There was little to indicate what had happened on the fifth floor of the Grand Hyatt Erawan in Bangkok until police officers opened the door.

No-one was heard to scream, or had rung for help. No-one had even made it to the door.

Even inside, there were apparently no signs of struggle – the untouched late lunch still laid out neatly on the table for the occupants to enjoy.

From outside of Room 502, the only clue to the horror inside the locked room was the fact the group were late checking out of the hotel.

And yet inside were six bodies, alongside tea cups laced with cyanide.

It didn’t take officers long to work out the occupants of the room had drunk the poisoned tea, or to find out who the apparent victims were.

But days after police revealed the grim discovery, big questions remain: why them – and who did it?

Four of the victims are Vietnamese nationals – Thi Nguyen Phuong, 46, her husband Hong Pham Thanh, 49, Thi Nguyen Phuong Lan, 47, and Dinh Tran Phu, 37.

The other two are American citizens of Vietnamese origin – Sherine Chong, 56, and Dang Hung Van, 55.

According to investigators, Chong was believed to have borrowed 10 million baht ($280,000; £215,000) from husband and wife Hong Pham Thanh and Thi Nguyen Phuong to invest in a hospital building project in Japan. The couple, who owned a construction business, had apparently tried in vain to get their money back.

In fact, the matter was due to go to court in Japan in a matter of weeks.

On the face of it, this meeting appeared to be an attempt to discuss the issue in advance of the case.

Thi Nguyen Phuong Lan was there because Chong – who US media have said lived in Oakland, California – had asked her to act as her intermediary with the couple regarding the investment.

But how were the other two linked to the case?

Dinh Tran Phu – a successful make-up artist whose clientele includes movie stars, singers and beauty queens in Vietnam – was at the gathering working for Chong.

His father, speaking to BBC Vietnamese, emphasised the fact he had travelled to Thailand with his regular clients, not with strangers.

A close friend, meanwhile, said he knew both Thi Nguyen Phuong and Thi Nguyen Phuong Lan, having introduced them to treatments at a friend’s spa in Da Nang, where he lived.

Dang Hung Van’s participation in the hotel suite meeting was not immediately clear.

Police said there was a seventh name in the hotel reservation, the sister of one of the six. That person returned to Vietnam from Thailand last week and police said she was not involved in the incident.

The group checked into the hotel separately over the weekend and were assigned five rooms – four on the seventh floor, and one on the fifth.

Chong checked into Room 502 on Sunday. The five others visited her in her suite that day, but they headed back to their respective rooms for the night.

Before noon on Monday, Dang Hung Van ordered six cups of tea while Dinh Tran Phu, the make-up artist, ordered fried rice from their respective rooms. They asked that it be delivered to Room 502 at 14:00 local time.

A few minutes before 14:00, Chong started receiving the food orders at Room 502. She was alone in the suite at that time.

Police said she refused the waiter’s offer to brew tea for her party. The waiter also found that she “spoke very little and was visibly under stress”.

The rest of the group started arriving soon after. The couple went in lugging a suitcase.

At 14:17, all six could be seen by the door before it was shut. From then on, there was no sign of movement from inside.

They had been scheduled to check out on Monday but failed to do so.

Police entered the room at 16:30 on Tuesday and found the six dead on the floor.

The initial investigation found that two appeared to have tried get to the suite’s door, but failed to reach it in time.

All the bodies bore signs of cyanide poisoning, which can – in certain doses – kill within minutes. Their lips and nails had turned dark purple indicating a lack of oxygen, while their internal organs turned “blood red”, which is another sign of cyanide poisoning.

Investigators say there is “no other cause” that would explain their deaths “except for cyanide”.

Further tests are being carried out to determine the “intensity” of the deadly chemical and to rule out any other toxins.

Cyanide starves the body’s cells of oxygen, which can induce heart attacks. Early symptoms include dizziness, shortness of breath and vomiting.

Its use in Thailand is heavily regulated and those found to have unauthorised access face up to two years in jail.

Police suspect that one of the dead was behind the poisoning and was driven by crushing debt – but have not said who.

According to Vietnamese outlet VN Express, investigators said Chong had been sued by all the other five over their failed investments.

The meeting in Bangkok was called to negotiate a settlement, but the attempt failed.

Police have sought a statement from the group’s tour guide in Bangkok, 35-year-old Phan Ngoc Vu.

The guide reportedly said that before she died, Thi Nguyen Phuong Lan, the mediator, had asked someone to buy traditional medicine containing snake blood for her joint pains.

Then there are the two metal beverage containers that did not belong to the hotel found by police in the suite.

The containers were placed beside the cyanide-laced teacups, near the dining table.

What is certain is that officials want the matter resolved quickly.

Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh has directed officials in Hanoi to co-ordinate closely with their Thai counterparts on the investigation.

As for Thai authorities, it couldn’t have come at a worse time for Thailand. It had just expanded visa-free entry to 93 countries to revive its tourism industry, a key economic pillar that has yet to fully recover from the pandemic.

Barely a year before, a 14-year-old boy shot dead two people at a luxury shopping mall, also in Bangkok.

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin was with police on the scene at the Grand Hyatt on Tuesday night. He said there was no danger to public safety and that it was a private matter.

For the families left behind, the shock is palpable.

BBC Vietnamese got hold of the make-up artist’s mother, Tuy, on the phone, but she was sobbing so uncontrollably that she hung up after a short conversation. She said she thought her son was just on a routine work trip.

His father, Tran Dinh Dung, said in a separate interview that he did not notice anything strange with his son the last time he saw him.

Donald Trump took the stage on Thursday night at the Republican National Convention like a conquering hero. He had cheated death. His Democratic opponents were tearing themselves apart.

His loyalists, who now fill the ranks of his party, packed the Milwaukee arena and cheered enthusiastically throughout his hour-and-a-half speech.

He pledged to serve all Americans if elected then recounted, in a subdued, but almost messianic tone, his brush with a spray of bullets. Some delegates even wore bandages over their right ears like their injured political idol in tribute to him.

“I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God,” he said. “Over the last few days, many people have said it was a providential moment.” He spoke of dropping to the ground as bullets flew past him and how his supporters had “great sorrow on their faces”.

“When I rose, surrounded by Secret Service, the crowd was confused because they thought I was dead,” he said.

The unity message and its powerful delivery made for a unique convention speech and a remarkable Trump one. But the rest of his speech was more traditional convention fare.

Although he called for ending the “partisan witch hunts” against him, he avoided the extended forays into 2020 election denial that have at times dominated his rally speeches, and he mostly replaced his normal pointed attacks on individual opponents with calls for unity.

There was classic Trump in there too – dark and false claims, sometimes during extended improvisations.

Trump’s performance hinted that for all the talk of a changed man after the attempt on his life and for all the more organised, focused operation behind him, the former president is still inclined to veer off-script, even in the most momentous of occasions.

The question many Americans could be wondering now is which version of Trump will lead the country should he beat Democrat Joe Biden in November. Looking back at the last four days offers some clues.

The address, weakly delivered though it may have been, still represented the culmination of a remarkable stretch for the former president, starting with President Joe Biden’s disastrous presidential debate performance in Atlanta three weeks ago that prompted an uprising in his Democratic Party.

Since then, the US Supreme Court ruled that Trump had broad immunity from criminal prosecution, a judge delayed sentencing for his New York conviction in a hush-money case and another judge entirely dismissed the case against him for mishandling national security documents.

Then he was nearly assassinated. The attempt on his life by a 20-year-old gunman left Trump’s face bloodied and provided the iconic image that was emblazoned on T-shirts and signs at the convention.

All of this meant he and his supporters converged on Milwaukee with a sense that their time had come.

For four slickly produced and relentlessly on-message evenings, the Republican party positioned itself as a welcoming place for all Americans and the former president as a uniting force who would return the nation to greatness.

While there were still partisan speakers throwing red meat to the crowd, they were largely limited to the early-evening slots, when fewer Americans were tuned in to the proceedings.

As the final hour each night arrived, the focus softened and a string of speakers described the former president in deeply personal terms.

• The Trump family: A guide to an American dynasty

It began on Monday, with Trump receiving an exuberant welcome as he entered the convention centre for his first public appearance since the shooting.

He sat in the VIP section of the building and watched as model and social media influencer Amber Rose defended him against accusations of racism: “Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re black, white, gay or straight.”

On Tuesday, former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders recounted Trump hugging her young son at the White House while Lara Trump painted her father-in-law as “an amazing grandfather”.

Earlier that evening, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who had been one of Trump’s fiercest critics on the 2024 Republican primary campaign trail, was urging voters who didn’t support Trump “100% of the time” to back his re-election.

“When times are really tough, when he’s got everything to lose and nothing to gain,” Steve Witkoff, a friend of the former president, told the audience, “Donald Trump shows up, and he’s there for you.”

Trump’s first term in office was marked by sharp political divisions within American society. The day after he was inaugurated, millions marched through the streets of Washington in protest.

His attempts to ban nationals from a list of Muslim-majority countries caused chaos at American airports early in his presidency and border restrictions implemented later led to an outcry about crying children separated from their parents at detention centres.

Trump’s four years in office ended with him refusing to accept his defeat in the presidential election – denialism that culminated in the 6 January riot at the US Capitol, where thousands of his supporters attempted to block certification of President Biden’s victories.

He was denounced by many in his own party, and faced a second impeachment by the House of Representatives. Although he was acquitted in a Senate trial, seven Republicans broke ranks and voted for his conviction. After leaving office, the former president was indicted four times, found culpable for sexual assault by a civil court and convicted of fraud.

That was then, however, and here in Wisconsin – within the security bubble of the Republican National Convention – it was decidedly different now.

The overriding message from the Republicans this week was that those divisions and distractions are things of the past, and that the Trump that America sees today is not the one they might remember from his first White House tenure.

If the rest of the nation agrees, it would represent a remarkable comeback story or a collective act of political amnesia, depending on one’s perspective.

“I think that we really now are the party of unity and inclusiveness,” said Jennifer McGrath, a delegate from Las Vegas, Nevada. “We really are the place to be at this point.”

David Botkins, a member of the Virginian Republican Party’s State Central Committee, said he thought the assassination attempt had changed Trump and that he would be “different, better and more effective” in a second presidential term.

“I think the policies are going to be the same, the conservatism is going to be the same, but there may be a tenderness and a compassion and a gratitude and a respect for divine providence that will inform the tone with which he conducts himself as president for the next four years.”

As for those policies and proposals, the Republican convention offered scant details.

The first three nights of the convention each had a theme – the economy, safety and foreign policy. They formed a framework for the former president’s acceptance speech and offer a useful guide for the key points the party is seeking to emphasise in the campaign ahead.

While Trump only mentioned President Biden by name once, he noted that “this administration” was presiding over soaring inflation (which has now eased), knowing that economic concerns are the bread-and-butter of bids to oust an incumbent officeholder.

Crime and immigration, two issues on which Republicans joined at the hip all week, served as the centrepiece on “safety” night. Polls show that a majority of Americans now favour lowering immigration levels and support Trump’s call for removing millions of undocumented migrants residing in the US. During Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s speech, some convention attendees waved pre-printed signs reading “mass deportation now”.

Conflicts abroad were another prong of the Republican case against Mr Biden. In a particularly dramatic moment on Wednesday, families of six of the 13 US soldiers killed by a car bomb during the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan took the stage to blame the current president for the deaths and claim that the president wasn’t fit to lead the nation’s military.

“With our victory in November, the years of war, weakness and chaos will be over,” Trump said in his speech.

And while there were more specific policy discussions in events held on the sidelines of the convention, they took place well away from prime-time network television cameras.

For instance, on Monday, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, hosted a “policy fest”, where former Trump administration officials and Republican politicians offered their views on topics like foreign policy, education, immigration, the economy and energy.

The Heritage Foundation is behind the 1,000-page Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump presidency, which has generated controversy, media attention and relentless attacks from Democrats – and many of the speakers defended their efforts to provide a detailed plan for a new Republican administration.

On Thursday, Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita made it clear what he thought of these outside efforts, describing Project 2025 – which many officials from the first Trump administration are part of – as a “pain in the ass”.

“The issues that are going to win us this campaign are not the issues that they want to talk about,” he said.

Eight years ago, when Donald Trump first ran for president, the Republican National Convention in Cleveland was a sometimes chaotic event, with then-establishment conservatives making last-ditch efforts to deny him the nomination.

Trump’s 2024 campaign is run by wily operatives, rather than political fringe characters, and they kept the convention participants on a tight script this week. The party, from the top to the grass-roots, has been fully remade in the former president’s image.

In 2016, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who finished second behind Trump in the primary voting, pointedly declined to endorse the winner, saying only that Republicans should vote their “conscience”. He was roundly booed.

This time around, he started his speech by saying “God bless Donald Trump” and went on to lavish the former president with praise.

Trump’s other Republican critics were nowhere to be found. His former vice-president, Mike Pence, spent the week on holiday in Montana. Senators like Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine stayed home. Former President George W Bush also kept his distance.

On Wednesday, it was Trump’s new vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance, who laid out the core tenets of this new, Trump-dominated Republican Party in his nomination acceptance speech.

“We won’t cater to Wall Street, we’ll commit to the working man,” he said. “We won’t import foreign labour, we’ll fight for American citizens. We won’t buy energy from countries that hate us, we’ll get it right here from American workers. We won’t sacrifice our supply chains to unlimited global trade, we’ll stamp every product ‘Made in the USA.’”

The political festivities in Milwaukee were Trumpism from start to finish – a carefully calibrated machine, promoting the party’s most popular agenda items and focusing criticism on one man, President Joe Biden.

But what if Republicans are going after the wrong guy? A growing number of Democrats have called on Mr Biden to be replaced as their presidential nominee and speculation is growing that he might actually listen.

