities to make its platforms safer.

In July, Meta said it was taking “aggressive action” on accounts breaking its rules – including the removal of 635,000 Instagram and Facebook accounts over sexualised comments and imagery in relation to children.

Meta’s wide-ranging policy on child sexual exploitation has changed three times since Boxing Day last year, with all amendments occurring since 17 July.

It has not said what impact, if any, these changes had on the cases the BBC has raised with it.

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The son of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro has praised US President Donald Trump for imposing huge tariffs on his home country – and warned more measures could be on the way.

Eduardo Bolsonaro – who is an elected Congressman in Brazil – spoke to the BBC in Washington, where he has been on a months-long lobbying campaign to convince the Trump administration to punish the Brazilian authorities for putting his father on trial on coup charges.

The congressman said there could be more sanctions on individuals.

“There’s a very significant possibility regarding the application of sanctions and the extension of Magnitsky sanctions to other people. You have on Secretary Marco Rubio’s desk, for example, the possibility of withdrawing visas, among other pressure mechanisms, to try to get Brazil out of this institutional crisis we’re experiencing.”

At the White House Thursday, President Trump doubled down accusing Brazil of being a bad trade partner. He wrongly claimed the US runs a trade deficit with Brazil. Last year, it ran a $7.4 billion trade surplus with Brazil

He went onto defend Jair Bolsonaro:

“It’s really a political execution that they’re trying to do with Bolsonaro. I think that’s terrible.”

The former president is accused of plotting a coup to prevent the man who beat him in the 2022 presidential election, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from taking office. Jair Bolsonaro has denied that he led an attempt to overthrow the government but acknowledged taking part in meetings aimed at reversing his election loss.

A verdict in the case is expected in the coming weeks. If found guilty, Jair Bolsonaro could face decades in prison.

Trump likened the case against Bolsonaro, who has been dubbed “Trump of the Tropics” for his similarities to the US president, to a “witch hunt” and drew parallels with his own legal battles following his refusal to accept defeat in 2020. It has left the two largest democracies in the Americas in a huge confrontation.

• Trump accuses Brazil of ‘witch hunt’ against Bolsonaro
• Trump threatens Brazil with 50% tariff and demands Bolsonaro’s trial end

In July, Trump announced he would raise tariffs on Brazilian imports to 50%, citing Brazil’s treatment of Jair Bolsonaro as a trigger for the hike.

In addition to that, the US state department banned eight Brazilian supreme court justices from travelling to the US, including Alexandre de Moraes, the judge overseeing Bolsonaro’s trial.

Brazil’s President Lula said the move constituted an unacceptable interference in his country’s justice system and refused to budge, so the 50%-levy came into effect last week.

In an interview with the BBC in Washington, Eduardo Bolsonaro would not be drawn on the closeness of his relationship with President Trump or if he influenced the tariff action.

“I admire President Trump, we’ve met several times in his first and second term. We fought first to sanction Alexandre de Moraes. But if President Trump starts with tariffs, I do believe that he is right and I do support him because of that.”

Eduardo Bolsonaro, 41, has been in the US since March – saying he is living in “exile” out of fear of arrest should he return to Brazil.

He rejects criticism that he is being unpatriotic by lobbying for sanctions which will see his country suffer economically: “I believe freedom comes first, before the economy.”

When challenged, he cites a recent poll by the Quaest institute saying that one day after Trump announced the 50%-levy, “four in every 10 Brazilians were in support of the tariffs”.

We put it to him that the poll actually suggests that 79% of Brazilians believe the tariffs will harm their lives, and among voters who say they have got no political position, 77% believe their imposition is wrong.

• What tariffs has Trump announced and why?
• Bolsonaro denies involvement in alleged coup plot

So how worried is he that this could blow back on his family, and boost support for the current president, Lula?

“I’m not thinking about the next election, I’m thinking about the next generation,” he says before conceding that he knows it is something “people are really concerned about, for sure”.

He often refers to Brazil as a dictatorship in his answers, despite the fact that major institutions like Freedom House cite the country as having free and fair elections.

Eduardo Bolsonaro himself was one of the members of Congress to gain most votes in 2022.

He has also said that his father may stand again for president despite being barred from running for public office until 2030 under a ban which predates the coup charges that the older Bolsonaro is currently facing.

Eduardo Bolsonaro’s anger is very focussed on Alexandre de Moraes, the judge who presided over the electoral court which issued the ban in 2023, and who is also overseeing the current trial on coup charges against Jair Bolsonaro.

He is confident that “in the next election … we will have new judges in the electoral court”, which he thinks will mean that the restrictions preventing his father from running for office will be lifted.

“The new judges in the electoral court, they can do a better system. They can improve the system. And I hope this is going to happen,” he says.

But he adds that in order for that to happen “you need Alexandre de Moraes to be isolated”.

The BBC asked the supreme court and Mr Moraes for a response but has not received a reply.

Mr Moraes, meanwhile, has doubled down despite the US sanctions. He has placed Jair Bolsonaro under house arrest for breaching an order banning him from social media and ordered him to wear an electronic ankle tag.

He has also ordered that the finances of Eduardo Bolsonaro be frozen on suspicion that he was using them to bankroll his lobbying on behalf of his father in the US.

Son and father have also been banned from seeing each other, accused of trying to get the US to intervene to obstruct the case.

Eduardo Bolsonaro argues that what he is doing in the US is shining a light on what he says are wrongdoings committed by “dictators” in his home country: “They think that is an anti-democratic act when you denounce the human rights violations of the abusers in Brazil.”

He goes on to compare himself to women from Iran who have been critical of their government and face persecution upon their return.

While no arrest warrant has been issued for him, Eduardo Bolsonaro has repeatedly expressed fear he would be detained if he were to return to Brazil.

“What is going to happen with me if I go back to my country because I’m denouncing these dictators? I’m going to jail, it’s pretty much the same situation. In Iran, they are a little bit more violent,” he told the BBC.

While he decries the current Brazilian government as a “dictatorship”, in 2019 – when his father was in power – Eduardo Bolsonaro himself proposed passing a new Institutional Act Number 5 (AI-5), a decree passed under Brazil’s military rule to suppress dissent.

AI-5 closed down Brazil’s Congress and indefinitely outlawed freedom of assembly and freedom of expression.

Eduardo Bolsonaro said at the time that if protesters took to the streets against his father’s administration, the government could adopt similar measures – thereby invoking one of the darkest moments in the country’s history.

He told the BBC he now regrets those remarks: “It was a mistake to say that. It was a mistake. I would not do that again.”

He also condemns the events of 8 January 2023, when hundreds of his father’s supporters stormed the buildings in Brasilia that symbolize the country’s democracy, a week after Lula had taken office.

They vandalized the supreme court, congress and the presidential palace and urged the military to take over.

Jair Bolsonaro was in the United States when the storming in Brasilia happened, having left Brazil two days before his presidential term ended. He did not attend his successor’s swearing-in and remained in Florida for months before returning to his home country in March 2023. He has always denied having incited his followers and according to his son, he even denounced it.

“January 8th was a protest that did go too far. I do agree, I do condemn it,” he says, adding that “my father condemned it the very first day when it was happening”.

About 2,000 people were arrested over the Brasilia attack. Most were released but many were convicted by the supreme court on charges of an attempted coup, among other crimes, following ongoing police investigations. Eduardo Bolsonaro thinks the rioters should be granted an amnesty because, he says, the sentences are too long.

But we put to him that plenty of people would argue that if you commit a crime to overturn democracy you should be punished for it.

He in turn argued that vandalising buildings did not amount to a coup attempt:

“Even with the heart angry because of the result of the elections, these people would never bring a dictatorship to Brazil. They would never accomplish a coup d’etat”

He says he misses his home country but has no plans to return soon.

Is this all just simple, pure revenge by an aggrieved son?

“For sure, he is my father, we have a relationship, but this is way bigger than only him. And if we do the right thing and rescue freedom in Brazil, everybody’s going to receive the benefits, even him.”

Artificial intelligence has invented two new potential antibiotics that could kill drug-resistant gonorrhoea and MRSA, researchers have revealed.

The drugs were designed atom-by-atom by the AI and killed the superbugs in laboratory and animal tests.

The two compounds still need years of refinement and clinical trials before they could be prescribed.

But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team behind it say AI could start a “second golden age” in antibiotic discovery.

Antibiotics kill bacteria, but infections that resist treatment are now causing more than a million deaths a year.

Overusing antibiotics has helped bacteria evolve to dodge the drugs’ effects, and there has been a shortage of new antibiotics for decades.

Researchers have previously used AI to trawl through thousands of known chemicals in an attempt to identify ones with potential to become new antibiotics.

Now, the MIT team have gone one step further by using generative AI to design antibiotics in the first place for the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhoea and for potentially-deadly MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).

Their study, published in the journal Cell, interrogated 36 million compounds including those that either do not exist or have not yet been discovered.

Scientists trained the AI by giving it the chemical structure of known compounds alongside data on whether they slow the growth of different species of bacteria.

The AI then learns how bacteria are affected by different molecular structures, built of atoms such as carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen.

Two approaches were then tried to design new antibiotics with AI. The first identified a promising starting point by searching through a library of millions of chemical fragments, eight to 19 atoms in size, and built from there. The second gave the AI free rein from the start.

The design process also weeded out anything that looked too similar to current antibiotics. It also tried to ensure they were inventing medicines rather than soap and to filter out anything predicted to be toxic to humans.

Scientists used AI to create antibiotics for gonorrhoea and MRSA, a type of bacteria that lives harmlessly on the skin but can cause a serious infection if it enters the body.

Once manufactured, the leading designs were tested on bacteria in the lab and on infected mice, resulting in two new potential drugs.