The Democratic convention isn’t until the end of August, leaving time for the president to step aside either for his running mate, Kamala Harris, or for an open process to select another candidate.

On Thursday evening, the Trump campaign sought to highlight their candidate’s strength and vitality by giving him a raucous entrance, preceded by appearances by former wrestler Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Fighting Championship impresario Dana White and a performance by Kid Rock.

The campaign’s intention – to draw a contrast with Mr Biden’s perceived frailty and target younger male voters – was obvious.

That strategy may be less effective against Ms Harris or one of the more youthful Democratic governors who are mentioned as possible Biden successors.

But for the moment, the Republicans are riding high and optimistic about their victory in November, convinced that the former president’s run of good fortune is just getting started.

US President Joe Biden is looking forward to “getting back on the campaign trail next week”, fortifying his commitment to stick in the race as more Democrats on Friday called for him to step aside as the party nominee.

“The stakes are high, and the choice is clear. Together, we will win,” he said.

His statement appeared to be in response to the conflicting reports that Mr Biden’s inner circle is discussing the beleaguered president’s future and whether he will remain in the race.

Over the last several weeks, Mr Biden has been caught in a whirlwind of political pressure to step down: Calls from leaders within his own party to withdraw from the race, a loss of big-ticket donors and the added pressure that his decision could cost Democrats control of Congress.

At least a dozen Democratic lawmakers have called for him to step aside on Friday alone, and Vice-President Kamala Harris – considered the top choice to replace Mr Biden – was tasked with comforting worried donors on a Friday afternoon call.

Ms Harris said that she believed “in my heart of hearts” that “we are going to win this election”, an individual who listened to the conversation told the BBC.

“We know which candidate in this election puts the American people first: Our president, Joe Biden,” she added.

Earlier in the day, Mr Biden’s re-election campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon also attempted to push back on speculation that the president would withdraw in an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe

“Absolutely, the president’s in this race,” she said when asked about Mr Biden’s plans.

She described him as “more committed than ever to beat Donald Trump” and said he’s the “best person” to take on the former president.

In his statement, the president referenced former President Trump’s Republican National Convention speech to say he will continue “exposing the threat” of the former president while “making the case” for his record.

“Donald Trump’s dark vision for the future is not who we are as Americans. Together, as a party and as a country, we can and will defeat him at the ballot box,” he said.

As the conflict played on on Friday, the president was under quarantine at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He tested positive for Covid-19 while traveling in Las Vegas earlier this week. Mr Biden is experiencing “mild symptoms”, the White House said.

Since his poor debate performance last month, Mr Biden has insisted he will continue to run, though his perspective on what it would take for him to step down as the Democratic nominee has evolved.

First telling ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos “only the Lord Almighty” would make him stand down, Mr Biden said this week during an interview with BET (Black Entertainment Television) that he would re-evaluate the campaign if a doctor told him he had a serious medical condition.

According to a campaign memo released on Friday, Mr Biden isn’t going anywhere.

“Joe Biden has made it more than clear: He’s in this race and he’s in it to win it,” according to the memo. “Moreover, he’s the presumptive nominee — there is no plan for an alternative nominee. In a few short weeks, Joe Biden will be the official nominee. It is high past time we stop fighting one another. The only person who wins when we fight is Donald Trump.”

Time is running out for Mr Biden to decide if he will step down.

The Democratic National Convention begins 19 August, but the Democratic National Committee is expected to meet virtually the first week of August to nominate Biden as the official party nominee to meet state ballot deadlines.

The DNC rules committee met on Friday morning to discuss the procedures for the virtual roll-call vote, which they intend to hold before 7 August.

When asked whether another candidate could challenge Mr Biden in the roll-call vote, the committee’s co-chair Leah Daughtry said that “any challenger would have to have the verified support of hundreds of delegates”.

With Mr Biden winning nearly all of the available delegates during the Democratic primary, that requirement would be nearly insurmountable.

Ms Daughtry noted that “such a challenge has never happened over the past half century of competitive primaries”.

The pressure continues to build, however.

On Friday, Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich, of New Mexico, became the third Democrat in the upper chamber to call for Biden to step aside.

“By passing the torch, he would secure his legacy as one of our nation’s greatest leaders and allow us to united behind a candidate who can best defeat Donald Trump and safeguard the future of our democracy,” he wrote in a statement on X, formerly Twitter.

His statement follows that of Democratic Senator Jon Tester, of Montana, who called on Biden to end his re-election bid on Thursday.

“While I appreciate his commitment to public service and our country, I believe President Biden should not seek re-election to another term,” Mr Tester wrote in a statement on X.

In the House, Congressman Jim Costa, a Democrat from California, also called for him to withdraw on Thursday.

Democratic congressmen Jared Huffman of California, Marc Veasey of Texas, Chuy Garcia of Illinois and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin released a joint message on Friday saying “the most responsible and patriotic thing” Biden could do is “step aside as our nominee”.

“With great admiration for you personally, sincere respect for your decades of public service and patriotic leadership, and deep appreciation for everything we have accomplished together during your presidency, it is now time for you to pass the torch to a new generation of Democratic leaders,” they wrote in the joint statement.

Illinois Democratic congressman Sean Casten wrote in the Chicago Tribune on Friday that he doesn’t think the president can defeat former US President Donald Trump.

“It is with a heavy heart and much personal reflection that I am therefore calling on Biden to pass the torch to a new generation,” he wrote.

Other members of the House joined the calls for the president to step aside on Friday, including Zoe Lofgren of California, Kathy Castor of Florida, Morgan McGarvey of Kentucky, Greg Landsman of Ohio and Betty McCollum of Minnesota.

Reports this week suggested senior Democratic leaders are leaning in the same direction.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have all reportedly expressed concerns during private conversations with Mr Biden about his candidacy. In public statements, Ms Pelosi’s staff insisted her comments have been misrepresented and Mr Jeffries affirmed his support for Mr Biden.

Former President Barack Obama, Mr Biden’s previous running mate, has reportedly said Mr Biden’s chances of winning the election have greatly diminished.

Lawmakers haven’t been the only ones turning their backs to Biden. Big name donors – including actor George Clooney and Disney family heiress Abigail Disney – have closed their wallets.

Despite the defectors, some are sticking by his side.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most influential progressive voices in the House, has supported Biden over the last few weeks. She broadcast live on Instagram on Friday morning and spoke about the risks of entering the convention without Biden as the presumptive nominee, including potential legal challenges and ballot access deadlines.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which has about 40 members, and the 60-member Congressional Black Caucus, have both met with the president and also indicated their support for his re-election bid.

Bangladesh is in turmoil.

Street protests are not new to this South Asian nation of 170 million people – but the intensity of the demonstrations of the past week has been described as the worst in living memory.

More than 100 people have died in the violence, with more than 50 people killed on Friday alone.

The government has imposed an unprecedented communications blackout, shutting down the internet and restricting phone services.

What started as peaceful protests on university campuses has now transformed into nationwide unrest.

Thousands of university students have been agitating for weeks against a quota system for government jobs.

A third of public sector jobs are reserved for the relatives of veterans from the country’s war for independence from Pakistan in 1971.

The students are arguing that the system is discriminatory, and are asking for recruitment based on merit.

Protest coordinators say police and the student wing of the governing Awami League – known as the Bangladesh Chhatra League – have been using brutal force against peaceful demonstrators, triggering widespread anger.

The government denies these allegations.

“It’s not students anymore, it seems that people from all walks of life have joined the protest movement,” Dr Samina Luthfa, assistant professor of sociology in the University of Dhaka, tells the BBC.

The protests have been a long time coming. Though Bangladesh is one of the fastest growing economies in the world, experts point out that growth has not translated into jobs for university graduates.

Estimates suggest that around 18 million young Bangladeshis are looking for jobs. University graduates face higher rates of unemployment than their less-educated peers.

Bangladesh has become a powerhouse of ready-to-wear clothing exports. The country exports around $40 billion worth of clothes to the global market.

The sector employs more than four million people, many of them women. But factory jobs are not sufficient for the aspiring younger generation.

Under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year rule, Bangladesh has transformed itself by building new roads, bridges, factories and even a metro rail in the capital Dhaka.

Its per-capita income has tripled in the last decade and the World Bank estimates that more than 25 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 20 years.

But many say that some of that growth is only helping those close to Ms Hasina’s Awami League.

Dr Luthfa says: “We are witnessing so much corruption. Especially among those close to the ruling party. Corruption has been continuing for a long time without being punished.”

Social media in Bangladesh in recent months has been dominated by discussions about corruption allegations against some of Ms Hasina’s former top officials – including a former army chief, ex-police chief, senior tax officers and state recruitment officials.

Ms Hasina last week said she was taking action against corruption, and that it was a long-standing problem.

During the same press conference in Dhaka, she said she had taken action against a household assistant – or peon – after he allegedly amassed $34 million.

“He can’t move without a helicopter. How has he earned so much money? I took action immediately after knowing this,”

She did not identify the individual.

The reaction of the Bangladeshi media was that this much money could only have been accumulated through lobbying for government contracts, corruption, or bribery.

The anti-corruption commission in Bangladesh has launched an investigation into former police chief Benazir Ahmed – once seen as a close ally of Ms Hasina – for amassing millions of dollars, allegedly through illegal means. He denies the allegations.

This news didn’t escape ordinary people in the country, who are struggling with the escalating cost of living.

In addition to corruption allegations, many rights activists point out that space for democratic activity has shrunk over the past 15 years.

“For three consecutive elections, there has been no credible free and fair polling process,” Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, told the BBC.

“[Ms Hasina] has perhaps underestimated the level of dissatisfaction people had about being denied the most basic democratic right to choose their own leader,” Ms Ganguly said.

The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) boycotted elections in 2014 and 2024 saying free and fair elections were not possible under Ms Hasina and that they wanted the polls to be held under a neutral caretaker administration.

Ms Hasina has always rejected this demand.

Rights groups also say more than 80 people, many of them government critics, have disappeared in the past 15 years, and that their families have no information on them.

The government is accused of stifling dissent and the media, amid wider concerns that Sheikh Hasina has grown increasingly autocratic over the years. But ministers deny the charges.

“The anger against the government and the ruling party have been accumulating for a long time,” says Dr Luthfa.

“People are showing their anger now. People resort to protest if they don’t have any recourse left.”

Ms Hasina’s ministers say the government has shown extreme restraint despite what they describe as provocative actions by protesters.

They say demonstrations have been infiltrated by their political opposition and by Islamist parties, who they say initiated the violence.

Law Minister Anisul Huq said the government was open to discussing the issues.

“The government has been reaching out to the student protesters. When there is a reasonable argument, we are willing to listen,” Mr Huq told the BBC earlier this week.

The student protests are probably the biggest challenge that has faced Ms Hasina since January 2009.

How they are resolved will depend on how she handles the unrest and, most importantly, how she addresses the public’s growing anger.

At least 11 people have died and more than 30 are missing after a highway bridge partially collapsed during torrential rains in northwest China.

The bridge over a river in Shaanxi province’s Shangluo city collapsed on Friday night due to a sudden downpour and flash floods, the provincial authority said.

Rescue teams have recovered several vehicles that fell into the river, with efforts still underway according to authorities.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged an “all out” effort to find those still missing.

The 11 dead were found in five cars that were pulled from the river below. It is thought 20 more vehicles plunged into the water, according to state media.

Video and images from Xinhua news agency shows a partially submerged section of the bridge with heavy river waters rushing around it.

According to Xinhua, officials sent 736 firefighters, 18 boats and 32 drones to the scene.

On Friday, at least five people were killed in flooding and mudslides in another part of the province.

Large parts of northern and central China have been battered since Tuesday by rains that have caused flooding and significant damage.

State media reported at least five people died and eight were missing after the rains sparked flooding and mudslides in Shaanxi’s Baoji city.

Tshiring Jangbu Sherpa cannot forget the dead body he saw just metres from the summit of Mount Lhotse in the Himalayas more than a decade ago.

The Nepali was working as a guide for a German climber trying to scale the world’s fourth highest mountain in May 2012. The body blocking their path was thought to be Milan Sedlacek, a Czech mountaineer who’d perished just a few days earlier.

Mr Sherpa was curious why the Czech climber had died so close to the top. One of the gloves on the frozen corpse was missing.

“The bare hand might have slipped away from the rope,” the guide says. “He might have been killed after losing his balance and crashing onto the rock.”

The body stayed where it was – and every climber scaling Mount Lhotse thereafter had to step past it.

Mr Sherpa, 46, had no idea then that he would return 12 years later to retrieve the climber’s body, as part of a team of a dozen military personnel and 18 sherpas deployed by the Nepali army to clean up the high Himalayas.

There have been more than 300 deaths in the Everest region since records of mountain climbing there began a century ago, and many of these bodies remain. The death toll has kept increasing: eight people have been killed so far this year; and 18 died in 2023, according to Nepal’s tourism department.

The government first launched the clean-up campaign in 2019, which included removing some bodies of dead climbers. But this year was the first time that authorities set a goal to retrieve five bodies from the so-called “death zone”, above an altitude of 8,000m (26,247 feet).

In the end the team – who subsisted on water, chocolate and sattu, a mixture of chickpea, barley and wheat flour – retrieved four bodies.

One skeleton and 11 tonnes of rubbish were removed at lower attitudes after a 54-day operation that ended on 5 June.

“Nepal has received a bad name for the garbage and dead bodies which have polluted the Himalayas on a grave scale,” Major Aditya Karki, the leader of this year’s operation, told BBC Nepali.

The campaign also aims to improve safety for the climbers.

Maj Karki says many have been startled by the sight of bodies – last year, one mountaineer could not move for half an hour after seeing a dead body on the way to Mount Everest.

Many people cannot afford to retrieve the bodies of relatives who have died on mountains in Nepal. Even if they have the financial means, most private companies refuse to help get bodies from the death zone because it is too dangerous.