“We’re excited because we show that generative AI can be used to design completely new antibiotics,” Prof James Collins, from MIT, tells the BBC.

“AI can enable us to come up with molecules, cheaply and quickly and in this way, expand our arsenal, and really give us a leg up in the battle of our wits against the genes of superbugs.”

However, they are not ready for clinical trials and the drugs will require refinement – estimated to take another one to two year’s work – before the long process of testing them in people could begin.

Dr Andrew Edwards, from the Fleming Initiative and Imperial College London, said the work was “very significant” with “enormous potential” because it “demonstrates a novel approach to identifying new antibiotics”.

But he added: “While AI promises to dramatically improve drug discovery and development, we still need to do the hard yards when it comes to testing safety and efficacy.”

That can be a long and expensive process with no guarantee that the experimental medicines will be prescribed to patients at the end.

Some are calling for AI drug discovery more broadly to improve. Prof Collins says “we need better models” that move beyond how well the drugs perform in the laboratory to ones that are a better predictor of their effectiveness in the body.

There is also an issue with how challenging the AI-designs are to manufacture. Of the top 80 gonorrhoea treatments designed in theory, only two were synthesised to create medicines.

Prof Chris Dowson, at the University of Warwick, said the study was “cool” and showed AI was a “significant step forward as a tool for antibiotic discovery to mitigate against the emergence of resistance”.

However, he explains, there is also an economic problem factoring into drug-resistant infections – “how do you make drugs that have no commercial value?”

If a new antibiotic was invented, then ideally you would use it as little as possible to preserve its effectiveness, making it hard for anyone to turn a profit.

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Childcare workers banned in one Australian state will be prevented from “gaming the system” by moving to another jurisdiction, under proposed new laws.

The “banned in one, banned in all” legislation means states and territories will now share information if a person’s application to work with children has been rejected due to criminal history or workplace misconduct.

Attorney-General Michelle Rowland said the reform was needed as the current system has “loopholes” that can be exploited.

The new laws – hoped to start at the end of the year – are part of wider safety reforms in the childcare sector after a spate of sexual and physical abuse cases have shocked the country .

The proposed changes to Australia’s working with children checks come almost a decade after a landmark royal commission into child sex abuse recommended the system be nationalised.

Currently, each state and territory complete what is essentially a criminal history check required for those who work alongside children, but they don’t share the information with each other. Some jurisdictions also consider allegations of workplace misconduct.

Rowland said there are no plans to nationalise the checks as states and territories will continue to manage their own systems, but that there will be more information sharing under a national “checking capability”.

“If you’re banned from a working with children check in one state and territory, it means that you can’t then go and apply for one somewhere else in Australia,” she said.

Rowland chaired a meeting of attorneys-general from across the country on Friday, and said representatives from all states and territories had committed to “pull out all stops” to enable stronger, “near real time” information sharing.

Rowland blamed complex IT systems in different jurisdictions – as well as failings by successive governments – on the years-long delay for such a move.

The federal government also announced on Friday that 30 childcare centres have been told they must lift their standards or risk losing their government funding, under new laws introduced last month.

In recent months a series of high-profile cases of alleged sexual and physical abuse have been reported at childcare centres across Australia.

Last month, police revealed a Melbourne childcare worker, Joshua Dale Brown, had been arrested and charged with 70 offences – including child rape – against eight babies.

The case also prompted authorities to recommend infectious diseases testing, as a precaution, for 2,000 children from more than two dozen locations where Mr Brown had worked.

Shares in Intel jumped by more than 7% on Thursday, following reports that the Trump administration is in talks to take a stake in the chipmaker.

The reported deal would support the technology firm’s plans to build a manufacturing hub in Ohio, according to Bloomberg, which said the size of the potential stake is not clear.

White House spokesman Kush Desai said “discussion about hypothetical deals should be regarded as speculation unless officially announced by the administration.”

The article comes days after a meeting between Intel boss Lip-Bu Tan and US President Donald Trump, who had earlier accused Mr Tan of being “highly conflicted” due to his earlier ties to China.

The BBC has contacted Intel for comment.

According to Bloomberg, the firm’s spokesperson declined to comment on the discussions and said that Intel is “deeply committed to supporting President Trump’s efforts to strengthen US technology and manufacturing leadership”.

The details of the stake and price are still being discussed, the report said.

The reported move would be a “lifeline” for Intel, offering the company funding and government support, said tech analyst David Nicholson from The Futurum Group, a market research firm.

The storied chipmaker has struggled in recent years after falling behind in the AI race, with rival Nvidia leaping ahead. Intel’s stock market value has more than halved to $104 billion (£77bn) since 2020.

The deal would signal a deeper “intertwining” of the government and private businesses in the US, following a trend seen elsewhere in places like China, Mr Nicholson told the BBC.

This week, chip giants Nvidia and AMD agreed to pay the US government 15% of Chinese revenues, in another instance of the Trump administration’s direct intervention in private enterprise.

“Some folks will think that this is unfair that Intel is being propped up, but most will agree that it is strategically vital for the US,” said Mr Nicholson.

Intel is among only a few American chip manufacturers capable of producing high-end semiconductors at scale.

Its planned Ohio factory, which is reported to be a key part of talks with Washington, had been touted as a key part of the company’s future.

The firm had a goal to make the factory the world’s largest chip manufacturing facility, but its development has since faced numerous delays.

Though it is uncommon for the US government to directly support a single company, backing Intel could be a “special case” because the stakes are high for America’s chipmaking edge, said tech analyst Austin Lyons.

Intel is the US’ best shot at competing with global rivals like TSMC and Samsung, and the Ohio plant would ensure that the country is able to make high-end semiconductors at home, he explained.

Washington is unlikely to seek a majority stake, but just enough to ensure it has influence over the nation’s primary chipmaking company, said Raymond Woo from Kyoto University Innovation Capital, the school’s investment arm.

Backing Intel in the interest of national security is risky as the company has fallen behind many rivals, he said.

Mr Woo said the government could also consider backing other US semiconductor players including smaller-scale ones, or to provide them with other incentives.

Mr Tan, an American venture capitalist who took over as Intel’s chief executive in March, has focused on getting the firm’s finances in check and catching up in the booming AI chip industry.

In a social media post last week, Trump called for Mr Tan’s resignation, apparently referring to his alleged investments in companies that the US says are tied to the Chinese military.

The European Union has sent two firefighting planes to Spain to help battle raging wildfires, after the country activated the bloc’s disaster assistance mechanism for the first time.

The assistance comes as the country recorded a third wildfire-related death on Thursday morning.

There are concerns the wildfires could continue to spread. Spain’s state weather agency Aemet forecasts that a heatwave will continue until Monday, with temperatures of up to 44C in some areas, as well as moderate winds.

Spain is the fifth European nation to request assistance with fighting wildfires. In Greece, 25,000 acres of land have burned since Tuesday.

Two French Canadair water bomber aircraft arrived in Spain’s north-western Galicia region on Thursday.

“The fight against fires knows no borders,” government representative in the region Pedro Blanco said. “French resources are now in Spain to intensify efforts to extinguish forest fires.”

Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told local media on Wednesday that the two planes were not yet needed, but that the government wanted them in Spain so they could be put to use when necessary.

He told broadcaster Cadena SER that he had not ruled out requesting more firefighters.

A volunteer firefighter died in hospital in the north-western region of León on Thursday, after suffering severe burns.

He became the second volunteer to die as a result of a fire in the region and the third person to die in total. Another man died near the capital, Madrid, last Tuesday.

“We are struck once again by the death of a second volunteer who has lost their life in León,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Thursday. “All our love and support go out to their family and friends during this unbearable time.”

Spain’s Civil Guard said it had arrested two men on suspicion of starting fires in Castille and León that had spread across thousands of hectares – taking the number of arson arrests to 10 since the start of June.

While weather conditions are currently favourable for wildfires, they can be sparked by barbecues, cigarette stubs or discarded bottles. Causing a wildfire is a criminal offence in Spain, even if unintentional.

Thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes across the country, with 700 told to leave their towns in the south-western province of Caceres on Wednesday.

In neighbouring Portugal, more than 1,900 firefighters have been deployed to tackle four major blazes, with one in the central city of Trancoso already burning an estimated 14,000 hectares since Saturday, AFP news agency reported.

The government also extended a state of alert issued last week for the entire mainland to Sunday.

Wildfires are a common occurrence across southern Europe in the summer, but their severity can often be exacerbated by heatwave conditions.

EU data shows that around 629,000 hectares (1.6 million acres) of land has burnt across the bloc since the beginning of the year, with wildfires in Spain comprising around a quarter of that total.

While linking climate change with individual extreme weather events can be difficult, scientists say that climate change is generally making heatwaves hotter, longer and more frequent.

Prolonged hot conditions can dry out the ground and vegetation, making it easier for wildfires to spread rapidly.

Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Albania have also activated the EU’s civil protection mechanism, which allows any country hit by a disaster – both in Europe and beyond – to request emergency assistance.

In Greece, wildfires have been burning for a third consecutive day, with the most dangerous fronts on the island of Chios and in the Achaia region of the Peloponnese.

So far, 95 people – including both firefighters and civilians – have been injured.

EU data shows that more than 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) have burned across the country since Tuesday morning.

Authorities have issued a red alert for Thursday, warning of very high fire risk in Attica, eastern Central Greece, Evia, the north-eastern Peloponnese, and Thrace.

In Chios, the fire’s front stretched for dozens of kilometres, and with limited resources available, many residents have had to be evacuated by sea using coastguard and private vessels.

Authorities said three men had been arrested for a fire near the port city of Patras, which began earlier this week and pockets of whcih continue to burn.

Fires have also raged in Albania and Turkey, with several firefighters injured while tackling the blazes.

Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said plans to build more than 3,000 homes in a controversial settlement project in the occupied West Bank will “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.

The so-called E1 project between Jerusalem and the Maale Adumim settlement has been frozen for decades amid fierce opposition internationally. Building there would effectively cut off the West Bank from occupied East Jerusalem.

Smotrich said it would thwart the idea of a Palestinian state “because there is nothing to recognise and no one to recognise”.

Settlements are considered illegal under international law and form one of the most contentious issues between Israel and the Palestinians.

• Jeremy Bowen: Israeli settlers intensify campaign to drive out West Bank Palestinians
• The unseen map that promised to bring peace to the Middle East

About 700,000 settlers live in approximately 160 settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now. It is land Palestinians seek for a future independent state.

“After decades of international pressure and freezes, we are breaking conventions and connecting Maale Adumim to Jerusalem,” Smotrich said.

“This is Zionism at its best – building, settling and strengthening our sovereignty in the Land of Israel.”

It follows declarations in recent days by a growing number of countries of their intention to recognise a Palestinian state in coming months, which Israel has denounced.

Announcing the plan at a news conference with settler organisation Yesha Council Chairman Israel Ganz and Maale Adumim Mayor Guy Yifrach, Smotrich said the land had been given to the Jews by God.

When asked by the BBC what message the plans sent to the likes of the UK and France, which plan to recognise a State of Palestine later this year, he said: “It’s not going to happen. There will be no state to recognise.”

In response to the move, the US State Department said “a stable West Bank keeps Israel secure and is in line with this administration’s goal to achieve peace in the region.”

But the UN and the EU urged Israel not to progress the plan.

The “EU rejects any territorial change that is not part of a political agreement between involved parties,” a spokesman said.

UK Foreign Minister David Lammy said the proposal must be stopped.

“The UK strongly opposes the Israeli government’s E1 settlement plans, which would divide a future Palestinian state in two and mark a flagrant breach of international law,” he said.

Germany said it “strongly rejects” the plan and urged Israel to “stop settlement construction” in the occupied West Bank, according to the AFP news agency.

Turkey’s foreign ministry also condemned the decision, saying it “disregards international law” and targets the “territorial integrity” of the state of Palestine.

Israeli NGO Peace Now said: “The Netanyahu government is exploiting every minute to deepen the annexation of the West Bank and prevent the possibility of a two-state solution.

“It is clear to everyone today that the only solution to the conflict, and the only way to defeat Hamas, is through the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

“The Government of Israel is condemning us to continued bloodshed, instead of working to end it.”

The Palestinian foreign ministry called the new settlement plan “an extension of crimes of genocide, displacement and annexation”.

Israel has long rejected such accusations, but leading Israeli human rights organisations have argued that the country’s conduct in the war in Gaza constitutes genocide against the Palestinian population.

Smotrich, together with national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, was sanctioned by the UK in June over “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian communities” in the occupied West Bank.

The construction of 3,401 housing units in the E1 area has been frozen for 20 years. Developing the area has long been seen as effectively blocking the establishment of a Palestinian state, because of its strategic position separating areas south of Jerusalem from those to its north, preventing a contiguous Palestinian urban area connecting Ramallah, East Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel’s pressure on West Bank Palestinians has increased sharply, justified as legitimate security measures.

The vast majority of the international community considers the settlements illegal under international law – a position supported by an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last year.

“Putin is supposed to be in jail, and he just comes to Alaska like that.”

Hanna Correa is amongst a sea of Alaskans waving Ukrainian flags on road leading into the capital city, Anchorage.

“When I entered through that parking lot, and I see a lot of Americans, they’re supporting, it made me cry,” she says.

Ms Correa, 40, left Ukraine in 2019 for love, and six years later, the future of her country could be decided in her adopted home town.

US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are set to touch down at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, a 30 minute drive away. Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky is not invited, something Ms Correa says is “pretty sad”.

Among those protesting their arrival is Christopher Kelliher, a 53-year-old military veteran and Alaskan native.

“It’s gross, it makes you want to take a shower,” he says of the meeting.

“Putin doesn’t need to be in our state, much less our country. We have an idiot in the White House that will kowtow to this guy.”

• Follow live coverage of the meeting here
• Left out of Alaska talks, exhausted Ukrainians fear an unjust peace

This region’s history with Moscow gives Friday’s summit added significance. The US purchased Alaska from the Russians in 1867 for $7.2m (£1.48m).

Critics called the purchase ‘Seward’s Folly’, arguing the land amounted to a frozen wasteland. But later discoveries of rare earth minerals and abundant oil and gas put paid to that label.

Ornate churches are among the most visible symbols of Alaska’s Russian heritage. The St Tikhon Orthodox Church in Anchorage has been holding three days of prayer ahead of leaders’ arrival.

Priest Nicholas Cragle, an American who recently moved to Alaska after living in Russia for seven years, says the conflict is “particularly painful and close to the hearts” of parishioners.

“We’re hoping that this meeting will lead to something… lead to a culmination of this conflict,” says Mr Cragle.

That feeling is shared by fishermen ankle-deep in creek bed on the outskirts of town, drawn to the area by the allure of some of the world’s finest salmon.

“I think it’s a good idea [the summit], I wish Zelensky would be out here too… get this thing over with,” says Don Cressley, who lives in the Alaskan city of North Pole and is visiting on a fishing trip with his grandson.

He wants an end to the war “because of the destruction they’re doing to all the cities, all the buildings, making everybody more homeless, taking their foods away, their supplies away, their living right away,”.

Donald Trump, he says, is doing an “awesome job” in ceasefire negotiations.

While the US president often talks warmly of his relationship with Vladimir Putin, superpower tensions persist and are more keenly felt here.

Moscow’s military planes are routinely detected flying near the coast of Alaska. And in January, Canadian and American fighter jets were scrambled after multiple Russian jets were spotted in the Arctic, according to the North American Aerospace Defence Command.

That breeds a sense of unease for some Alaskans who live closer to Russia than Washington DC.

“Although the Cold War is over between Russia and the US, they’re constantly patrolling our airways,” Anchorage resident Russell Wilson tells me while fishing.

“If the president doesn’t put the hammer down, we could be the next Ukraine.”

However other Alaskans consider a return to Cold War hostilities are far-fetched fantasy.

I ask Army veteran Christopher Kelliher if he is concerned about a Russian invasion. “Not really, everybody in Alaska owns a gun,” he replies.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister and by far the dominant force in its politics, has not budged from what he believes is the essential truth about the war in Gaza.

He has given Israel – and the outside world – a consistent message since Hamas attacked Israel almost two years ago. He stated it clearly when he ordered the first big ground offensive of the war into the Gaza Strip on 28 October 2023, three weeks after the attacks, and since then he has repeated the themes many times.

“We will fight to defend our homeland. We will fight and not retreat. We will fight on land, at sea and in the air. We will destroy the enemy above ground and below ground. We will fight and we will win.

“This will be a victory of good over evil, of light over darkness, of life over death. In this war we will stand steadfast, more united than ever, certain in the justice of our cause.”

His speech adopted the cadences of Winston Churchill’s rallying call in June 1940 of “we shall fight on the beaches,” after Britain’s defeat by Germany in northern France and the evacuation of more than 338,000 allied soldiers from Dunkirk.

Before Churchill told the British in his celebrated peroration that “we shall never surrender,” he had not spared them from the truth that they had suffered a “colossal military disaster”.

Hamas inflicted Israel’s worst defeat in a single day on 7 October, and the horror that it could break open the borders, and kill and take so many hostages, is still very real in Israel. It is a big factor shaping attitudes to the war, the way it is being fought, and how it might end.

Very few Israelis have ever doubted that their cause is just, but Netanyahu’s statement that they would be “more united than ever” could not have been further from the condition of Israel almost two years later.

Israel is as divided now as at any time in its history, and Netanyahu, a deeply divisive figure when Hamas attacked, is presiding over fault lines in Israel that have opened into chasms.

On the edge of the anti-Netanyahu demonstration in Tel Aviv, several hundred Israelis stood silently, each holding a placard with the name of a Palestinian child killed by Israel in Gaza.

Many of the signs had a photograph of a smiling girl or boy, next to the day they were born and the day they were killed. Children who did not have a photo were represented by a drawing of a flower.

The silent demonstrations to stop the killing are getting bigger – some are held outside airbases, where they try to catch the eye of pilots arriving for bombing raids into Gaza – but the demonstrators still hold a minority view.

Timina Peretz, one of the organisers, says they started after Israel broke the last ceasefire with Hamas on 18 March and went back to war.

“We realised how many children died just in the same week. I refuse to stay silent while it’s happening, a genocide and starvation of people…

“On the street, we’re getting a lot of good reactions, like people saying, ‘thank you’. And we have many people cursing us and [getting] really offended and upset from these images.”

I asked if they get called traitors. “Of course, they do a lot of them, they say that if we think the way we think, or we act the way we act, we should just go… to live in Gaza.

“They can’t understand how the basic idea of criticising the state is something that is rooted in democracy.”

Opinion polls taken since the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) went back to war in Gaza in March, breaking the last ceasefire, suggest that a large majority of Jewish Israelis are not troubled by Palestinian suffering in Gaza.

A sample recorded in the last three days of July by the Israeli Democracy Institute says that 78% of Jewish Israelis, who make up four-fifths of the population, believe that given the restrictions of the fighting, Israel “is making substantial efforts to avoid causing unnecessary suffering to Palestinians in Gaza”.

The pollsters also chose a more personal question, asking whether individuals were “troubled or not troubled by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza?”

Some 79% of Jewish Israelis surveyed said they were not troubled. Meanwhile 86% of those in Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority who were asked the same question said they were very or somewhat troubled.