The military allocated five million rupees ($37,400; £29,000) this year to retrieve each body. Twelve people are needed to lower a body from 8,000m, with each needing four cylinders of oxygen. One cylinder costs more than $400, meaning that $20,000 is needed for oxygen alone.

Every year, there is only about a 15-day window during which climbers can ascend and descend from 8,000 metres, as the winds slow down during the transition between wind cycles. In the death zone, the wind speed often exceeds 100 km per hour.

After locating the bodies, the team mostly worked after nightfall because they did not want to disturb other mountaineers. In the Everest region, which also consists of Lhotse and Nuptse, there is only one single ladder and ropeway for people climbing up and down from base camp.

“It was very tough to bring back the bodies from the death zone,” Mr Sherpa says. “I vomited sour water many times. Others kept coughing and others got headaches because we spent hours and hours at very high altitude.”

At 8,000m, even strong Sherpas can carry only up to 25kg (55 pounds), less than 30% of their capacity at lower altitudes.

The body near the summit of Mount Lhotse, which stands at 8,516m, was discoloured after exposure to the sun and snow for 12 years. Half of the body was buried in snow, Mr Sherpa says.

All four climbers’ bodies retrieved were found in the same position as they had died. Their frozen state meant their limbs could not be moved, making transportation even more difficult.

Nepali law states that all bodies have to remain in the best condition before they are returned to authorities – any damage could result in penalties.

The clean-up team arranged a roping system to bring the bodies down gradually, because pushing them from behind or pulling them from in front was not possible. Sometimes, the bodies became stuck in the rocky, icy terrain, and pulling them out again was a laborious task.

It took 24 hours non-stop to bring the body presumed to belong to the Czech climber to the nearest camp, which is just about 3.5km away, Mr Sherpa says. The team then spent another 13 hours getting the body down to another lower camp.

Next stop for the bodies was a journey to Kathmandu by helicopter, but the crew was stuck in the town of Namche for five days because of bad weather. They arrived in the capital safely on 4 June.

The four bodies and the skeleton have been kept at a hospital in Kathmandu.

The army has found identification documents on two bodies – Czech climber Milan Sedlacek and American mountaineer Ronald Yearwood, who died in 2017. The Nepali government will be in communication with the respective embassies.

The process of identifying the other two bodies is ongoing.

Sherpa climbers and guides keep track of the locations and possible identities of lost climbers, so they have provided potential information on some of the bodies. They believe all the bodies belong to foreigners, but the government has not confirmed this.

About 100 sherpas have died on the Himalayas since records began, so many families have been waiting for years to perform the last Buddhist rites for their loved ones.

Authorities have said they will bury the bodies if no one comes to claim them three months after identification – regardless of whether the bodies belong to a foreigner or a Nepali.

Mr Sherpa first climbed in the Himalayas at the age of 20. In his career, he has scaled Everest three times and Lhotse five times.

“Mountaineers have got famous from climbing. The Himalayas have given us so many opportunities,” he says.

“By doing this special job of retrieving dead bodies, it’s my time to pay back to the Great Himalayas.”

How do you assess the impact of the Covid pandemic on a population?

One way is by examining life expectancy, or the average number of years a person can expect to live.

A team of 10 researchers from the UK, the US and Europe have studied the mortality impacts of the pandemic in India by sex, social group and age. Their peer-reviewed paper has been published in Science Advances, a US journal.

They found that life expectancy at birth in India was 2.6 years lower and mortality was 17% higher in 2020 compared to 2019. This implied 1.19 million excess deaths in 2020. Excess deaths are a simple measure of how many more people are dying than expected, compared with previous years.

The researchers of the new study say life expectancy declines in India were larger and affected a younger age profile compared to high-income countries.

They found that mortality rose among all age groups, but compared to high-income countries, the increase was particularly pronounced in younger age groups, leading to larger declines in life expectancy.

The researchers also found something which was more worrying.

For one, females experienced a life expectancy decline of one year greater than males. This contrasts with patterns in most other countries and may be due to gender inequality, say the researchers from University of Oxford, University of California, Berkeley and Paris School of Economics, among others.

Also, marginalised social groups – Muslims, Dalits, and tribespeople – in India saw larger declines in life expectancy compared to privileged upper caste people, exacerbating existing disparities.

The researchers agree that before Covid, these groups already had significant disadvantages in life expectancy. The pandemic worsened these disparities, with declines comparable to or greater than those seen among Native Americans, Blacks, and Hispanics in the US in 2020, the study says.

“These findings uncover large and unequal mortality impacts during the pandemic in the world’s most populous country,” Sangita Vyas, of CUNY Hunter College and one of the researchers, told me.

More than 4.7 million people in India – nearly 10 times higher than official records suggest – are thought to have died because of Covid, according to a 2022 World Health Organization (WHO) report. India’s government rejected the figure, saying the methodology was flawed.

To be sure, the latest study looked at deaths from all causes, not just deaths from Covid. “For that reason we can’t conclude that women in India were more likely to die of Covid than men,” says Ms Vyas. “What we can conclude is that the increase in mortality from all causes was greater for women than men”.

The researchers believe these patterns partly stem from gender inequality.

Previous research shows Indian households spend less on healthcare for females compared to males, a disparity which likely worsened during the pandemic. Fewer females appear in India’s official Covid-19 case data, despite surveys showing similar infection rates among males and females.

Furthermore, severe disruptions to maternal healthcare and livelihoods due to lockdowns likely contributed to these trends.

How did the researchers come to these findings? They surveyed data of more than 765,000 people – a sample size that accurately reflects the diversity and distribution of a quarter of India’s population – to identify patterns missed by incomplete data and disease surveillance.

India’s National Family Health Survey 5 collected high quality data on recent household deaths and socio-economic characteristics. This allowed researchers to analyse age, sex, and group-specific mortality patterns. They compared mortality in 2019 and 2020 using data from the same households interviewed in 2021.

The researchers believe more research is necessary to explore why females in India experienced higher excess deaths than males, why excess mortality affected younger age groups more in India compared to other countries, and why Muslims saw significant declines in life expectancy compared to other social groups.

“These patterns likely resulted from disparities in healthcare access and underlying health, differing impacts of lockdowns on public health and livelihoods, and increased discrimination against marginalised groups,” says Ms Vyas.

A former Ukrainian nationalist MP has died after being shot on the street in the western city of Lviv.

Iryna Farion caused controversy in 2023 by suggesting that “true patriots” of Ukraine should not speak Russian under any circumstances.

The 60-year-old linguistic professor’s killing on Friday is being investigated and police say it may have been a targeted attack.

Her attacker has not been identified. Police say a power outage affected CCTV in the area.

Lviv Regional Governor Maksym Kozytskyi said on Telegram that Ms Farion died in hospital after the shooting.

Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said “this was not a spontaneous killing” and police were looking for a motive.

“We already have several versions. The main ones, I can say, are [linked to Farion’s] social and political activities and personal dislike,” he said in a statement via the Telegram message service.

“We do not rule out that the murder has a commissioned character,” he added.

On Saturday President Volodymyr Zelensky said a major police operation was under way.

“All versions are being investigated, including the one that leads to Russia,” he said.

The hardline nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) political party Ms Farion was a member of blamed Russia directly for the killing.

“Moscow shoots in the temple for the Ukrainian language,” it said in a statement.

In 2023, Ms Farion said that true patriots of Ukraine should not speak Russian in any settings, including on the front lines, as it is the language of the aggressor country.

She described Russian as “the language of the enemy, who kills, discriminates, insults and rapes me”, and added: “How crazy should you be to fight in the Ukrainian army and speak Russian?”

Her words provoked a strong reaction in Ukraine at the time, with people accusing her of inciting hatred based on linguistic preferences.

She was dismissed from a university in western Ukraine and was investigated by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).

In May, the Lviv Court of Appeal reportedly issued a ruling reinstating her to the position.

Vietnam’s long-serving leader Nguyen Phu Trong has died “after a period of illness”, marking the end of a political era.

The announcement came days after the government said he was stepping back to focus on his health and had handed duties to President To Lam.

As the general secretary of Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party since 2011, and at one point also double-hatting as president, Mr Trong was seen as one of the country’s most powerful leaders in decades.

Besides overseeing the supercharged growth of Vietnam’s economy, the 80-year-old was known for his “blazing furnaces” anti-corruption campaign.

Mr Trong’s death comes at a time of political turbulence for Vietnam’s Communist leadership. In recent months three top leaders quit following unspecified accusations of wrongdoing.

According to an official statement released on Friday, Mr Trong died “due to old age and serious illness”.

It comes a day after the Vietnamese government said in a surprise announcement that Mr Trong needed time to “focus on active treatment” for an unspecified medical condition. It added that the president would take over Mr Trong’s duties in running the party’s central committee, politburo and secretariat.

On that same day, the government also awarded Mr Trong the Gold Star, the highest honour given in Vietnam, for contributions to the party and country.

Mr Trong was seen as recently as late June, when he welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin on a state visit.

But after that he failed to attend several events, including the official launch of a book compiling some of his speeches.

In recent years, there were several instances where he would disappear from the public eye for long stretches of time. In 2019, he was reported to have had a stroke.

Little would be said about these absences by the state, though Mr Trong occasionally acknowledged he had health and ageing issues. Observers say the state’s discretion over the health of party leaders and government officials is one way of portraying Vietnam as a stable nation under single-party rule.

In 2018, the country passed a law classifying top officials’ health as a state secret, prompting the already tightly-controlled local media to be even more cautious. Intense speculation over his health has long thrived on social media.

Observers say he leaves behind a deep but incomplete legacy. After rising to power in 2011 he stayed on as general secretary for a rare three terms. During this period he also acted as president from 2018 to 2021.

He saw the need to open up Vietnam’s economy – under his watch, the country’s GDP per capita more than doubled and Vietnam inked a series of free trade agreements with the West and Asian neighbours. Mr Trong was seen as more keen to engage the world than his predecessors, building relationships with US leaders as well as Mr Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

At the same time, he fervently clung on to his socialist ideals. “He was a career lifelong ideologue… he was a true believer, and I think that’s why in some ways relations between Vietnam and China have grown so close,” said Zachary M Abuza, a professor and Southeast Asia expert with the National War College in Washington DC.

“He always believed in making the party clean and relevant so that the party could live with the country for another 1,000 years – that’s his quote. So he saw the fate of the Vietnamese Communist party and the nation as bound together,” said Giang Nguyen, a visiting senior fellow with the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore and former BBC Vietnamese editor.

Mr Trong launched his “blazing furnaces” campaign to root out corruption that deepened in tandem with Vietnam’s growth. Close to 200,000 officials are estimated to have been criminally charged or to have faced disciplinary action since then.

But there are few signs it has truly succeeded in stamping out the problem. The country still performs dismally in international corruption rankings. In recent months Vietnam has been rocked by one of its biggest fraud scandals ever, involving a staggering $44bn (£34bn) filched from banks.

The anti-corruption drive has been seen as sparking a critical shortage in the public service sector. It’s also been seen as contributing to instability within the Communist Party, where so many top officials have been purged – due to corruption or infighting – that very few are left as possible successors, particularly in the paramount political leadership team, the Politburo. Only two currently meet the conditions to inherit his post: Mr Lam and Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh.

“The talent pool hasn’t been prepared by Mr Trong. It shows he couldn’t control the forces within the party anymore,” said Mr Nguyen.

Dr Abuza pointed out that the anti-corruption drive in many ways “served to delegitimise the party in ways that [Trong] didn’t expect, because it exposed just how sweeping corruption is at the highest level of the party”.

During his rule Vietnam also continued to tighten its control on human rights and freedom of speech. It has jailed or deported scores of dissidents, activists and bloggers, and passed draconian laws limiting the press and internet.

His death, and the question of succession that it poses, puts Vietnam in uncharted waters. For many Vietnamese, “we share the feeling of anxiety of the unknown”, said Mr Nguyen.

“It is the end of an era. That version of communism or socialism, the old times, it’s now gone. What’s next is going to be very difficult to foresee. The system is still there, but without that veneer of ideology and ideals.”

Adidas has dropped the supermodel Bella Hadid, who is half Palestinian, from an advertising campaign for retro shoes referencing the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Israel had criticised the choice of Ms Hadid. It accused her of hostility to Israel and noted that 11 Israeli athletes had been killed by Palestinian attackers at the Munich Games.

Adidas subsequently apologised and said it would “revise” its campaign.

Ms Hadid has been a vocal supporter of the Palestinians and earlier this year donated money to support relief efforts for the war in Gaza.

BBC News has contacted Hadid’s representatives for comment.

The German sportswear company had chosen Hadid to promote its SL72 trainers, which were first launched to coincide with the 1972 Olympics.

Adidas recently relaunched the SL72 shoes as part of a series reviving classic trainers.

However images of the American model wearing the shoes prompted criticism, including on Israel’s official account on X (formerly Twitter).

“Guess who the face of their campaign is? Bella Hadid, a half-Palestinian model,” a post read on Thursday.

It referred to the attack at the 1972 games, which happened when members of the Palestinian Black September group broke into the Olympic village. In addition to the Israeli athletes, a German police officer was also killed.

Other social media users defended Ms Hadid and called for a boycott of Adidas following the move to pull the campaign.

Adidas confirmed to AFP that Hadid had been removed from the campaign.

In a statement provided to the news agency, the company said it would be “revising the remainder of the campaign” with immediate effect.

“We are conscious that connections have been made to tragic historical events — though these are completely unintentional — and we apologise for any upset or distress caused.”

Hadid, whose father is Palestinian property tycoon Mohamed Anwar Hadid, has been vocal in her support for people affected by the war in Gaza.