Netanyahu, his ministers and spokespeople insist that Hamas, the United Nations, witnesses, aid workers and foreign governments are telling lies about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

In a news conference conducted in English for the international media on 10 August, Netanyahu condemned reports of starvation in Gaza. He wanted “to puncture the lies… the only ones that are being starved in Gaza are our hostages”.

He has, for many years, equated criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Accounts of hunger, and IDF soldiers killing Palestinians struggling to find food that have been believed and condemned by Israel’s allies, including Britain, France and Germany, should he said be viewed in the context of the long history of the persecution of Jews in Europe.

“We were said to be spreading vermin to Christian society, we were said to be poisoning the wells, we were said to slaughter Christian children for their blood.

“And as these lies spread around the globe, they were followed by horrific, horrific massacres, pogroms, displacements, finally culminating the worst massacre of them all – the Holocaust.

“Today the Jewish state is being maligned in a similar way.”

Ms Peretz blames the Israeli media for not showing the suffering and deaths of Palestinians.

That subject went closer to the heart of the national conversation when it was raised on a popular Saturday evening television talk show hosted by Eyal Berkovic, the former West Ham United football player.

One of the regular guests was an Israeli journalist called Emmanuelle Elbaz-Phelps. They had been discussing, as they had previously, the suffering of the hostages and their families, and Israeli soldiers who had been killed fighting in Gaza.

Then, she told me, she felt it was her duty as a journalist to mention something that was not often spoken about on Israeli TV.

“I just [said] that the war is also killing a lot of Palestinians in Gaza, which is a very simple statement, no political point of view. There was no patience to listen to it.”

Voices were raised. Eyal Berkovic has made a name for himself as a TV host by not holding back.

Ms Elbaz-Phelps, who also works as a correspondent for French TV, recalled his response. “He said, I do not have to worry about the people in Gaza, they are my enemies. To which I responded, you can let me say that I worry about the horrific images coming out of there.

“And he said, for sure, you can finish your point. This is very representative of the Israeli public opinion.”

She defended the work of Israeli journalists. “I think 95% of what the world knows about Israel’s government and decisions is brought by the Israeli journalists,” she argues.

“But I think there is a huge difference when you talk about something and when you show something, and you will see images of Gaza from above that mainly are going to show the people how IDF is winning the war on the ground.

“You don’t have human stories, you don’t have faces… because Israelis are in pain, and the stories also are happening inside of Israel.”

Ms Elbaz-Phelps believes the reason is that Israelis are still dealing with their trauma, after 7 October.

“The word outside is covering Gaza and talking about the suffering of the population in Gaza. Which is right, but there is not, I think, acknowledgement of how much the Israeli people is living in a trauma.

“We are not in a post-traumatic area. We are in a trauma time. Hostages are dying inside the tunnels of Hamas. [People are] begging the government to find a way and make a hostage deal.

“Only when the hostages will come home, then maybe the healing can start. The pain of the Israeli public, how much they’re still on 7 October, is something that is not completely grasped outside of Israel.”

Around 20 Israeli hostages are still believed to be alive in Gaza. Israelis of all political persuasions were horrified by recent videos posted by their captors showing two badly emaciated young men in tunnels under Gaza.

Their fate is front and centre of the attitudes of most Israelis to the war.

I met the pollster Dahlia Scheindlin, who has often criticised Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in her column in the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz, in “hostage square” next to Israel’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv.

Since October 2023, this has been the centre of the hostage families’ campaign to get their people out of Gaza.

“The reason why the majority of Israelis consistently support ending the war is to get the hostages back,” she says.

Speaking about the lack of concern in Israel for the people in Gaza, she tells me: “It’s because a large portion of Israelis believe that the suffering has been exaggerated or even partly fabricated by Hamas.”

Israelis, she continues, are inclined to believe that the problem is the messaging. “Israelis have been obsessed with PR for a long time. They call it Hasbara.

“That inclination to blame criticism of Israel on poor public communications has gone into overdrive during the war, and [is] on steroids [in] relation to the accusations of starvation.

“The far-right wing calls it the campaign of fabrication. They think [even the way] the Israeli media is starting to cover it is amplifying Hamas’ narrative.

“But I think mainstream Israelis are sort of suppressing it because it’s too hard for them to cope with. This is the kind of thing you hear people say in private conversation.

“They are too consumed with the hostages or their own family members who are fighting in Gaza, and they just can’t handle the sense that Israel might be doing something wrong.”

Outside the secular Israeli mainstream of Tel Aviv and the cities on the Mediterranean coast, I have found few doubts about the justice of Israel’s conduct of the war.

Deep in the occupied West Bank, down a dirt road, is a Jewish settlement called Esh Kodesh, which is part of a complex of small settlements. Just a generation ago these were a collection of caravans on hilltops, but they are now well established.

Aaron Katzoff, a father of seven who is originally from Los Angeles, has created a winery and a bar called “Settlers,” which feels like a small piece of the American west. He labels his wine “liquid prophecy”.

It is a social centre, not just for his community but for an overwhelmingly right-wing and religiously-observant clientele who make special journeys there.

Many of the customers were armed when I visited. A soldier with a dusty uniform sat eating a burger and drinking red wine with his M-16 cradled on his lap. Others had left their assault weapons behind the bar. A woman had a 9mm pistol in a holster strapped on over her flowery dress. The young men at the corner table were, Aaron said, decompressing after a stint in Gaza.

Aaron still does reserve duty as an IDF officer and has fought in Gaza. He has no doubts about the justice of Israel’s actions.

“Come down to a tunnel in Gaza,” he told me. “See what it means not to have oxygen and in the humidity and heat try to fight terrorists that are hiding behind women and children and shoot at you…

“It’s very easy to sit in an air conditioning room and judge people who do that, war is not easy.”

What, I asked him, about ending the war now, as so many Israelis want.

“Sometimes you can’t always get there now… You want everything to be Wonderland… but the world’s not like that.

“Things take time, and it’s sad, but that’s reality.”

In the months leading up to 7 October 2023, thousands of Israelis had been demonstrating in the streets against plans to change the judicial system in what they saw as an assault on democracy.

“This has been an unpopular government since well before the war,” argues Ms Scheindlin.

“Once the war began, by contrast to most other countries where you see a rallying of support for the government, there was a complete collapse of support.”

Enough of Netanyahu’s political base on Israel’s right wing accepts his insistence that the war cannot end until total victory over Hamas, for him to have rebuilt his poll ratings from rock bottom. But he is still trailing opposition parties.

They have pointed to evidence that they say shows he is prolonging the war to stay in office. As a private citizen he would face a national inquiry into the security failures that gave Hamas its opening on 7 October 2023.

His long running trial on corruption charges serious enough to carry a potential prison sentence would also accelerate from its current glacial pace.

Ultranationalists in his coalition, the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and the national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have threatened to topple his government if he makes any kind of deal with Hamas.

They want not just the defeat of Hamas, but the annexation of Gaza, the removal of Palestinians and their replacement by Jewish settlers.

The families of the hostages, meanwhile, have appealed to Netanyahu to do a deal with Hamas before the men still being held die.

But the prime minister, doubling down on his theme of a fight until total victory, announced a new offensive that has appalled many hostage families and been condemned by many of Israel’s allies.

Netanyahu’s plans were also opposed by the current leadership of the IDF. Its chief of staff General Eyal Zamir made it known that he opposes the Netanyahu plan for a new offensive in Gaza, reportedly telling the cabinet that it would endanger the hostages and worsen the humanitarian crisis.

Zamir was appointed in March when his predecessor resigned after falling out with the prime minister over the conduct of the war.

Now the Israeli media is speculating that Netanyahu will force Zamir to resign. One report says Zamir is convinced he’s been “marked for dismissal” for challenging Netanyahu’s plan.

The war has also widened Israel’s most bitter division, between the secular population and the religious right. Shuttling between demonstrations by secular Israelis in Tel Aviv and their religious fellow citizens in Jerusalem can feel like commuting between two different countries.

War is always painful. But for some in Israel’s hardline religious nationalist right wing, it is also an opportunity, even a time of miracles that heralds the coming of the messiah.

Orit Strock, a minister from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, said last summer that the war had turned events in their direction. “From my point of view, this is like a miracle period,” she said.

Some see an opening granted by God to transform Israel into a state ruled by the Torah, the law of God as revealed to Moses and laid out in the five books of the Hebrew scriptures.

War also can speed up their desire to change the map. They believe God gave all the land between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan to the Jews.

No space can be allowed for the shrinking number of Palestinians who still believe it might be possible to make peace with Israel by creating an independent state in Gaza and the West Bank, with a capital in east Jerusalem.

Smotrich has said the Jewish state should be on both sides of the river Jordan, taking in Jordan and stretching up to Damascus, the Syrian capital.

Extending religious law is not government policy, nor is expanding Israel’s borders across the River Jordan. But blocking a Palestinian state is a cornerstone of the Netanyahu coalition.

And the coalition can only stay in government as long as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir agree to support it. That gives them a disproportionate influence over the prime minister.

On 6 May Smotrich laid out his vision for Gaza and the West Bank, which Palestinians want for a state. Most western governments, including the United Kingdom, see Palestinian statehood alongside Israel as the only way to escape a conflict that has lasted more than a century for control of the land Arabs and Jews both want.

Instead, Smotrich said that within six months Gaza’s population would be confined to a narrow piece of land. The rest of the territory would be “totally destroyed” and “empty”.

Palestinians in Gaza would be “totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places”.

In the occupied old city of Jerusalem on Sunday 3 August, many Palestinians shut shops and businesses and stayed off the streets as Israeli Jews marked Tisha B’Av.