In an Instagram post in May, Hadid said she was “devastated at the loss of the Palestinian people and the lack of empathy coming from the government systems worldwide”.

Last month, she and her supermodel sister Gigi donated $1m (£785,000) to support Palestinian relief efforts.

The conflict in Gaza began when Hamas gunmen launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 252 back to Gaza as hostages.

Israel responded by launching a military campaign in Gaza with the aims of destroying Hamas and freeing the hostages.

More than 38,900 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

A US police officer has been fired for saying that an Indian student’s life was of “limited value” after she died last year.

The Seattle Police Department said that officer Daniel Auderer’s comments about Jaahnavi Kandula’s death were “vile” and callous”, The Seattle Times reported.

Kandula, 23, was fatally struck down in January by another police vehicle while she was crossing a street near her university.

Daniel Auderer – who was responding to the incident – was recorded laughing and saying that she was a “regular person” and the city should “just write a cheque”.

The footage was captured on his body camera while he had made a call to a colleague.

“But she is dead,” the officer was heard saying before laughing. “No, it’s a regular person. Yeah, just write a cheque,” he said, before laughing again.

“Eleven thousand dollars. She was 26, anyway. She had limited value,” he added.

The video was widely circulated on social media and sparked outrage online.

On Wednesday, Seattle Police Department’s interim chief Sue Rahr announced the policeman’s termination through a department-wide email.

His actions had brought shame on the entire department and the police profession, she wrote.

Interim chief Rahr added that his “cruel and callous laughter” and the pain it had inflicted on Kandula’s family could not outweigh Daniel Auderer’s good reputation among his colleagues and his years of service to the community.

“For me to allow the officer to remain on our force would only bring further dishonour to the entire department. For that reason, I am going to terminate his employment,” she said.

Daniel Audered had been placed under investigation after the incident.

The Office of Police Accountability – the agency that investigates police misconduct – had recommended his termination for unprofessional conduct and showing bias in recorded statements, the Seattle Times reported.

Jaahnavi Kandula was a graduate student at Northeastern University in Seattle.

The officer who rammed her with his patrol vehicle was going at 74mph (119km/h) and she was thrown more than 100ft (30m), US media reports said.

At least 40 migrants have died after the boat they were travelling in caught fire off the northern coast of Haiti, a United Nations agency says.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) says 41 others were rescued by the Haitian Coast Guard.

The vessel was travelling from Cap-Haitien to the Turks and Caicos Islands, more than 220km (137 miles) away, the IOM said.

The exact cause of the fire is not yet clear, but a local official told Reuters that people on the boat were lighting candles in a ritual to ask for safe passage, leading gasoline-filled drums to catch fire.

The injured are receiving care provided by the IOM, and 11 of them were taken to the nearest hospital, the agency said.

Tens of thousands of people flee Haiti every year, escaping poverty, lawlessness and gang violence at home.

Rival armed groups took control of the capital, Port-au-Prince, earlier this year, forcing Prime Minister Ariel Henry to resign weeks later.

Grégoire Goodstein, IOM’s chief of mission in Haiti, said: “This devastating event highlights the risks faced by children, women and men migrating through irregular routes – demonstrating the crucial need for safe and legal pathways for migration.

“Haiti’s socio-economic situation is in agony. The extreme violence over the past months has only brought Haitians to resort to desperate measures even more.”

The lack of economic opportunities, a collapsing health system and school closures are pushing many to consider migration as the only way to survive, the IOM says.

Gang violence on average killed or injured more than one person per hour in the first three months of this year, according to UN data.

More than 86,000 migrants have been forcibly returned to Haiti by neighbouring countries this year, despite the rising violence, according to the IOM.

The Caribbean nation has seen an escalation of violence following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse three years ago.

Hundreds of Kenyan police arrived in Haiti this month as part of a mission to help Haitian police fight the gangs.

Cyber-security experts and agencies around the world are warning people about a wave of opportunistic hacking attempts linked to the IT outage.

Although there is no evidence that the CrowdStrike outage was caused by malicious activity, some bad actors are attempting to take advantage.

Cyber agencies in the UK and Australia are warning people to be vigilant to fake emails, calls and websites that pretend to be official.

And CrowdStrike head George Kurtz encouraged users to make sure they were speaking to official representatives from the company before downloading fixes.

• LIVE: Follow updates on this story

“We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” he said in a blog post.

“Our blog and technical support will continue to be the official channels for the latest updates.”

His words were echoed by cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt, who runs the well-known Have I Been Pwned security website.

“An incident like this that has commanded so many headlines and has people worried is a gift to scammers,” he said.

Mr Hunt was responding to a warning from the Australian Signals Directorate (known as the ASD, the equivalent of the UK’s GCHQ or the US’s National Security Agency) which issued an alert about hackers sending out bogus software fixes claiming to be from CrowdStrike.

“Alert! We understand a number of malicious websites and unofficial code are being released claiming to help entities recover,” the notice reads.

The agency is urging IT responders to only use CrowdStrike’s website to source information and help.

The ASD warning follows calls from the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) on Friday for people to be hyper vigilante of suspicious emails or calls that pretend to be CrowdStrike or Microsoft help.

“An increase in phishing referencing this outage has already been observed, as opportunistic malicious actors seek to take advantage of the situation,” the agency said.

Whenever there is a major news event, especially one linked to technology, hackers respond by tweaking their existing methods to take into account the fear and uncertainty.

We saw the same with the Covid-19 pandemic when hackers adjusted their phishing email attacks to offer information about the virus and even pretend to have an antidote in order to hack people and organisations.

Because the IT outage has been a global news story we are seeing hackers capitalise.

According to researchers at Secureworks, there has already been a sharp rise in CrowdStrike-themed domain registrations – hackers registering new websites made to look official and potentially trick IT managers or members of the public into downloading malicious software or handing over private details.

The advice is mainly for IT managers who are the ones being affected by this as they try to get their organisations back online.

But individuals too might be targeted, so experts are warning to be cautious and only act on information from the official CrowdStrike channels.

As the global chaos subsides and systems continue to return online, the enormous IT outage which caused havoc around the world on Friday reveals a few uncomfortable truths about the foundations of our digital lives – and how fragile they might be.

The outage showed that even the platform of an enormous firm like Microsoft, with its deep pockets and huge investment in robust system security, could be knocked sideways by an accidental error in a software update issued by an independent cybersecurity company. And with catastrophic impact because Microsoft-powered computers are at the heart of so much of our tech infrastructure.

It shines a light on just how reliant we have become on that infrastructure, and how helpless we are as a result when something goes wrong that is beyond our control.

Ultimately, when these systems wobble, there is nothing you or I can do about it.

I watched an IT expert on the TV yesterday, whose advice for those caught up in the whirlwind was to “be patient”. Patience is the last thing many people felt at the time I’m sure, but honestly it was the only possible action for most of us.

• Follow live updates on this story

The outage also demonstrated, wrote Owen Sayers in Computer Weekly, “the immense risk we face if we put all our eggs into one huge world-spanning basket”.

He was referring to the huge number of businesses, services and people who use a single IT provider. It is easy and convenient – but it also means there is no Plan B if that provider suddenly has a problem.

There is an old adage that convenience is the enemy of security, and this is the biggest example of that I have ever seen.

As a consumer, it is hard to avoid this dominance – if you shop in a store and pay with a card or your phone, you are relying on someone else’s tech to process your transaction smoothly. Increasingly, you are less likely to have a choice – a number of businesses no longer accept physical cash at all.

For small businesses, budgets are tight.

“In some of the cases, the single vendor is a choice due to cost,” says Alina Timofeeva from BCS, the Institute for IT.

“The rationale is that the vendor is so big and powerful that the companies do not anticipate it could go down.”

This makes sense, but is a larger number of smaller IT providers the solution?

You might not get the huge, seismic outages if fewer people are relying on them, but you are also introducing multiple systems with multiple potential weaknesses – which could make them easier to hack.

What happened on Friday was not a cyber attack, and Microsoft is quick to point out that the outage was not its fault, although questions clearly remain about exactly how the cyber security firm CrowdStrike’s disastrous Falcon update slipped through the net.

“There will be someone in CrowdStrike who will be in a lot of trouble right now for not getting this right,” observes Prof Victoria Baines, from Gresham College in London.

“And there will be a lot of people working this weekend.”

A massive tech failure has caused travel chaos around the world, with banking and healthcare services also badly hit.

Flights have been grounded because of the IT outage – a flaw which left many computers displaying blue error screens.

There were long queues, delays and flight cancellations at airports around the world, as passengers had to be manually checked in.

Cyber-security firm CrowdStrike has admitted that the problem was caused by an update to its antivirus software, which is designed to protect Microsoft Windows devices from malicious attacks.

Microsoft has said it is taking “mitigation action” to deal with “the lingering impact” of the outage.

Here is a summary of what we know so far.

• Follow live updates on this story
• How a single update caused global havoc
• What are my rights if my flight is cancelled or delayed?
• GPs, pharmacies and airports hit by outage

This is still a little unclear.

CrowdStrike is known for producing antivirus software, intended to prevent hackers from causing this very type of disruption.

According to CrowdStrike boss George Kurtz, the issues are only impacting Windows PCs and no other operating systems, and were caused by a defect in a recent update.

“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he said.

“This is not a security incident or cyber-attack.”

What exactly was wrong with the update is yet to be revealed, but as a potential fix involves deleting a single file, it is possible that just one rogue file could be at the root of all the mayhem.

It could be some time.

CrowdStrike’s Mr Kurtz, speaking to NBC News, said it was the firm’s “mission” to make sure every one of its customers recovered completely from the outage.

“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our companies,” he said.

He has since told CNBC that while some systems can be fixed quickly, for others it “could be hours, could be a bit longer”.

CrowdStrike has issued its fix. But according to those in the know, it will have to be applied separately to each and every device affected.

Computers will require a manual reboot in safe mode – causing a massive headache for IT departments everywhere.

Something important to note here, is that personal devices like your home computer or mobile phone are unlikely to have been affected – this outage is impacting businesses.

Microsoft is advising clients to try a classic method to get things working – turning it off and on again – in some cases up to 15 times.

The tech giant said this has worked for some users of virtual machines – PCs where the computer is not in the same place as the screen.

“Several reboots (as many as 15 have been reported) may be required, but overall feedback is that reboots are an effective troubleshooting step at this stage,” it said.

It is also telling customers with more in-depth computing knowledge that they should delete a certain file – the same solution one CrowdStrike employee has been sharing on social media.

But this fix is intended for experts and IT professionals, not regular users.

The problems have emerged across the world, but were first noticed in Australia, and possibly felt most severely in the air travel industry, with more than 3,300 flights cancelled globally.

• UK airports saw delays, with long queues at London’s Stansted and Gatwick.
• Ryanair said it had been “forced to cancel a small number of flights today (19 July)” and advised passengers to log-on to their Ryanair account, once it was back online, to see what their options are.
• British Airways also cancelled several flights.
• Several US airlines, notably United, Delta and American Airlines, grounded their flights around the globe for much of Friday. Australian carriers Virgin Australia and Jetstar also had to delay or cancel flights.
• Airports in Tokyo, Amsterdam and Delhi were also impacted.

Meanwhile, the problems have also hit payment systems, banking and healthcare providers around the world.

Railway companies, including Britain’s biggest which runs Southern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express and Great Northern, warned passengers to expect delays.

In Alaska, the 911 emergency service was affected, while Sky News was off air for several hours on Friday morning, unable to broadcast.

The outage might also impact people getting paid on time.

Melanie Pizzey, head of the Global Payroll Association, told PA news agency that she’d been contacted by “numerous clients” who couldn’t access their payroll software.

She said the outage could mean firms are unable to process staff payments this week, but there may be a knock-on effect too.

“We could see a backlog with regard to processing payrolls for the coming month end, which may delay employees from receiving their monthly wage,” she said.

If you’re worried about your own, personal devices, we have some good news.

The software at the centre of this outage is generally used by businesses, which means that most people’s personal computers won’t be impacted.

That means if you’re wondering whether you need to delete a certain file to avoid your computer restarting constantly, the simple answer is no, you don’t.

It’s a reminder of the complexity of our modern digital infrastructure that CrowdStrike, a company that’s not exactly a household name, can be at the heart of such worldwide disarray.

The US firm, based in Austin, Texas, is a listed company on the US stock exchange, featuring in both the S&P 500 and the high-tech Nasdaq indexes.

Like a lot of modern technology companies, it hasn’t been around that long. It was founded a mere 13 years ago, but has grown to employ nearly 8,500 people.

As a provider of cyber-security services, it tends to get called in to deal with the aftermath of hack attacks.

It has been involved in investigations of several high-profile cyber-attacks, such as when Sony Pictures had its computer system hacked in 2014.

But this time, because of a flawed update to its software, a firm that is normally part of the solution to IT problems has instead caused one.

In its last earnings report, CrowdStrike declared a total of nearly 24,000 customers. That’s an indication not just of the size of the issue, but also the difficulties that could be involved in fixing it.

Each of those customers is a huge organisation in itself, so the number of individual computers affected is hard to estimate.

A love story between a white, heterosexual, working-class mechanic and a South Asian Muslim drag queen is shining a light on an underground LGBTQ+ subculture.

Feature film Unicorns takes the viewer to the heart of the highly secretive so-called “gaysian” scene – an amalgamation of the words gay and Asian – and introduces its glamorous drag queens.

“A lot of the queens are closeted and only have a certain number of hours on a weekend where they can actually be themselves, a lot use pseudonyms and have been ostracised from their families,” said Sally El Hosaini who co-directed the film with her partner James Krishna Floyd.

“On the surface [the gaysian scene is] extremely bright, very attractive… but underneath it’s actually a very gritty, real and quite a hardcore world,” added Floyd.

“They’re a minority within a minority… they’re getting attacked and rejected from all sides, from mainstream culture, from South Asian communities for the most part, from their religious communities for the most part and from the mainstream LGBTQ+ community as well.”

Floyd, who also wrote the screenplay, said he and El Hosaini – who is half Welsh and half Egyptian – were keen to explore “fluid identities”.

“For me personally as a half Indian, half English guy who has had sexually fluid experiences… mainstream culture is always putting all of us in very neat little boxes,” he said.

“I find that very frustrating and just so limiting.”

He said he had “always known about the gaysian scene” but was properly introduced to it by his friend Asifa Lahore, who in 2014 became the UK’s first Muslim drag queen to speak publicly about her work.

Lahore is a producer on the film.

“Everything in the film is based on either Asifa’s experiences, my own experiences or South Asian drag queens that I now know very well – it all comes from reality,” said Floyd.

Ashiq (played by Jason Patel) works in a shop by day but at night transforms into drag queen Aysha, dancing for a largely South Asian LGBTQ+ audience.

The love story begins when single father and mechanic Luke (played by Bohemian Rhapsody and former EastEnders actor Ben Hardy) mistakenly happens upon an underground club where Aysha is performing and they share a kiss before he realises she is a drag queen.

Patel, who plays Aysha, is not a real-life drag queen but many of the supporting cast are.

After a casting shout-out on social media El Hosaini and Floyd were sent audition tapes by a number of South Asian drag queens.

“A lot of those tapes were very moving,” said El Hosaini.

“Some of them were saying things like ‘I don’t even care if I get this role… the fact that this is being made about this kind of character and exists has made me feel seen’,” she said.

“Someone had recorded their tape in a bathroom and were talking very quietly because their family were in the house and and they didn’t want to be overheard.”

“It was another moment of just reminding us why we’re making this film,” added Floyd.

“If we were making this film for anyone, it was for the gaysian community… because there hasn’t been a film about them, certainly not a fictional feature film.”

Floyd and El Hosaini, who live in London and have a son together, first met when Floyd starred in El Hosaini’s directorial debut feature film My Brother the Devil.

He starred again in her second feature film The Swimmers.

Unicorns is Floyd’s directorial debut and the pair’s third time working together.

What is it like making a film with your partner?

“We first met in work, so we had that creative connection before our relationship,” said El Hosaini.

“When you do what we do and you’re so involved, we are each other’s rocks and support.”

She said with Floyd beginning work on Unicorns nine years ago, the project was “as old as our son, so actually it was like a child that had grown up in our family”.

“Us coming together to make it together just felt organic and felt like the right thing to do,” she added.

El Hosaini, whose mother is Welsh and father is Egyptian, was born in Swansea, raised in Cairo and returned to Wales at 16 to study at UWC Atlantic College in the Vale of Glamorgan.

Unicorns was supported by Ffilm Cymru Wales and will have a special screening at Green Man Festival in Powys next month.

“The industry has often seen my Egyptian side and seen me as Arab so I’ve been sent a lot of projects that always have an Arab angle,” said El Hosaini.

“But I’m equally as Welsh as I am Arab, it’s definitely in my bones, my blood and part of me and I think it’s just time until I do my Welsh projects.”

Floyd said they were both frustrated by the narrow range of stories that make it to cinema and wanted to correct that.

“This industry is not very kind to minorities and it certainly isn’t kind to minorities within minorities,” he said.

“There’s such an imbalance. How many films do we need to make about – and I can say this as a half-white man – privileged, white, middle-class, cis, heteronormative men? Do we need any more of those? No, we don’t.”

He said one of the great things about storytelling was it could “shine a bit of a light on those communities that we don’t really hear about”.

“There’s more that connects us than divides us,” added El Hosaini

Unicorns is in UK and Irish cinemas now.

How do you stage a music festival for 25,000 people when you’re under threat from a potential Russian missile attack?

That’s a question Vlad Yaremchuk has been trying to answer for the past few months.

He’s the programme director of Atlas United, Ukraine’s biggest music festival.

The event’s due to return this weekend for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.

But it’s not quite business as usual – this year’s event has relocated to a shopping mall in case of an airstrike.

When Vlad speaks to BBC Newsbeat, Atlas has just been pushed back a week after a series of deadly missile attacks, including one that hit a children’s hospital.

He admits that there’s been a lot of stress in the lead-up to this year’s event, but he’s optimistic about it going ahead.

“To finally see people coming into the festival for the first time will be exciting,” he says.

“We’ve really missed that feeling.”

Since it began in 2015 Atlas, held in Ukrainian capital Kyiv, has hosted huge names such as Kasabian, The Chemical Brothers and Liam Gallagher.

Organising a big festival takes time, but Vlad says they only got the go-ahead for 2024’s event this spring.

“Normally for a festival of this size you would need a year or more to organise it,” he says.

“We didn’t even expect to have a chance to do a festival while the war is still happening.”

But, he adds: “The reality showed us that cultural events are still possible in wartime.”

Vlad says Atlas is expecting about 25,000 fans, crew and artists to be on site, while other events have only had a maximum of 10,000.

With all those people in one place, a potential air attack is a huge concern.

Vlad says the solution has been the brand new venue – two stages erected in the car park of a Kyiv shopping centre.

“It gives us a shelter which can fit more than 100,000 people,” says Vlad.

“There will be more than enough space to get everyone evacuated quickly — and we’re talking minutes.”

Vlad says it can be challenging to convince people – who are so used to hearing air-raid sirens – to head for a shelter when the alarm is raised.

But he says there’s a plan for that too – take the festival underground.

If the crowd does have to flee to safety Vlad says there’s “an entire stage” and a bar so the music can continue.

One thing that will be missing this year is international headliners.

Vlad says they were approached but most turned it down over safety concerns.

He says he understands the decision, but “seeing musicians playing in Russia right now really ticks me off”.

“That can be frustrating,” he says.

“But if people honestly gave it a thought and decided that’s not for them because they’re scared for their life, that’s fair.”

It does mean that more homegrown acts will get a chance to take some of the top slots on the bill.

That includes Vitalii and Marina from indie band Disappeared Completely.

“People need some joy in their lives, even through these hard times,” says Vitalii.

Marina says: “It’s always nice to gather together with people and to celebrate life itself.

“To just remember the joys of everyday life, because you might not have it tomorrow.

“Appreciate these moments and appreciate the people around you while you can.”

They also say that after years of attacks from the air, they’re no longer worried about performing outside.

“We got used to this. It sounds bad, because it’s war, and we could die. But life is going on so we need to adapt,” says Vitalii.

While a festival might seem like a chance to forget about the war for a day, Ukraine’s ongoing battle against Russia is reflected by Atlas United.

The festival hopes to raise at least €2m (£1.7m), with most being spent on drones to help soldiers on the front line.

And some Ukrainian acts who’ve been raising awareness abroad are due to return to perform in their home country.

Solo artist Shmiska, who now lives in Paris, says it’s important to come back for the festival.

“People sometimes just start to lose their hope. They start to lose their dreams,” she says.

“I think, as artists, it’s our job to give people this chance to feel again, to dream again.”

Shmiska performs across Europe and says she worries people are starting to forget about Ukraine.

So she’s aiming to make her big show in Kyiv memorable, with light shows and plenty of costume changes.

“It’s such a big opportunity to feel alive again,” she says.

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.

America’s national security community made its annual pilgrimage to the mountains of Aspen in Colorado this week for a gathering notable for a looming feeling of anxiety.

One reason is that the world is more dangerous and contested than in previous years with war in Ukraine and the Middle East as well as tensions in Asia. But the issues discussed at the Aspen Security Forum also were overshadowed by political events that may define much of what happens next.

With Donald Trump accepting the US presidential nomination during the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin and questions over whether President Biden will be forced to stand aside, there was a concern that time may be running out not just for the current administration, but for the wider approach to foreign policy, which has guided America in recent years.

Allies are looking toward November’s election with ”angst” about how much they can continue to count on American leadership, Douglas Lute, a former ambassador to NATO said at the forum.

Specifically, anxiety surrounded the question of whether America’s support for Ukraine would continue.

November’s presidential election comes at a moment when the war may be shifting so that it will less be about major gains on the battlefield and more a test of wills between Russia and Ukraine, and its allies as to who can keep going.

Trump has suggested he might push for a deal, which Ukraine and its allies fear may serve Russia’s interests more than their own. The selection of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate heightened concerns about the future of America’s commitment since Mr Vance has advocated for reducing spending on Ukraine, shifting America’s focus away from Europe, and focusing on confronting China.

British officials and ministers were absent from Aspen, but officials from other European countries stressed the importance of continued US engagement with Ukraine.

“Our house is on fire in Europe. The war in Ukraine is existential,” Jonatan Vseviov, from Estonia’s Foreign Ministry told the conference.

While US military officers were wary of being drawn into politics, some sounded almost as if they were already preparing a case to make to a possible Trump administration, knowing that it likely would pressure NATO allies to increase their spending and take up a greater burden on Ukraine.

General Christopher Cavoli, America’s top general in Europe, said continued US commitment to NATO was important because European partners had changed their behaviour in recent years.

“This is a Europe that recognizes what the burden is and that it has got to be shared … this is exactly the partner that we have been looking for for three decades,” he said.

The moderator responded that they hoped someone was livestreaming his answer to the Republican convention.

There was recognition that the Republican Party’s foreign policy shift away from a more internationalist perspective went deeper than just Donald Trump.

One reason discussed at the meeting, was that the international order America built through globalisation and free trade did not always deliver benefits for American workers. That sparked domestic backlash, undermining support for continued engagement, not just in Ukraine, but more broadly.

Calls to reduce funding for Ukraine and act more unilaterally have been growing within the Republican Party.

Former Republican Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said she was’ concerned’.

She made the case that, for the US, standing firm in Ukraine would send an important message to China.

“I understand that a lot of people want to focus now just on China, but ….we have to keep driving home that credibility is not divisible. So what you do in Ukraine is actually going to matter to (China’s leader) Xi Jinping,” she said.

That view was echoed by General CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military.

“We have credibility at stake,” he said. “Ukraine matters. Unprovoked aggression in one part of the world does not stay in one part of the world.”

But Ms Rice said she also recognised that American public opinion had changed and some previous commitments were unsustainable.

“We have to realize that some of these engagements are going to be hard to sustain over a long period of time. I don’t know if any American president …. can sustain 60 billion (dollar) packages to Ukraine every six months,” she said.

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan closed the forum stressing that the Biden administration has put considerable effort into building alliances in Europe and Asia.

The reservoir of support for Ukraine in Congress and among the public was strong enough to survive any political headwinds, he said. Mr Sullivan also pointed out that international commitments had been secured for Ukraine to sustain support in the long term.

“It’s a very good feeling,” Mr Sullivan joked when asked if it was good to be out of Washington, even as journalists pressed him on President Biden’s ability to go on for another four years in office.

The Aspen foreign policy elite can feel like a bubble but in the fresh mountain air there was a sense that foreign affairs was not going to be immune from change. And whatever the result of November’s election, with a more dangerous world, the path ahead looked uncertain.

Donald Trump’s elusive wife Melania has appeared in public for the first time since the former president narrowly missed an assassin’s bullet.

Wearing Republican red she walked, alone, into the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee accompanied by classical music – a marked contrast from the country music anthems and rock ballads we’ve been hearing all week.

Glossy and glamorous, she looked more like she was walking down a catwalk than into a political convention. She seemed as inscrutable and distant as ever.

She joined him on stage after his lengthy acceptance speech, walking to the podium just before balloons rained down on thousands in the crowd. Donald Trump greeted her with a hug and the pair shared a kiss on the cheek.

He then grabbed her hand and walked across the stage as other members of the Trump family joined them.

Ever since her husband was first elected in 2016, Melania Trump has broken all the rules of normal American presidential politics.

In the White House during Trump’s first term, she was a reclusive figure compared to other first ladies, focusing on a narrow set of interests. The US national archives descibes her as having been an “ambassador for kindness” and an advocate for children’s issues.

And since her husband left office, she has refused to be seen by her husband’s side on many occasions when the public would expect her to be present.

She wasn’t there when he had his mugshot taken in Atlanta. She wasn’t there in New York when he became the first former president to be convicted of a crime. And she wasn’t there when he officially won his party’s presidential nomination, for the third time, on Monday.

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• Watch: ‘It can only be a bullet’ – Trump describes moment he was shot at
• Republicans put abortion disagreements aside at ‘unity’ convention
• The Trump family: A guide to an American dynasty

“Melania does what Melania wants,” said Mary Jordan, who wrote The Art of her Deal, a biography on the former first lady. “She is fiercely independent and won’t do something just because other people do it. She doesn’t feel any obligation to do it.”

We are now all accustomed to the fact that she doesn’t turn up at many of Donald Trump’s events, but on Monday, when he walked into the arena here in Milwaukee to a roaring welcome, greeted like a Messiah after his survival of the assassination attempt, her absence felt particularly obvious.

It was certainly noticed by the Republicans gathered here, but that didn’t mean they weren’t excited for her appearance, when it finally came.

Melania is the most enigmatic first lady in modern history and we rarely hear what she thinks.

An exception was the lengthy statement she released after the shooting targeting her husband, which read as though she may have dictated it directly.

“A monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion – his laughter, ingenuity, love of music, and inspiration,” she said.

“The core facets of my husband’s life – his human side – were buried below the political machine. Donald, the generous and caring man who I have been with through the best of times and the worst of times.”

It is traditional at party conventions for the candidate’s spouse to give a speech and tell heavily-scripted anecdotes about family life.

On Wednesday evening, Usha Vance – the wife of Trump’s newly-minted running mate JD Vance – did just that. She called her husband a “meat and potatoes” man, but – in an apparent sign of his devotion – said he now cooked her Indian vegetarian food.