It is a day of mourning for the destruction by the Babylonians of Jerusalem’s first Jewish Temple and of its second one by the Romans.

The area where the Temples stood later became the third holiest place for Muslims, now dominated by al-Aqsa mosque where Muslims believe the prophet Muhammad ended his night journey from Mecca, and the golden rotunda of the Dome of the Rock where he ascended to heaven.

To try to keep the peace in an area that is a religious and national symbol for Israelis and Palestinians, a set of laws and customs, known as the status quo, is supposed to be observed.

One rule bans Jewish prayer within al-Aqsa compound, known by Palestinians as the Noble Sanctuary. It has been flouted in recent years with the encouragement of Ben-Gvir.

On Tisha B’Av he went there himself to lead prayers, an action that in the fragile and tense holy city was seen by some as a provocative political move.

Dozens of his followers – and heavily armed police that he commands as national security minister – followed as he strode through the narrow street of the Old City, through the gates of the place Israelis call the Temple Mount.

As well as praying, he made a speech linking his presence and prayers in Jerusalem to the war in Gaza and the way he wants to change Israel.

The videos of the two starving Israeli hostages were, he said, an attempt to put the state of Israel under pressure, which had to be resisted.

“From Temple Mount – the place where we proved that sovereignty and governance can be done – from here of all places we should send a message and make sure that today itself we conquer the whole of Gaza Strip, announce sovereignty of the whole of Gaza Strip, take down every Hamas man and encourage voluntary emigration.

“Only this way will we return the hostages and win the war.”

After Ben-Gvir had left, a big crowd of his young religious supporters stayed on to pray in a long, covered arcade.

The sound of their prayers echoed off the vaulted stone roof. Two young women, Ateret and Tamar, sad about the religious commemoration but seemingly excited by the future, explained why they believed the Temple Mount was the heart of Judaism.

Ateret said the destruction of the Temples meant, “it’s like having a body, but your heart is not there.

“We just want to say that we want our hostages back. We want everybody to have peace. This is the heart of the whole world, not only our hearts. When God will be here the world will have peace.”

They explained they prayed every day for the construction of a third Temple on the site. “This is our house for thousands of years, and now we’re back here, we want our house.”

When I asked what would happen to the Muslim holy places that stand there now, they said they didn’t know.

Ateret and Tamar seemed to be gentle souls, suffused with religious fervour.

According to senior diplomatic sources, the nightmare for security services in both Israel and its Arab neighbours is that a violent Jewish extremist might try to damage al-Aqsa mosque to bring on the third temple, an act that would risk igniting the region.

On the other end of the political spectrum is Avrum Burg, a writer and strong critic of Netanyahu, who used to be one of Israel’s most prominent centre-left politicians. He was speaker of the Knesset, the parliament, from 1999 to 2003 and before that he chaired the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organisation, two venerable Zionist institutions.

Today, he is among those who do not see the war as a miraculous chance to transform the country.

Israelis, Mr Burg reflects, are “somewhere between religious excitement and psychological despair”.

There is no middle ground, he argues. “A few Israelis, a majority of government, believe that we’re living in a miraculous time. It’s an opportunity. It’s God given. It is a once in a lifetime opening in order to realign, reorganise, re-something with history.

“And so many Israelis feel and sense – what for? What does that mean? Why do I have to pay the price? It’s a meaningless war. In between, there is no Israel. Israel is a fragmented, broken, torn apart social fabric.”

That psychological despair – and anger – at Israel’s government can be found at the regular demonstrations calling for Netanyahu’s resignation.

At one, on a hot and humid night in Tel Aviv, secular opponents of the government waved the blue and white Star of David flag, chanted and banged drums until they stood silent for the national anthem.

After, they listened to speeches from retired veteran commanders of the army and the police demanding a ceasefire.

Backstage, Nava Rosalio, the organiser of many mass rallies against the Netanyahu government, spelled out their position.

“We wish to replace Netanyahu’s government, but specifically to bring back all hostages in a deal at once, ending Netanyahu’s war in Gaza, which at this point has become completely political and serving nothing but his own political survival, of Netanyahu and his partners.”

I suggested some might accuse her of repeating the Hamas position. (For more than a year Hamas negotiators have offered to return all the hostages if the IDF pulled out of Gaza and the US and others guaranteed that the Israel would not go back to war once it had its people back. Israel, however, insists that Hamas must be fully disarmed, play no future role in Gaza and that Israel would retain security control in Gaza with the freedom to decide what comes next.)

But Ms Rosalio dismissed the suggestion that a ceasefire deal could be any kind of a win for Hamas. “That’s for propaganda. We have a great army… which can stay outside of the Gaza Strip and just protect the border.

“There is no reason to stay either, unless they imagine or wish to conquer Gaza and to transfer the people of Gaza.

“We just don’t believe the excuse of we’re protecting you, the people of Israel. If you wish to protect us, you would have ended this war to allow the people of Israel to rehabilitate, for society to recover.

“We are torn from inside.”

In the last three weeks I have travelled between the two sides of Israel, from leftists in Tel Aviv silently protesting the killing of Palestinian children, displaying the “psychological despair” described by Avrum Burg, the former speaker of parliament.

But on the other side of Israel, I have witnessed an overwhelming sense that Israel should ignore the mounting pressure and condemnation by some of its allies as well as its enemies, a feeling that its actions are justified by everything Hamas did on 7 October and the continued imprisonment of Israeli hostages in brutal conditions in tunnels.

Israel’s prime minister, still backed in public by US President Donald Trump despite murmurings that he is becoming exasperated by Netanyahu’s refusal to make a hostage deal possible, is planning another offensive and accuses Israel’s allies of deep seated antisemitism.

Messianic religious Zionists who support him believe God is with them and granting miracles.

Deep in the West Bank, overlooking the Jordan Valley, Aaron Katzoff and his friends in the Settlers wine bar believe they are fulfilling the prophecies of the scriptures, as they drink wine from grapes he says proudly were grown using the methods of Biblical times.

His relaxed and happy customers believe the secular liberals protesting against Netanyahu in Tel Aviv are yesterday’s Israelis. Now, the future of their state is in their hands, and in God’s – and they are confident it will all end well.

Japanese vlogger Hayato Kato’s 1.9 million followers are used to his funny clips about exploring China, where he has been living for several years.

But on 26 July he surprised them with a sombre one.

“I just watched a movie about the Nanjing Massacre,” he said, referring to the Japanese army’s six-week rampage through Nanjing in late 1937, which, by some estimates, killed more than 300,000 civilians and Chinese soldiers. Around 20,000 women were reportedly raped.

Dead To Rights, or Nanjing Photo Studio, is a star-studded tale about a group of civilians who hide from Japanese troops in a photo studio. Already a box office hit, it is the first of a wave of Chinese movies about the horrors of Japanese occupation that are being released to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two. But a sense of unfinished history – often amplified by Beijing – persists, fuelling both memory and anger.

Speaking in Chinese on Douyin, China’s domestic version of TikTok, Kato recounted scenes from the film: “People were lined up along the river and then the shootings began… A baby, the same age as my daughter, was crying in her mother’s arms. A Japanese soldier rushed forward, grabbed her, and smashed her into the ground.”

He said he had seen many people on the Japanese internet denying the Nanjing Massacre had happened, including public figures, even politicians. “If we deny it, this will happen again,” he continued, urging Japanese people to watch the movies and “Iearn about the dark side of their history”.

The video quickly became one of his most popular, with more than 670,000 likes in just two weeks.

But the comments are less positive. The top-liked one quotes what has already become an iconic line from the movie, uttered by a Chinese civilian to a Japanese soldier: “We are not friends. We never were.”

For China, Japan’s brutal military campaign and occupation are among the darkest chapters of its past – and the massacre in Nanjing, then the capital, an even deeper wound.

What has made it fester is the belief that Japan has never fully owned up to its atrocities in places it occupied – not just China, but also Korea, what was then Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia. One of the most painful points of contention involves “comfort women” – the approximately 200,000 women who were raped and forced to work in Japanese military brothels. To this day, the survivors are still fighting for an apology and compensation.

In his video, Kato seems to acknowledge that it’s not a subject of conversation in Japan: “Unfortunately these anti-Japanese war movies are not shown in Japan publicly, and Japanese people are not interested to watch them.”

When the Japanese Emperor announced on 15 August that he would surrender, his country had already paid a terrible cost – more than 100,000 had been killed in bombing raids on Tokyo, before two atom bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Japan’s defeat, however, was welcomed in large parts of Asia, where the Imperial Japanese Army had claimed millions of lives. For them, 15 August carries both freedom and lingering trauma – in Korea the day is called ‘gwangbokjeol’, which translates to the return of light.

“While the military war has ended, the history war continues,” says Professor Gi-Wook Shin, of Stanford University, explaining the two sides remember those years differently, and those differences add to the tension. While the Chinese see Japanese aggression as a defining, and devastating, moment in their past, Japanese history focuses on its own victimhood – the destruction caused by the atom bombs and post-war recovery.

“People I know in Japan don’t really talk about it,” says a Chinese man who has been living in Japan for 15 years, and wished to remain anonymous.

“They see it as something in the past, and the country doesn’t really commemorate it – because they also view themselves as victims.”

He calls himself a patriot, but he says that hasn’t made things difficult for him personally because their reluctance to talk about it means they “avoid such sensitive topics”.

“Some believe the Japanese army went to help China build a new order – with conflicts occurring in that process. Of course, there are also those who acknowledge that it was, in fact, an invasion.”

China fought Japan for eight years, from Manchuria in the north-east to Chongqing in the south-west. Estimates of the Chinese who died range from 10 to 20 million. The Japanese government says around 480,000 of its soldiers died in that time.

Those years have been well-documented in award-winning literature and films – they were also the subject of Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s work.