And while Donald Trump’s oldest son Don Jr, middle son Eric, daughter-in-law Lara and granddaughter Kai have all spoken at this convention, Melania has declined the opportunity to speak. She very clearly does not do anything she does not want to do.

When she did introduce her husband at the 2016 convention when he first ran for president – things went horribly wrong.

She was criticised for plagiarising the speech Michelle Obama gave in 2008 when she introduced her husband Barack at the Democratic convention. Melania’s speechwriter later accepted the blame.

First ladies are always heavily scrutinised for the image they project, the causes they adopt, and the clothes they wear.

But Melania Trump is the first who was previously a professional model. She looks fabulous in photographs and is well aware of the power of her image. By offering so few photo opportunities, she makes each one infinitely more powerful.

“She is very savvy and has cultivated the mystery woman mystique by going underground and then when she does come out, it’s a much bigger deal,” says Ms Jordan.

“She doesn’t appear very often, but she does show up when Donald Trump really needs her.”

After Saturday’s attempt on his life, Melania felt MIA. But on Thursday night, as she slowly walked the stairs to the VIP section, paused at the top and waved to all corners of the arena, she showed her mastery of the power of an image.

Her absence may, at times, be her strength.

Cynthia “Cyn” Carranza meticulously scavenged for a shady parking spot in the car she called home.

The overnight custodian at Disneyland has to sleep during the day – a difficulty for anyone, let alone when you’re living in your car with two dogs. Ms Carranza says she makes $20.65 an hour (about £15.99) at the park but last summer, she couldn’t afford rent in this Southern California city where the average apartment can run more than $2,000 (about £1,550) a month.

Ms Carranza teared up as she recounted the struggles of that summer, including sneaking for showers in Disneyland’s costume department. She now shares a small apartment with her boyfriend, who also works at the park, but still makes barely enough to make ends meet.

“That’s not something that anybody should experience working a full-time job for a company like Disney,” she told the BBC.

Ms Carranza, like others who work at the park, detailed to the BBC the financial hardships that come with working at what’s supposed to be the “Happiest Place on Earth”. About 10,000 union workers at Disneyland – the first of 12 parks created around the globe – are threatening to strike over the wages and what they say are retaliatory anti-union practices.

Hundreds of workers protested outside the park this week, with an array of signs and pins showing Mickey Mouse’s gloved fist in defiance.

“Mickey would want fair pay,” workers chanted outside Disneyland near the park’s gates.

They voted almost unanimously to authorise strike action on Friday, just days before union contract negotiations for workers are set to resume.

While the vote does not mean a strike is imminent, it could set workers up to act quickly if negotiations sour. Authorisation also gives the unions leverage as talks with Disney management continue again next week.

The contract for cast members at Disneyland expired 16 June, and the current negotiations involves a coalition of unions that represent nearly 10,000 employees at the park, which includes everyone from those who work as characters and operate rides to sales, restaurant, and janitorial workers.

Union officials say about one in 10 Disneyland cast members have experienced homelessness while working at the park. A survey of employees showed 73% say they don’t make enough to cover basic expenses each month and about a third said they experienced housing insecurity within the last year.

“We’re the ones who make the magic,” says L Slaughter, a host at the Toontown-themed part of the park. “We need Disney to pay us a liveable wage.”

Ms Slaughter spent two years living in her car while working at the park. She now has a small apartment about an hour’s drive from Disneyland.

She spent a lot of that time trying to find a safe parking spot to sleep, she says, adding that staff are not allowed to sleep in the Disneyland parking lots.

“My rent just went up $200 and I won’t be able to make rent again,” she says.

Ms Slaughter makes $19.90 an hour – thanks to a minimum wage mandate passed by city voters in 2018. Disney unsuccessfully fought the wage hike, but workers say it’s still not enough to survive in Southern California.

A living wage calculator built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, says a single person with no children would need to be paid $30.48 an hour to afford to live near Disneyland in Orange County, which is about 30 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

Workers who talked to the BBC said they have kept their jobs at the park because they love the Disney brand, and they rely on the generous healthcare benefits and union-operated food bank, which some workers described as a saving-grace.

Disney says it is committed to negotiations with its “cast members” – the company’s term for employees who play princesses and pirates as well as the chefs or janitors who maintain the park.

“We respect and value our cast members and recognize the important role they play in creating happiness for our guests,” Disney said in a statement, adding that talks with the unions representing its workers will resume 22 July and they are committed to reaching a deal “that focuses on what matters most to our current cast members, helps us attract new cast, and positions Disneyland Resort for growth and the creation of more jobs”.

The last Disneyland strike was in 1984, and it lasted 22 days.

Ms Carranza described the back-breaking work she does nightly at the park – cleaning, polishing, repairing floors and sometimes installing carpets.

She said last summer living in her car was the lowest point in her life, and she credits her dogs with keeping her alive.

“I know that they’re the reason why I’m still here, why I didn’t let go,” she said. “There were times when I questioned what I was doing here and how I was going to get back on my feet.”

But even with the small studio apartment Ms Carranza now has, she says she’s still living paycheck-to-paycheck and sometimes can only afford to eat rice or noodles.

Although workers’ demands are economic, the vote to strike was called in response to complaints that workers were disciplined for wearing the Mickey badges and distributing union information in the park.

In June, the unions filed unfair labour practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board against Disney for “unlawful discipline, intimidation and surveillance of union members exercising their right to wear union buttons at work.”

Colleen Palmer, one of the negotiators from Local UFCW 324, has worked at Disneyland for nearly 37 years and makes almost $24 an hour as a “merchandise hostess”. She says she wore her union badge for less than half an hour before management told her to take it off.

Palmer says workers are responsible for the experience that customers enjoy at Disneyland, and that her loyalty and experience should be rewarded. She said workers believe the pay gap between the workers and the company’s executives is outrageous: Disney CEO Bob Iger’s compensation was $31.6 million in 2023 – hundreds of times the amount Disneyland cast members earn.

“It makes me wonder, why don’t you want to recognize me? Because I’m making you that money, so that you can buy that sports team now,” she said, referring to news that Mr Iger and his wife had taken over the LA women’s soccer team, Angel City Football Club.

The disparity between workers pay and management has been fuelling labour unrest in the United States. According to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, CEO compensation rose 1,460 percent between 1978 and 2021.

Disneyland is a unique workplace. Many consider it a career, not a job, and workers are often also fans of the Disney brand – some call it the cult of Disney.

Workers get perks like free admission to Disney parks for their family and friends. But they also say Disney is not flexible when they have a family crisis or get sick. Many have second and third jobs that Disneyland’s unpredictable schedules make challenging to juggle.

For students and retirees working part-time, it can be a dream job, but it no longer provides a living wage for people in and around Anaheim, a wealthy city whose biggest employer is Disney, workers say.

“Without us, Disney would be like anywhere else,” says Morgan, who lived in motels around Disneyland for four years with his children and wanted to be identified by his middle name only.

The breakup of Morgan’s marriage caused him to lose his housing and cheap motels were all he could afford with his Disney wages. When his children were with their mother, he often slept outside and hid in shadows to avoid police or theft.

He now has a second full-time job as a recruiter – which he can do from home – and an apartment he can afford with the combined income.

Still, he takes pride in his job selling Disney merchandise and says every cast member takes the job seriously.

“It’s not the animatronics – it’s us. At least respect us enough to pay us a decent wage.”

The mother of two women who were murdered says she has forgiven their killer, but not two police officers who took photos of their bodies.

Mina Smallman told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme that she does not feel “hatred” towards the man who killed her daughters, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, in June 2020.

But she said the Met Police officers who sent photos of their bodies to a WhatsApp group chat had “violated” the victims – and for that reason she has not forgiven them.

“Obviously what they did wasn’t as bad as murdering,” Ms Smallman said.

“But you’re telling me you have violated our girls, further?

“Because of that – them I haven’t forgiven.”

Ms Smallman, 27, and Ms Henry, 46, were stabbed to death by Danyal Hussein in June 2020.

PCs Jamie Lewis and Deniz Jaffer were deployed to guard the crime scene in Wembley, where the two sisters were found. They took pictures of their bodies, describing them as “dead birds” on a group chat, an offence for which they were each jailed for 33 months.

Ms Smallman said that when the two men were released, she attempted suicide, an incident she describes in her book A Better Tomorrow: Life Lessons in Hope and Strength.

“I just thought: ‘I don’t want to be here.’

“I’ve had enough. And yeah – I attempted suicide.”

Ms Smallman, a campaigner for women’s safety, said police needed to take the online misogynistic radicalisation of young men more seriously.

“A lot accelerated during lockdown … [young men became exposed] to dialogues that suggest that if you can’t get a girlfriend it’s because women have become more dominant and men have lost their place in society.”

“This is radicalisation that is happening to our young men, it is feeding those haters to hate even more, and giving them the tools to hurt women in their lives.”

Despite how her daughters were treated by the Met Police officers, she said she still has faith in the police.

“The majority of the police are good people.”

But she added that the Met needed reform, which was why she was “working with” authorities to “ensure that we have the police force that we deserve”.

Earlier this month she called for more black officers to be deployed in London, appearing at the launch of the Alliance for Police Accountability (APA), a group of bodies fighting racism and misogyny in the police.

Commenting on the recent crossbow attack that killed Carol, Hannah and Louise Hunt, the wife and two of the daughters of the BBC’s John Hunt, Ms Smallman said she “grieves all over again”.

“It just takes me back to the day when I was told [my daughters] were dead.

“Now I grieve, for them, for us, and for the family.

“Their life will never be the same again.”

Ms Smallman knows the mother of Sarah Everard, who was raped and murdered by a Met Police officer.

“When I talk to these mums, they are so broken, really broken. And they’re grateful to me, because they know I’m talking about all of us.”

If you have been affected by any of the issues in this story, help and support is available at BBC Action Line.

Speeding along a road in the foothills of the Swiss Alps, Fariba Hashimi rises out of the saddle of her £15,000 bike and works the pedals even harder to close the gap between her and her sister, Yulduz, a few metres up ahead.

Training rides like this are the last steps on a journey that began with the two siblings from rural Afghanistan racing in disguise on borrowed bikes, before having to escape when the Taliban came to power.

Now they’re on their way to the Olympic Games in Paris. And, despite a Taliban ruling banning women from sport, they will compete under their country’s flag.

In a world where many elite athletes take up sport almost as soon as they can walk, Fariba, 21, and Yulduz, 24, came late to cycling.

They grew up in Faryab, one of the most remote and conservative provinces in Afghanistan, where it was practically unheard of to see women on bicycles.

Fariba was 14 and Yulduz 17 when they saw an advert for a local cycle race and decided to take part.

There were two problems; they didn’t have a bike and they didn’t know how to ride.

The sisters borrowed a neighbour’s bike one afternoon. After a few hours, they felt they had got the hang of it.

Their next challenge was to avoid their family finding out what they were doing because of the stigma around women taking part in sport in conservative areas of Afghanistan.

The sisters used false names and covered themselves up, wearing big baggy clothing, large headscarves and sunglasses so people didn’t recognise them.

Race day dawned, and incredibly the sisters came first and second.

“It felt amazing,” says Fariba. “I felt like a bird who could fly.”

They kept on entering races and kept on winning until their parents eventually found out when they saw pictures of them in the local media.

“They were upset at first. They asked me to stop cycling,” Fariba says. “But I didn’t give up. I secretly continued,” she smiles.

It didn’t come without dangers – people tried to hit them with cars or rickshaws as they rode or threw stones at them as they cycled past.

“People were abusive. All I wanted to do was win races,” says Yulduz.

And the situation was about to get worse.

In 2021, four years after the sisters started riding, the Taliban retook control of the country and clamped down on women’s rights, restricting their access to education and limiting how they could travel. They also banned women from taking part in sport.

Yulduz and Fariba had dreamed of one day competing in the Olympics. Now they knew if they wanted to race at all they had to leave Afghanistan.

Using contacts in the cycling community they managed to secure seats on an Italian evacuation flight, along with three teammates.

Once in Italy, the women joined a cycling team and got proper coaching for the first time.

“Back in Afghanistan, we didn’t have professional training,” says Yulduz. “All we used to do was take our bikes and ride.”

But leaving their homeland and family was not easy.

“The biggest thing for me is to be away from my mother,” says Fariba. “I never thought that because of cycling I would be separated from my brothers and sisters.”

“I’ve sacrificed a lot.”

The Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan also threw into doubt whether the country would even be allowed to compete at the Olympics.

National Olympic Committees are supposed to select athletes for the Games without any government interference.

As the Taliban’s ban on women playing sport breaks this rule, by preventing women being chosen for Afghanistan’s team, it led to calls for the country to be banned from the Olympics – as it had been when the militant group was last in power.

But the International Olympic Committee wanted to find a way to allow Afghan women to compete at the Games.

Behind the scenes talks took place between the heads of Afghan sporting bodies, including some now living in exile, about putting together a special team to represent the country in Paris.

As time ticked by, and Paris 2024 got ever closer, it looked as if no Afghan athletes would be at the Games.

Then, in June, International Olympic Committee announced that it had arranged for a special gender-equal team representing Afghanistan to go the Paris Olympics. It would be made up of three women and three men. And both the sisters are among them.

“This was a big surprise for both of us,” says Fariba.

“We always dreamt of taking part in the Olympic Games, this is our dream come true,” Yulduz adds.

“Despite all the rights that were taken from us we can show that we can achieve great success, we will be able to represent 20 million Afghan women.”

The IOC say no Taliban officials will be allowed to attend Paris 2024.

The sisters are preparing for the Olympic road race event while riding for a development team run and funded by the UCI and based at the World Cycling Centre, an ultra-modern facility in the Swiss town of Aigle.

The elite facilities are a world away from the dusty roads in Afghanistan where Yulduz and Fariba first taught themselves to cycle.

But their spirit remains the same.

“We are each other’s strength – I support her and she supports me,” says Yulduz.

“Our achievement belongs to Afghanistan,” adds Fariba. “This belongs to Afghanistan women. I am going to the Olympics because of them.”

The UN’s top court has said Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is against international law, in a landmark opinion.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) said Israel should stop settlement activity in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and end its “illegal” occupation of those areas and the Gaza Strip as soon as possible.

In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the court had made a “decision of lies”.

The court’s advisory opinion is not legally binding but still carries significant political weight. It marks the first time the ICJ has delivered a position on the legality of the 57-year occupation.

The ICJ, based at The Hague in the Netherlands, has been examining the issue since the beginning of last year, at the request of the UN General Assembly.

The court was specifically asked to give its view on Israel’s policies and practices towards the Palestinians, and on the legal status of the occupation.

Delivering the court’s findings, ICJ President Nawaf Salam said it had found that “Israel’s… continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal.”

“The State of Israel is under the obligation to bring an end to its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible,” he said.

He said Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 did not bring Israel’s occupation of that area to an end because it still exercises effective control over it.

The court also said Israel should evacuate all of its settlers from the West Bank and East Jerusalem and pay reparations to Palestinians for damages caused by the occupation.

Israel has built about 160 settlements housing some 700,000 Jews in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967. The court said the settlements were illegal. Israel has consistently disputed that they are against international law.

The ICJ said Israel’s “policies and practices amount to annexation of large parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory”, which it said was against international law, adding that Israel was “not entitled to sovereignty” over any part of the occupied territories.

Israel claims sovereignty over the whole of Jerusalem, the eastern half of which it captured in the 1967 Middle East war. It considers the city its indivisible capital – something which is not accepted by the vast majority of the international community.

Among its other far-reaching conclusions, the court said Israeli restrictions on Palestinians in the occupied territories constituted “systemic discrimination based on, inter alia, race, religion or ethnic origin”. It also said Israel had illegally exploited the Palestinians’ natural resources and violated their right to self-determination.

The court also advised states to avoid any actions, including providing aid or assistance, that would maintain the current situation.

Israel’s prime minister swiftly issued a blunt statement rejecting what the court had determined.

“The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land – not in our eternal capital Jerusalem, nor in our ancestral heritage of Judea and Samaria” (the West Bank), Mr Netanyahu said in a statement.

“No decision of lies in The Hague will distort this historical truth, and similarly, the legality of Israeli settlements in all parts of our homeland cannot be disputed.”

But the court’s findings were welcomed by the Palestinians.

Hussein Al Sheikh, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the Palestinians’ main umbrella group, called it “a historic victory for the rights of the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination. And the collapse and defeat of the Judaization project through confiscation, settlement, displacement, and racist practices against a people under occupation.

“The international community must respect the opinion of international justice and force Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories,” he said.

The court’s findings will now go to the UN General Assembly, which will decide how to respond, including the option of adopting a resolution. That would be significant and could constitute a catalyst for negotiations and set the legal parameters for a future negotiated settlement.

This case is separate from another active case brought to the ICJ by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in the war in Gaza.

A selection of striking news photographs taken around the world this week.

From causing seismic activity at Harry Styles concerts to Swifties boosting the UK economy during the Eras Tour, the power of teenage female pop fans shouldn’t be underestimated.

For playwright Yve Blake, the danger of dismissing these youngsters is the inspiration behind her new comedy musical Fangirls.

Following the life of 14-year-old Edna, who is obsessed with a boy band resembling One Direction, Fangirls explores “what it means to love something without apology”.

The idea came to Blake in 2015 after she witnessed a pivotal moment in the lives of thousands of teenage girls – Zayn Malik left One Direction.

Despondent and heartbroken fans across the world were shown weeping inconsolably – but for Blake, something even more interesting caught her eye.

“People started calling these young girls crazy, hysterical and psycho,” the writer explains. “I asked myself the question – would the same words be used to describe male football fans?

“The girls screaming at the top of their lungs at Taylor Swift concerts are cringe, but men running around with their tops off and fist pumping the air because England scored a goal are just supporting their country.

“It seems like there’s definitely a double standard there.”

But the musical doesn’t just praise fangirls.

“It’s a lot more nuanced than that,” Blake explains. “We look at the dark side of worshipping celebrities as well as praising the decision for girls to make an empowered choice to love something free of judgement.

“I’d describe it as a glittery trojan horse.”

The hit musical premiered in 2019 in Blake’s home country, Australia, and has been met with critical acclaim across three runs.

Its stint at the Sydney Opera House was awarded five stars by Time Out, which said “it deals with the exquisite pain of being a teenager, of having little agency and lesser respect from the world around you”.

In a four-star review, the Guardian called it “witty and agile” and said it “balances serious social reflections with a loving twinkle in its eye”.

Blake says the show “retains its fearlessness, cheekiness and naughtiness from Australia, but the screws have really been tightened”.

She is both excited and nervous about bringing the show to the Lyric theatre in Hammersmith, west London.

“Brits are definitely a lot more repressed than Aussies, so I don’t know if they can match the energy of previous runs,” Blake says.

At one point in the show, the stage is transformed into a concert venue and audience participation is encouraged.

“Theatre is so polite normally, but Fangirls is about unleashing your feral excitement and screaming like you’re 14 again.”

In Australia, Blake had no problem getting the audience involved – she tells the BBC that an older lady in the front row accidentally flashed the actors because she “was so in the moment and excitedly dancing”.

Playing the lead role of Edna is Jasmine Elcock, who got a golden buzzer on Britain’s Got Talent in 2016.

The singer was 14 when she reached the talent show final, and this is her first major acting role.

“I’m excited for people to be able to see the world through the eyes of a young girl,” Elcock says.

As a self-proclaimed fangirl, Elcock can relate to the feelings and emotions that the play delves into.

“I am a mega fangirl and at the moment I am absolutely obsessed with Little Simz. I can spend hours in my bedroom dancing and singing along to her,” she says.

In comparison, writer Blake explains she was a “victim of my own cringe growing up”.

“I was socially embarrassed to be a fangirl so I definitely repressed it as a teenager,” she says.

“As an adult that’s what made me interested in exploring this topic – I woke up to the fact that my cringe was a symptom of internalised misogyny because it’s only the things that teenage girls like that are ever called cringeworthy.”

It seems that for Blake, this play is a way for her to tell her younger self, and all teenage girls out that, that it’s OK to let lose and embrace being a fangirl.

China-born actress Cheng Pei-pei, who starred in Oscar-winning film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, has died in San Francisco at the age of 78.

A pioneer of martial arts roles for female actors, Cheng became a major performer in action films after she starred in Come Drink with Me by King Hu in 1966. The film achieved critical acclaim and won Cheng international attention.

After moving to the US she inspired a new generation of directors from East Asia to Hollywood to make female-driven swordplay films.

Cheng’s family said she had been privately battling a neurodegenerative brain disease with symptoms similar to Parkinson’s since 2019 and passed away on Wednesday.

“Our mom wanted to be remembered by how she was: the legendary Queen of Martial Arts… a versatile, award-winning actress whose film and television career spanned over six decades, not only in Asia but internationally as well,” her family wrote on Facebook.

Born in Shanghai in 1946, Cheng moved to Hong Kong in 1962 and soon won acclaim as an actor with the release of Come Drink with Me. The film is considered one of the best examples of “wuxia” films – a period movie genre celebrating legendary martial artists from ancient China.

In the film she played the role of Golden Swallow, the sister of an important leader who was kidnapped by a band of thugs. A kung-fu master, her character was dispatched to rescue her brother.

The film, selected as the Hong Kong entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 39th Academy Awards, launched her career at the age of 19.

Coupled with its 1968 sequel, Golden Swallow, the role saw Cheng win scores of parts in martial arts films as a fearless swordswoman.

Her character went on to establish the motif of the lone female assassin, sent out to seek revenge. The genre would heavily influence Quentin Tarantino’s box office hits, Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2.

Cheng moved to California in the early 1970s and played dozens of roles as an iconic action heroine during the golden age of Hong Kong martial arts films.

Her biggest role came in 2000, in director Ang Lee’s wuxia-inspired Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where she played the villain, Jade Fox. It was one of the first mainstream martial arts films to feature a female lead.

The film became a global hit, winning 10 Academy Awards nominations, including Best Picture. It earned $128 million at the North American box office and won Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, as well as at the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs.

It became the first foreign-language film to gross more than $100 million worldwide.

Her final role was in the live-action Disney version of “Mulan” in 2020, where she played as the matchmaker to the eponymous heroine.

Her Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon co-star Michelle Yeoh hailed Cheng in a message posted to Instagram. “We will miss your kindness and shining talent,” she wrote.

After her illness was diagnosed five years ago, Cheng chose not to make her condition public and instead spent time with her four children and grandchildren.

Her family said she had requested that instead of flowers, donations be made to the Brain Support Network (BSN) where she donated her brain.

Last week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford posted a video online with a message for his Canadian province.

It seemed like a typical innocuous political advertisement – Mr Ford sporting a casual black polo shirt and a blue apron, standing at a barbecue grilling burgers, cans of beer at hand.

“It’s summertime in Ontario,” the premier said, beaming into the camera.

Instead, the video was a shot across the bow, with the premier launching an interactive map of local breweries, wineries and distilleries.

It was a strategic move in the midst of liquor labour dispute that has snarled summer alcohol sales in Canada’s most populous province.

For the first time in its history, workers at Ontario’s liquor retailer are on strike. The battle has shone a spotlight on the province’s peculiar and, some say, outdated liquor control system.

On 5 July, the more than 9,000 employees of the provincially-owned Liquor Board of Ontario (LCBO) walked off the job after negotiations for a new collective agreement between their union and Mr Ford’s government fell apart. The LCBO then shuttered all its 650 stores for at least two weeks.

This week, the Ontario Public Services Employees Union (OPSEU) returned to the bargaining table with the province. But talks resumed after another salvo from Mr Ford: the premier has promised to accelerate plans to put canned cocktails in privately-run retailers – the primary sticking point for the union.

For a brief moment on Friday, it seemed the dispute was resolved, after the union representing LCBO workers announced that a tentative deal had been reached that would reopen liquor stores in a few days.

But it backtracked during a scheduled news conference with reporters that lasted just two minutes, during which they claimed that Mr Ford’s government had refused to sign their return-to-work order.

“We were prepared to come here to announce a deal,” said union spokesperson Katie Arnup. “We do not have a deal. The strike continues.”

Soon after, the LCBO told its side of the story: It accused the workers’ union of negotiating in “bad faith”, saying it introduced new demands around money that should have been dealt with at the bargaining table. It also vowed to file an unfair labour complaint against the union, signalling that the fight is not yet over.

The LCBOs scattered through Ontario today – generally well-stocked, clean and some consumers will argue, overpriced – are the product of a nearly century-old decision that gave the Crown corporation control over the distribution and sale of liquor in the province.

For years, the whole system maintained distinctive traces of temperance-era policy.

Customers were required to obtain a separate liquor permit before placing an order with a clerk, who could deny any order they believed was too large. Alcohol was not openly displayed. Stores were hidden away from main streets, and purchases were packed away in discrete paper bags.

Slowly, starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the LCBO evolved into a more consumer-friendly operation, now with wine tasting and free drink samples and a glossy LCBO-branded food and drink magazine. (Though self-service, which allows customers to grab their preferred alcohol directly off store shelves, was only fully phased in by the late 1980s).

Ontarians could get beer from the brewer consortium-owned The Beer Store and, later, in the 1990s, Ontario-made wine from The Wine Rack, owned by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

But for the most part the LCBO has enjoyed an iron-clad monopoly on Ontario alcohol sales.

As most other provinces, like Alberta, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island, moved to liberalise their liquor sales and allow for privately-run stores, Ontario stayed mostly the same.

In 2015, things started to shift. The first grocery stores in Ontario were authorised to sell six-packs of beer – a change described at the time as the biggest shake-up to alcohol sales since Prohibition.

“It was one small purchase for a politician, one giant leap for Ontario beer consumers,” read one article in the Toronto Star of the very first grocery store beer purchase by then Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Today, 450 grocery stores across the province are licensed to sell beer, wine and cider.

So amid the strike, Ontarians are not facing an entirely dry summer. They can still place limited LCBO delivery orders online, and purchase wine, beer and cider from some stores.

A bigger change is now around the corner.

Starting this month, convenience stores, big-box stores and grocers will all be eligible to sell wine, beer, cider and ready-to-drink cocktails like hard seltzers.

OPSEU says pre-made cocktails pose an existential crisis to the LCBO’s business.

“This is our line in the sand and we are making history,” said president JP Hornick on the first day of the strike.

“We are here today because of the Ford government’s plan to try and expand privatisation of alcohol sales… That puts every Ontarian at risk.”

And, OPSEU says, the change threatens the C$2.5bn ($1.83bn; £1.42bn) LCBO sales net for provincial coffers.

But Mr Ford argues the plan will give small businesses a shot at the market while still leaving the LCBO with a considerable competitive advantage.

Under the new plan, the LCBO remains the only retailer of high-alcohol spirits like gin and whisky, as well as the only wholesaler and primary distributor of alcohol in Ontario.

“Keep in mind when, when you’re the wholesaler, that’s where you make money,” the premier said last week.

The proposal also gives Mr Ford a chance to deliver on a pledge in time for the next election, currently scheduled for 2026.

“He campaigned on this,” said Walid Hejazi at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

“It’s a winning issue for the Conservatives,” added Mr Hejazi, who noted he worked as a consultant for the LCBO about 15 years ago.

“The province is proposing a strategy that will lower the price I have to pay and make it more convenient… who doesn’t want cheaper alcohol and more convenience?”