That period is now being revisited under a regime that holds patriotism as central to its ambitions: “national rejuvenation” is how Xi Jinping describes his Chinese dream. While the Party heavily censors its own history, from the Tiananmen Square massacre to more recent crackdowns, it encourages remembering a more distant past – with an outside enemy.

Xi even revised the date the war with Japan started – the Chinese government now counts the first incursions into Manchuria in 1931, which makes it a 14-year war, rather than eight years of full-fledged conflict.

Under him, Beijing has also been commemorating the end of World War Two on a bigger scale. On 3 September, the day Japan formally surrendered, there will be a major military parade in Tiananmen Square.

Also in September, a highly-anticipated new release will focus on the notorious Unit 731, a branch of the Japanese Army that conducted lethal human experiments in occupied Manchuria. The date of release – 18 September – is the day Japan attempted its first invasion of Manchuria.

That is apart from Dongji Rescue, a film inspired by the real-life efforts of Chinese fishermen who saved hundreds of British prisoners of war during Japanese raids; and Mountains and Rivers Bearing Witness, a documentary from a state-owned studio about Chinese resistance.

And they seem to be striking a nerve.

“That one generation fought a war on behalf of three, and endured suffering for three. Salute to the martyrs,” a popular RedNote post on Nanjing Photo Studio reads.

“We are not friends…”, the now-famous line from the movie, “is not just a line” between the two main characters, says a popular review that has been liked by more than 10,000 users on Weibo.

It is “also from millions of ordinary Chinese people to Japan. They’ve never issued a sincere apology, they are still worshipping [the war criminals], they are rewriting history – no-one will treat them as friends”, the comment says, referring to some Japanese right-wing figures’ dismissive remarks.

Tokyo has issued apologies, but many Chinese people believe they are not profuse enough.

“Japan keeps sending a conflicting message,” Prof Shin says, referring to instances where leaders have contradicted each other in their statements on Japan’s wartime history.

For years, in Chinese history classes, students have been shown a photo of former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling before a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970. The Chinese expect a similar gesture from Japan.

This wasn’t always the case, though.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, the turbulence in China did not end. For the next three years, the Nationalist Kuomintang – then the ruling government and the main source of Chinese resistance against Japan – fought a civil war against Mao Zedong’s Communist Party forces.

That war ended with Mao’s victory and the Kuomintang’s retreat to Taiwan. Mao, whose priority was to build a communist nation, avoided focusing on Japanese war crimes. Commemorations celebrated the Party’s victory and criticised the Kuomintang. He also needed Japan’s support on the international stage. Tokyo, in fact, was one of the first major powers to recognise his regime.

It wasn’t until the 1980s – after Mao’s death – that the Japanese occupation returned to haunt the relationship between Beijing and Tokyo. By then, Japan was a wealthy Western ally with a booming economy. Revisions to Japanese textbooks began to spark controversy, with China and South Korea accusing Japan of whitewashing its wartime atrocities. China had just begun to open up, and South Korea was in transition from military rule to democracy.

As Chinese leaders moved away from Mao – and his destructive legacy – the trauma of what happened under Japanese attack became a unifying narrative for the Communist Party, says Yinan He, associate professor of international relations at Lehigh University in the US.

“After the Cultural Revolution, Chinese people for the large part were disillusioned by communism,” she told the BBC. “Since communism lost its appeal, you need nationalism. And Japan is [an] easy target because that’s the most recent external [aggressor].”

She describes a “choreographed representation of the past”, where commemorations of 1945 often downplay the contributions of the US and the Kuomintang, and are accompanied by growing scrutiny of Japan’s official stance on its wartime actions.

What hasn’t helped is the denial of war crimes – prominent right-wing Japanese don’t accept the Nanjing massacre ever happened, or that Japanese soldiers forced so many women into sexual slavery – and recent visits by officials to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honours Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals.

This hostility between China and Japan has spilled over into everyday lives as nationalism online peaks – Chinese and Japanese people have been attacked in each other’s countries. A Japanese schoolboy was killed in Shenzhen last year.

China’s economic rise and assertiveness in the region and beyond has changed the dynamic between the two countries again. It has surpassed Japan as a global power. The best time to seek closure – the 1970s, when the countries were closer – has passed, Prof He says.

“They simply said, let’s forget about that, let’s set that aside. They’ve never dealt with the history – and now the problem has come back to haunt them again.”

First Lady Melania Trump has threatened to sue Hunter Biden for more than $1bn after he said she was introduced to her husband by sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Lawyers acting on behalf of the first lady, who married President Donald Trump in 2005, described his claim as “false, disparaging, defamatory and inflammatory”.

Biden, son of former US President Joe Biden, made the comments during an interview this month. He defended them on Thursday and did not seem willing to back down in the face of the lawsuit threat.

Donald Trump was a friend of Epstein, but has said they fell out in the early 2000s because the financier poached employees from the spa in Trump’s Florida golf club.

A letter from the first lady’s lawyers and addressed to an attorney for Hunter Biden demands he retract the claim and apologise, or face legal action for “over $1bn in damages”.

It says the first lady has suffered “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” because of the claim he repeated.

It also accuses the youngest Biden son of having a “vast history of trading on the names of others”, and repeating the claim “to draw attention to yourself”.

During a wide-ranging interview with filmmaker Andrew Callaghan published earlier this month, Hunter Biden claimed unreleased documents relating to Epstein would “implicate” President Trump.

He said: “Epstein introduced Melania to Trump – the connections are so wide and deep.” The first lady’s legal letter notes the claim was partially attributed to Michael Wolff, a journalist who authored a critical biography of the president.

In a recent interview with US outlet the Daily Beast, Wolff reportedly claimed that the first lady was known to an associate of Epstein and Trump when she met her now-husband.

The outlet later retracted the story after receiving a letter from the first lady’s attorney that challenged the contents and framing of the story.

When asked during an interview on the YouTube show Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan if he would apologise, Biden said “not going to happen”.

Biden said in the interview posted on Thursday that he did not think “these threats of a lawsuit add up to anything other than a designed distraction”. But he noted that if the lawsuit was filed, he would be able to collect testimony from both Trumps through depositions and he was “more than happy to provide them the platform”.

There is no evidence the Trumps were introduced to each other by Epstein, who took his own life in prison while awaiting trial in 2019.

In the first lady’s legal letter, Hunter Biden is accused of relying on a since-removed article as the basis of his claims, which it describes as “false and defamatory”.

A message on the archived version of the Daily Beast online story reads: “After this story was published, The Beast received a letter from First Lady Melania Trump’s attorney challenging the headline and framing of the article.

“After reviewing the matter, the Beast has taken down the article and apologizes for any confusion or misunderstanding.”

Asked about the legal threat, the first lady’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, referred BBC News to a statement issued by her aide, Nick Clemens.

It read: “First Lady Melania Trump’s attorneys are actively ensuring immediate retractions and apologies by those who spread malicious, defamatory falsehoods.”

A January 2016 profile by Harper’s Bazaar reported the first lady met her husband in November 1998, at a party hosted by the founder of a modelling agency.

Melania Trump, 55, told the publication she declined to give him her phone number because he was “with a date”.

The profile said Trump had recently separated from his second wife, Marla Maples, whom he divorced in 1999. He was previously married to Ivana Trump between 1977 and 1990.

The BBC has contacted Hunter Biden’s attorney.

The legal letter comes after weeks of pressure on the White House to release the so-called Epstein files, previously undisclosed documents relating to the criminal investigation against the convicted paedophile.

Before being re-elected, Trump said he would release the records if he returned to office, but the FBI and justice department said in July that no “incriminating” client list of Epstein associates existed.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

The number of data centres in the UK is set to increase by almost a fifth, according to figures shared with BBC News.

Data centres are giant warehouses full of powerful computers used to run digital services from movie streaming to online banking – there are currently an estimated 477 of them in the UK.

Construction researchers Barbour ABI have analysed planning documents and say that number is set to jump by almost 100, as the growth in artificial intelligence (AI) increases the need for processing power.

The majority are due to be built in the next five years.

However, there are concerns about the huge amount of energy and water the new data centres will consume.

Some experts have warned it could drive up prices paid by consumers.

More than half of the new data centres would be in London and neighbouring counties.

Many are privately funded by US tech giants such as Google and Microsoft and major investment firms.

A further nine are planned in Wales, one in Scotland, five in Greater Manchester and a handful in other parts of the UK, the data shows.

While the new data centres are mostly due for completion by 2030, the biggest single one planned would come later – a £10bn AI data centre in Blyth, near Newcastle, for the American private investment and wealth management company Blackstone Group.

It would involve building 10 giant buildings covering 540,000 square metres – the size of several large shopping centres – on the site of the former Blyth Power Station.

Work is set to begin in 2031 and last for more than three years.

Microsoft is planning four new data centres in the UK at a total cost of £330m, with an estimated completion between 2027 and 2029 – two in the Leeds area, one near Newport in Wales, and a five-storey site in Acton, north-west London.

And Google is building two data centres, totalling £450m, spread over 400,000 sq m in north-east London in the Lee Valley water system.

By some analyses, the UK is already the third-largest nation for data centres behind the US and Germany.

The government has made clear it believes data centres are central to the UK’s economic future – designating them critical national infrastructure.

But there are concerns about their impact, including the potential knock-on effect on people’s energy bills.

It is not known what the energy consumption of the new centres will be as this data is not included in the planning applications, but US data suggests they are can be considerably more powerful than older ones.

Dr Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate lead at machine learning firm Hugging Face, explains that in the US “average citizens in places like Ohio are seeing their monthly bills go up by $20 (£15) because of data centres”.

She said the timeline for the new data centres in the UK was “aggressive” and called for “mechanisms for companies to pay the price for extra energy to power data centres – not consumers”.

According to the National Energy System Operator, NESO, the projected growth of data centres in Great Britain could “add up to 71 TWh of electricity demand” in the next 25 years, which it says redoubles the need for clean power – such as offshore wind.

There are also growing concerns about the environmental impact of these enormous buildings.

Many existing data centre plants require large quantities of water to prevent them from overheating – and most current owners do not share data about their water consumption.

Stephen Hone, chief executive of industry body the Data Centre Alliance, says “ensuring there is enough water and electricity powering data centres isn’t something the industry can solve on its own”.

But he insisted “data centres are fixated with becoming as sustainable as possible”, such as through dry-cooling methods.

Such promises of future solutions have failed to appease some.

In Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, residents are objecting to the construction of a £3.8bn cloud and AI centre on greenbelt land, describing the area as the “lungs” of their home.

And in Dublin there is currently a moratorium on the building of any new data centres because of the strain existing ones have placed on Ireland’s national electricity provider.

In 2023 they accounted for one fifth of the country’s energy demand.

Last month, Anglian Water objected to plans for a 435-acre data centre site in North Lincolnshire. The developer says it aims to deploy “closed loop” cooling systems which would not place a strain on the water supply.

The planning documents suggest that 28 of the new data centres would be likely to be serviced by troubled Thames Water, including 14 more in Slough, which has already been described as having Europe’s largest cluster of the buildings.

The BBC understands Thames Water was talking to the government earlier this year about the challenge of water demand in relation to data centres and how it can be mitigated.

Water UK, the trade body for all water firms, said it “desperately” wants to supply the centres but “planning hurdles” need to be cleared more quickly.

Ten new reservoirs are being built in Lincolnshire, the West Midlands and south-east England.

A spokesperson for the UK government said data centres were “essential” and an AI Energy Council had been established to make sure supply can meet demand, alongside £104bn in water infrastructure investment.

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California’s Democratic governor has unveiled a high-stakes plan to redraw voting lines in America’s most populous state, in order to counter similar efforts by Republicans in Texas.

Gavin Newsom called for a special election to be held in November, in which voters would be asked to approve lawmakers redrawing congressional districts before national midterms in 2026.

He billed the move as an emergency measure in response to a Donald Trump-backed plan in Texas, which could see the Republicans pick up five more seats in the finely-balanced House.

It is the latest development in a gerrymandering fight that runs the risk of setting off a political arms race for control of the US Congress.

The governor – whose term in office ends next year and is rumoured to have presidential ambitions – said it would neutralise an attempt by Trump and other Republicans to “rig the system”.

“We’re working through a very transparent, temporary and public process,” Newsom said.

“We’re putting the maps on the ballot and we’re giving the power to the people.”

He continued: “We have got to recognise the cards that we have been dealt and we have got to meet fire with fire.”

Newsom’s proposal would see California retain its current congressional maps if Texas and other states pulled out of any changes.

The tit-for-tat move seeks to cancel out projected gains by Republicans in Texas if the state approves a redistricting effort sought by Trump and the state’s governor Greg Abbott.

Republicans in Texas have so far been blocked from approving new maps, as Democratic lawmakers have physically left the state, denying its legislative body the two-thirds attendance it needs to proceed with a vote.

Abbott has threatened to arrest the Democrats, who are staying in Illinois, and said he would call continuous special sessions of the state’s legislature until the proposal passes.

Like other states, California typically redraws congressional districts once a decade when new population data is released by the US Census. California convenes a commission of independent citizens to do so.

The proposal in Texas to make changes mid-decade has triggered a nationwide political row, as the changes could give Republicans an easier path to keep control of the US House of Representatives and prevent challenges from Democrats that they’d face under current political maps. If Democrats gain control of the House, it could block much of Trump’s legislative agenda.

Gerrymandering – the redrawing of electoral boundaries to favour a political party – has been carried out by both Democrats and Republicans across the US for decades, and is legal as long as it does not amount to racial discrimination, the Supreme Court has ruled.

Trump has said Texas is “entitled” to redraw maps and called on the FBI to put pressure on the state’s Democrats to return home, paving the way for a vote.

Some are expected to return to the state as early as this weekend, saying they feel their cross-country relocation has helped generate more attention on the issue nationally.

According to US media, some made the decision to return after seeing California’s plans to counter Texas’s new maps.

Democrats in California – which elected 43 Democrats and nine Republicans at the last election – have not published a detailed new map, or indicated exactly how many extra seats they would envision winning under the changes. The newly redrawn political boundaries would be released in a map in the coming days, the governor said.

Newsom announced his plan – which he dubbed the Election Rigging Response Act – with a coalition of Democratic leaders. He also called for new federal standards to prevent political meddling in voting boundaries.

It is unclear if California’s voters will approve Newsom’s plan. Earlier this week, a Politico-Citrin Center Possibility Lab survey suggested Californians support retaining its independent districting system.

Only 36% of respondents backed returning congressional redistricting authority to state lawmakers.

Speaking to Fox on Thursday, Trump called Newsom “an incompetent governor”.

He also said he was considering encouraging Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to redraw districts in the state, so that Republicans could win more seats there.

The president said other states had drawn “ridiculous” voting districts that are shaped like “rattlesnakes”.

An Australian man who murdered a British woman while breaking into her Queensland home will be eligible for earlier release after appealing against his sentence.

Emma Lovell, who emigrated from Suffolk in 2011 with her family, was stabbed after she confronted two intruders at her home in Brisbane on Boxing Day in 2022.

Her attacker, who cannot legally be named as he was 17 at the time, was last year sentenced to 14 years in jail, with 70% to be served before he is eligible for supervised release.

The man appealed, claiming his sentence was “manifestly excessive”. On Friday, the Queensland Court of Appeal opted to reduce his non-parole period slightly, to 60% of his sentence.

The three judges said the man’s early guilty plea, genuine remorse and chances of rehabilitation warranted the change.

The man will now be eligible for release after serving a minimum of eight years and five months of his sentence, a cut of 17 months.

The attack in the suburb of North Lakes, about 45km (30 miles) north of Brisbane, sparked community outrage and was among several cases which prompted the state of Queensland to controversially introduce stricter youth crime laws.

During the trial, the court heard that Lovell and her husband had confronted the two intruders, both teens at the time, in their home before forcing them out onto the front garden where a struggle broke out.

Lovell was stabbed in the heart with a knife, with ambulance officers performing open heart surgery on her while her two teenage daughters watched on. She died shortly after arriving at hospital.

The court of appeal judges found that her murderer’s 14-year sentence was not “manifestly excessive”, agreeing with the sentencing judge that the murder had been a “particularly heinous offence” which had provoked “a sense of outrage”.

However, the requirement that the man serve 70% of that sentence was excessive in light of an early guilty plea which had saved the victim’s family from the trauma of a trial.

The judges also found the man’s troubled upbringing – exposure to violence, parental neglect and excessive alcohol and drug use – should also have been given more weight when considering the timeline for his release.

The second teenager involved in the attack was cleared of murder but last December sentenced to 18 months detention for burglary and assault.

Global talks to develop a landmark treaty to end plastic pollution have once again failed.

The UN negotiations, the sixth round of talks in just under three years, were due to end on Thursday but countries continued to negotiate into the night in the hopes of breaking a deadlock.

There remained a split between a group of more than 100 nations calling for curbs on production of plastic, and oil states pushing for a focus on recycling.

Speaking in the early hours, Cuban delegates said that countries had “missed a historic opportunity but we have to keep going”.

The talks were convened in 2022 in response to the mounting scientific evidence of the risks of plastic pollution to human health and the environment.

Despite the benefits of plastic to almost every sector, scientists are particularly concerned about potentially toxic chemicals they contain, which can leach out as plastics break down into smaller pieces.

Microplastics have been detected in soils, rivers, the air and even organs throughout the human body.

Countries had an original deadline to get a deal over the line at the end of December last year, but failed to meet this.

The collapse of the latest talks means they fall further behind.

Speaking on behalf of the island states, the northern Pacific nation of Palau, said on Friday: “We are repeatedly returning home with insufficient progress to show our people.”

“It is unjust for us to face the brunt of yet another global environmental crisis we contribute minimally to,” it added.

The core dividing line between countries has remained the same throughout: whether the treaty should tackle plastics at source – by reducing production – or focus on managing the pollution that comes from it.

The largest oil-producing nations view plastics, which are made using fossil fuels, as a vital part of their future economies, particularly as the world begins to move away from petrol and diesel towards electric cars.

The group, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, argue that better waste collection and recycling infrastructure is the best way of solving the problem, a view shared by many of the producers themselves.

“Plastics are fundamental for modern life – they go in everything,” said Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, a trade association for the plastic production industry in the United States.

“Focusing on ending plastic pollution should be the priority here, not ending plastic production,” he added, warning that attempts to substitute plastics with other materials could lead to “unintended consequences”.

But many researchers warn that this approach is fundamentally flawed. Global recycling rates are estimated at only about 10%, with limits on how far that can rise.

“Even if we manage to boost that over the next few decades to 15, 20, 30%, it would remain a substantial amount that is polluting the environment and damaging human health,” said Dr Costas Velis, associate professor in Waste and Resource Engineering at Imperial College London.

“Therefore, we do need to improve recycling… but we cannot really hope that this is going to solve all the aspects of plastic,” he added.

Plastic production has already risen from two million tonnes in 1950 to about 475 million in 2022 – and it is expected to keep rising without extra measures.

Nearly 100 countries, which include the UK and EU, had been pushing for curbs to production in the treaty and more consistent design globally to make recycling easier.

This could be as simple as requiring plastic bottles to be one colour – when dyes are used the products only fetch half the value of clear bottles.

This approach was supported by major plastic packagers, including Nestle and Unilever, who are part of the Business Coalition headed up by the Ellen McArthur Foundation.

The Coalition also said countries should better align their schemes to add a small levy on plastic products to help pay for recycling efforts, known as extended producer responsibility.

The group estimates that could double revenues for countries to $576bn (£425bn) between now and 2040.

Talks were due to end on Thursday but countries continued to negotiate into the night in the hopes of breaking a deadlock.

The chair, Luis Vayas from Ecuador, did produce a new text which seemed to align more closely with the request of the UK group.

Speaking at the final meeting the EU delegation he said: “We see the outcome of this session as a good basis of future negotiations.”

However, the oil states remained deeply unhappy. Saudi Arabia said it found the process of negotiating “problematic” whilst Kuwait said its views were “not reflected”.

But many environmental groups, reacting to the collapse, railed against what they see as prioritisation of profit by oil states over the health of the planet.

Graham Forbes, Greenpeace head of delegation to the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations, said: “The inability to reach an agreement in Geneva must be a wakeup call for the world: ending plastic pollution means confronting fossil fuel interests head on.

“The vast majority of governments want a strong agreement, yet a handful of bad actors were allowed to use process to drive such ambition into the ground.”

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Canada’s largest airline began suspending flights on Thursday after the union representing its flight attendants issued a 72-hour strike notice.

Air Canada warned passengers without confirmed flights to not go to the airport, as suspensions will continue through that period.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), representing 10,000 Air Canada attendants, provided a strike notice on Wednesday after an impasse in contract talks. It said it has bargained in good faith but the company “refused to address” core issues, such as proposals on wages and unpaid work.

The airline was extremely disappointed by the decision to strike, which could affect 130,000 customers a day, an official said.

“This is a situation that was, and still is, avoidable,” Arielle Meloul, Air Canada’s executive vice president, said at a press conference on Thursday.

Protesters forced the conference to end abruptly after they entered the room holding signs reading “unpaid work won’t fly” and “UnfAir Canada”.

Canadian jobs minister Patty Hajdu urged Air Canada and the union to return to the bargaining table to avoid a strike.

She also said in a statement that Air Canada had asked her to refer the dispute to binding arbitration.

The strike is set to begin at about 01:00 EST (05:00 GMT) on Saturday.

The airline – which operates in 64 countries with a fleet of 259 aircraft – said the unplanned shutdown is “a major risk” to the company and its employees. The flight disruption could affect 130,000 daily customers, including 25,000 Canadians, amid the peak summer travel period.

“By optimally positioning aircraft and crews ahead of a possible stoppage, Air Canada will be able to provide required routine maintenance and more quickly restore regular service,” the Montreal-based company said on Wednesday in response to the strike notice.

The first Air Canada and Air Canada Rouge flights were cancelled on Thursday, and additional flights are expected to be grounded on Friday.

A “complete cessation of flying” will begin on Saturday, the airline said. Air Canada Express flights, which carry about 20% of Air Canada’s daily customers, will not be affected.

In a news conference, the airline’s chief operations officer Mark Nasr said that the complexity of the airline’s network means it needs to start winding down its operations before a total shutdown.

“It’s simply not the kind of system that we can start or stop at the push of a button,” he said, as reported in Reuters.

He added that restarting operations would take a week.

Customers whose flights are cancelled will be notified and will receive a full refund, the airline said. The company has also made arrangements with other Canadian and foreign carriers to provide customers alternative travel options.

Customers will be notified of alternative options, but they could take time or might not be immediately possible.

The Newfoundland and Labrador government released a joint statement with Hospitality NL on Wednesday afternoon, expressing concern over the expected impact of the strike on tourism in the province.

The statement said small business and tourism operators could not sustain any reductions in service and described the impact as “catastrophic” for the tourism industry during the summer season.

Alanna Wolf told the CBC she had already made alternative travel arrangements to get home to Toronto because of the strike.

“[Our flight home] was supposed to be on Saturday, but yesterday we booked it for Thursday because we were afraid of the strike,” she said. “And sure enough, a strike happens.”

Toronto’s Pearson International Airport – Canada’s largest airport – said on Wednesday on X that it was closely monitoring the situation, and advised travellers to check directly with Air Canada for flight information. Other airports, including Vancouver International Airport, are also working on contingency plans.

In contract negotiations, the carrier said it offered flight attendants a 38% increase in total compensation over four years, with a 25% raise in the first year.

CUPE said the offer was “below inflation, below market value, below minimum wage” and would still leave flight attendants unpaid for some hours of work, including boarding and waiting at airports ahead of flights.

The union asserted that it had bargained in good faith with the airline for more than eight months but Air Canada instead sought government-directed arbitration.

“When we stood strong together, Air Canada didn’t come to the table in good faith,” CUPE said in a statement to its members. “Instead, they called on the federal government to step in and take those rights away.”

Earlier this month, 99.7% of employees represented by the union voted for a strike.

Instagram users have told the BBC of their confusion, fear and anger after having their accounts suspended, often for being wrongly accused by parent company Meta of breaching the platform’s child sex abuse rules.

For months, tens of thousands of people around the world have been complaining Meta has been banning their Instagram and Facebook accounts in error.

They say they have been wrongly accused of breaching site rules – including around child sexual exploitation.

More than 500 of them have contacted the BBC to say they have lost cherished photos and seen businesses upended – but some also speak of the profound personal toll it has taken on them, including concerns that the police could become involved.

Meta acknowledged a problem with the erroneous banning of Facebook Groups in June, but has denied there is wider issue on Facebook or Instagram at all.

It has repeatedly refused to comment on the problems its users are facing – though it has frequently overturned bans when the BBC has raised individual cases with it.

Here are some of the stories users have shared with BBC News.

Yassmine Boussihmed, 26, from the Netherlands, spent five years building an Instagram profile for her boutique dress shop in Eindhoven.

In April, she was banned over account integrity. Over 5,000 followers, gone in an instant. She lost clients, and was devastated.

“I put all of my trust in social media, and social media helped me grow, but it has let me down,” she told the BBC.

This week, after the BBC sent questions about her case to Meta’s press office, her Instagram accounts were reinstated.

“I am so thankful,” she said in a tearful voice note.

Five minutes later, her personal Instagram was suspended again – but the account for the dress shop remained.

Lucia, not her real name, is a 21-year-old woman from Austin, Texas.

She was suspended from Instagram for just over two weeks for breaching Meta’s policy on child sexual exploitation (CSE), abuse and nudity.

As with all the other cases, she was not told what post breached the platform’s rules.

That has left wondering if a picture she posted of herself and her 21-year-old friend wearing bikini tops somehow triggered the artificial intelligence (AI) moderation tools, as she thinks they “look a little bit younger”.

She also uses her account to interact with under 18s, such as sending Reels to her younger sister.

“It is deeply troubling to have an accusation as disgusting as this one,” she told BBC News.

“Given that I have a desire to work in juvenile justice as an attorney and advocate on behalf of children, I am appalled to have been suspended for something I know I did not do and would never do.”

She appealed, and then about seven hours after the BBC highlighted Lucia’s case to Meta’s press office, her account was restored with no explanation.

Over 36,000 people have signed a petition accusing Meta of falsely banning accounts; thousands more are in Reddit forums or on social media posting about it.

Their central accusation – Meta’s AI is unfairly banning people, with the tech also being used to deal with the appeals. The only way to speak to a human is to pay for Meta Verified, and even then many are frustrated.

Meta has not commented on these claims.Instagram states AI is central to its “content review process” and Meta has outlined how technology and humans enforce its policies.

Duncan Edmonstone, from Cheshire, has stage four ALK+ lung cancer. The 55-year-old finds solace in the support network he has on private Facebook groups.

For 12 days at the end of June, he was banned for breaking cybersecurity guidelines before being reinstated.

“The support groups are my lifeline, and there are actual examples of where advice from group members has made a difference to other patient’s treatment,” he said.

“I draw satisfaction and meaning, in a life that is probably going to be cut short, from helping other people in that group.”

Ryan – not his real name – has been banned, reinstated, and banned again from Instagram over the past few months.

The former teacher from London was thrown off the platform in May after he was accused of breaching the CSE policy.

He spent a month appealing. In June, the BBC understands a human moderator double checked and concluded Ryan had breached the policy.

Then his account was abruptly restored at the end of July.

“We’re sorry we’ve got this wrong,” Instagram said in an email to him, adding that he had done nothing wrong.

Ryan was left flabbergasted.

“‘Sorry we called you a paedophile for two months – here is your account back,'” is how he characterised the tone of the message.

But that wasn’t the end of the story.

Hours after the BBC contacted Meta’s press office to ask questions about his experience, he was banned again on Instagram and, for the first time, Facebook.

“I am devastated and I don’t know what to do,” he told the BBC.

“I can’t believe it has happened twice.”

His Facebook account was back two days later – but he was still blocked from Instagram.

Ryan says he has been left feeling deeply isolated – and worried the police are going to “knock on the door”.

His experiences mirrors those of other Instagram users who told the BBC of the “extreme stress” of having their accounts banned after being wrongly accused of breaching the platform’s rules on CSE.

Despite taking action on Yassmine, Lucia and Ryan’s accounts, Meta has not made any comment to the BBC.

In common with all big technology firms, it has come under pressure from authorities to make its platforms safer.

In July, Meta said it was taking “aggressive action” on accounts breaking its rules – including the removal of 635,000 Instagram and Facebook accounts over sexualised comments and imagery in relation to children.

Meta’s wide-ranging policy on child sexual exploitation has changed three times since Boxing Day last year, with all amendments occurring since 17 July.

It has not said what impact, if any, these changes had on the cases the BBC has raised with it.

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