Another problem for the LCBO is that the sting of the LCBO’s strike has been dulled considerably by the small amount of liquor liberalisation the province already has.

Ontarians, for the most part, are not up in arms, with access to alcohol at hundreds of wineries, grocery stores and beer stores that remain open.

“What if you went on strike and hardly anyone noticed?” read the first line of a Globe and Mail editorial.

Public polling has seemed to reflect the ambivalence, with just 15% of Ontarians saying they have been personally affected by the strike.

(A tourism industry group says the strike is affecting the operations of 35% of poll respondents in the sector due to limited product availability and slow fulfillment).

But they aren’t necessarily on Team Ford, either. An internal poll by Mr Ford’s government indicates that while many support liquor liberalisation, a little over half back the strike action.

Many Ontarians did, however, take notice of the Conservative premier’s interactive alcohol retail map, which may have annoyed more voters than the shuttered stores.

The province’s efforts to unveil an alcohol-finder soon after the strike began raised questions about the government’s priorities, with one resident suggesting a better use would be a map of family doctors that are accepting new patients.

Dr Adil Shamji, a provincial Liberal politician, said he “routinely” gets calls from constituents for help finding doctors, childcare or affordable housing.

“Never, including after this strike, have I had people calling my office asking for help in finding booze,” he said.

Dr Shamji said he wants both sides to get back to get a deal done, one with protections for the LCBO.

For his part, Mr Ford says he is ready to keep negotiating but on canned cocktails at least, he is not budging.

“If they want to negotiate over [ready-to-drink beverages], the deal’s off. I’m gonna repeat that: that ship has sailed,” he said.

Former North Korean diplomat Tae Yong-ho has been named the new leader of South Korea’s presidential advisory council on unification.

This makes him the highest-ranking defector among the thousands who have resettled in the South – and the first to be given a vice-ministerial job.

Tae, 62, was Pyongyang’s deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom before he fled to South Korea in 2016.

Pyongyang has denounced him as “human scum” and accused him of embezzling state funds and other crimes.

Mr Tae became the first former North Korean to win a seat in South Korea’s 2020 National Assembly.

He failed to secure a second term in parliamentary elections in April, but in his new role, he will be be advising South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s office on peaceful Korean unification.

“He is the right person to help establish a peaceful unification policy based on liberal democracy and garner support from home and abroad,” the presidential office said on Thursday.

Born in Pyongyang in 1962, Mr Tae entered the foreign service at the age of 27 and spent almost 30 years working under three generations of the ruling Kim dynasty.

He said in earlier statements that he left North Korea because he did not want his children to have “miserable lives”. He also cited disgust with Kim Jong Un’s regime and expressed admiration for South Korea’s democracy.

In a memoir published this year, Mr Tae wrote about the excesses of the North Korean elite and the depths of the personality cult built around the Kims.

Since his defection, he has advocated for the use of “soft power” to weaken the Kim regime and called for prisoner swaps between the North and the South.

Tensions between the Koreas have risen over the past few months, with Seoul resuming propaganda broadcasts towards the North on Friday, in response to Pyongyang floating thousands of trash-carrying balloons into the South.

Reports based on satellite imagery also suggest that North Korea may be strengthening its military presence and building walls along its border with the South.

As of December last year, some 34,000 individuals have defected from the North to the South, according to estimates from Seoul’s Unification Ministry.

Many do so by crossing into China and then to South Korea. In South Korea, they automatically receive citizenship and are given some resettlement money.

Earlier this week, Seoul’s spy agency cofirmed another high-profile defection of a former diplomat most recently stationed in Cuba.

Local reports identified the man as 52-year-old Ri Il Kyu and quoted him as saying that he fled because of “disillusionment with the North Korean regime and a bleak future”.

“Every North Korean thinks at least once about living in South Korea,” the Chosun Ilbo newspaper quoted him as saying.

Last Sunday, South Korea marked its very first North Korean Defectors’ Day, during which Mr Yoon Suk Yeol promised better financial support for defectors and tax incentives for companies that hire them.

US journalist Evan Gershkovich has been found guilty of espionage by a Russian court and sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony, after a secretive trial decried as a “sham” by his employer, his family and the White House.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter was first arrested last March while on a reporting trip in the city of Yekaterinburg, about 1,600km (1,000 miles) east of Moscow, by security services.

Prosecutors accused him of working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), accusations that Gershkovich, the WSJ and the US vociferously deny.

It marks the first conviction of a US journalist for espionage in Russia since the Cold War ended more than 30 years ago.

Both sides in the trial have 15 days to appeal against the verdict, the judge said.

“This disgraceful, sham conviction comes after Evan has spent 478 days in prison, wrongfully detained, away from his family and friends, prevented from reporting, all for doing his job as a journalist,” Wall Street Journal publisher Almar Latour and Editor in Chief Emma Tucker said in a statement.

“We will continue to do everything possible to press for Evan’s release and to support his family.

“Journalism is not a crime, and we will not rest until he’s released. This must end now.”

Western politicians have roundly condemned the verdict. US President Joe Biden said Mr Gershkovich had “committed no crime” and was “targeted by the Russian government because he is a journalist and an American”.

“Evan has endured his ordeal with remarkable strength,” Mr Biden added. “Journalism is not a crime. We will continue to stand strong for press freedom in Russia and worldwide, and stand against all those who seek to attack the press or target journalists.”

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Russia was punishing journalism with its “politicised legal system”, and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer described the sentence as “despicable”.

Washington accuses Russia of holding Gershkovich as a bargaining chip, to be used for a possible prisoner swap with Russian citizens in foreign jails.

But Moscow knows that the US is prepared to make swaps in order to release its own citizens, and the two countries are known to have been discussing such a swap.

Russian observers say a quick conviction could mean that an exchange is imminent. According to Russian judicial practice, an exchange generally requires a verdict to be in place already.

In February Russian President Vladimir Putin hinted at a possible exchange in an interview with US journalist Tucker Carlson.

It is thought he was referring to Vadim Krasikov, a Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) hitman serving a life sentence in Germany for shooting dead a former Chechen rebel commander in Berlin.

Evan Gershkovich’s trial began last month, and the last two days’ proceedings had originally been scheduled for August. Prosecutors had asked for an 18-year prison sentence.

But in an unexpected move, the hearing was brought forward to Thursday, and the judge gave the verdict late on Friday afternoon.

In a charging indictment, prosecutors accused Gershkovich, 32, of acting “under instructions from the CIA” to collect “secret information” about a factory that produces tanks in the Sverdlovsk region.

The reporter has consistently denied the accusations, and in a statement on Thursday the WSJ called the trial a “shameful sham” and his detention an “outrage”.

A number of other high-profile US citizens – including Paul Whelan – remain detained in Russian prisons. Mr Whelan was detained in 2018 and accused of espionage.

In his statement on Thursday Mr Biden said he had “no higher priority than seeking the release and safe return of Evan, Paul Whelan and all Americans wrongfully detained and held hostage abroad”.

A collection of 3,404 eggs have been seized in Australia after a European operation into the illegal bird trade.

Investigators discovered the haul – believed to be worth A$400,000 to A$500,000 (£207,000 – £259,000) – at a property in Granton, Tasmania on 9 July.

The eggs had been blown – or hollowed out – meaning they only had ornamental value.

A 62-year-old man was being investigated but no arrests had been made, according to officials.

Environmental and wildlife crime has become one of the world’s largest and most profitable crime sectors and continues to grow as it pushes many species to the brink of extinction.

It is expected that the Australian suspect will appear in court at a later date for offences in contravention of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act 1999.

“[The man] is alleged to have been involved in the collection and harvesting of bird eggs from the wild and trading of both Australian native and CITES-listed bird eggs with people overseas,” a spokesperson from the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) said.

CITES-listed means a species is listed in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an international agreement between governments that aims to protect endangered plants and animals from international trade.

Analysis of the eggs is now underway to confirm what species they belong to, but they are believed to include rare and threatened species facing a high extinction risk.

Investigators believe they include eggs from the forty-spotted pardalote, which is found only on Tasmania’s Bruny Island, the swift parrot and the shy albatross.

The eggs in this collection were all blown or hollowed eggs, meaning the egg white and yolk had been removed.

In 2023, European authorities launched an investigation in relation to the illegal harvesting, collecting, trading, buying and selling of bird eggs within Europe and internationally.

A number of search warrants were undertaken resulting in the seizure of over 56,000 eggs.

CITES estimates international wildlife trade is worth billions of dollars – ranging from live animals, to products derived from them.

More than 40,000 species are covered by the agreement, with more than 180 countries agreeing, including Australia.

Tasmanian ecologist Dr Sally Bryant told ABC News that egg collecting “was probably happening more than any of us realise”.

She said: “We are well aware of these sorts of activities, but they’re very, very outdated — they are morally, ethically, legally corrupt.”

Collections of this size were put together by “skilled operators” over “many years”, she added.

The interference of threatened and migratory birds can carry a penalty of seven years imprisonment, a fine of A$138,600 or both.

The export of Australian native specimens, including eggs, and the export or import of specimens, including eggs, on the CITES list has a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment, a fine A$330,000, or both.

The possession of CITES-listed specimens, including eggs, can carry a penalty of five years imprisonment, a fine of A$330,000 or both.

Tanya Plibersek, Minister for the Environment and Water, said: “Illegal trafficking and wildlife crime is fast becoming a threat for many of our species that are already at risk of extinction.

“We have to stamp out this terrible trade which sees our native animals captured in the Aussie bush and sent overseas to be sold.”

Donald Trump took the stage on Thursday night at the Republican National Convention like a conquering hero. He had cheated death. His Democratic opponents were tearing themselves apart.

His loyalists, who now fill the ranks of his party, packed the Milwaukee arena and cheered enthusiastically throughout his hour-and-a-half speech.

He pledged to serve all Americans if elected then recounted, in a subdued, but almost messianic tone, his brush with a spray of bullets. Some delegates even wore bandages over their right ears like their injured political idol in tribute to him.

“I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God,” he said. “Over the last few days, many people have said it was a providential moment.” He spoke of dropping to the ground as bullets flew past him and how his supporters had “great sorrow on their faces”.

“When I rose, surrounded by Secret Service, the crowd was confused because they thought I was dead,” he said.

The unity message and its powerful delivery made for a unique convention speech and a remarkable Trump one. But the rest of his speech was more traditional convention fare.

Although he called for ending the “partisan witch hunts” against him, he avoided the extended forays into 2020 election denial that have at times dominated his rally speeches, and he mostly replaced his normal pointed attacks on individual opponents with calls for unity.

There was classic Trump in there too – dark and false claims, sometimes during extended improvisations.

Trump’s performance hinted that for all the talk of a changed man after the attempt on his life and for all the more organised, focused operation behind him, the former president is still inclined to veer off-script, even in the most momentous of occasions.

The question many Americans could be wondering now is which version of Trump will lead the country should he beat Democrat Joe Biden in November. Looking back at the last four days offers some clues.

The address, weakly delivered though it may have been, still represented the culmination of a remarkable stretch for the former president, starting with President Joe Biden’s disastrous presidential debate performance in Atlanta three weeks ago that prompted an uprising in his Democratic Party.

Since then, the US Supreme Court ruled that Trump had broad immunity from criminal prosecution, a judge delayed sentencing for his New York conviction in a hush-money case and another judge entirely dismissed the case against him for mishandling national security documents.

Then he was nearly assassinated. The attempt on his life by a 20-year-old gunman left Trump’s face bloodied and provided the iconic image that was emblazoned on T-shirts and signs at the convention.

All of this meant he and his supporters converged on Milwaukee with a sense that their time had come.

For four slickly produced and relentlessly on-message evenings, the Republican party positioned itself as a welcoming place for all Americans and the former president as a uniting force who would return the nation to greatness.

While there were still partisan speakers throwing red meat to the crowd, they were largely limited to the early-evening slots, when fewer Americans were tuned in to the proceedings.

As the final hour each night arrived, the focus softened and a string of speakers described the former president in deeply personal terms.

• The Trump family: A guide to an American dynasty

It began on Monday, with Trump receiving an exuberant welcome as he entered the convention centre for his first public appearance since the shooting.

He sat in the VIP section of the building and watched as model and social media influencer Amber Rose defended him against accusations of racism: “Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re black, white, gay or straight.”

On Tuesday, former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders recounted Trump hugging her young son at the White House while Lara Trump painted her father-in-law as “an amazing grandfather”.

Earlier that evening, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who had been one of Trump’s fiercest critics on the 2024 Republican primary campaign trail, was urging voters who didn’t support Trump “100% of the time” to back his re-election.

“When times are really tough, when he’s got everything to lose and nothing to gain,” Steve Witkoff, a friend of the former president, told the audience, “Donald Trump shows up, and he’s there for you.”

Trump’s first term in office was marked by sharp political divisions within American society. The day after he was inaugurated, millions marched through the streets of Washington in protest.

His attempts to ban nationals from a list of Muslim-majority countries caused chaos at American airports early in his presidency and border restrictions implemented later led to an outcry about crying children separated from their parents at detention centres.

Trump’s four years in office ended with him refusing to accept his defeat in the presidential election – denialism that culminated in the 6 January riot at the US Capitol, where thousands of his supporters attempted to block certification of President Biden’s victories.

He was denounced by many in his own party, and faced a second impeachment by the House of Representatives. Although he was acquitted in a Senate trial, seven Republicans broke ranks and voted for his conviction. After leaving office, the former president was indicted four times, found culpable for sexual assault by a civil court and convicted of fraud.

That was then, however, and here in Wisconsin – within the security bubble of the Republican National Convention – it was decidedly different now.

The overriding message from the Republicans this week was that those divisions and distractions are things of the past, and that the Trump that America sees today is not the one they might remember from his first White House tenure.

If the rest of the nation agrees, it would represent a remarkable comeback story or a collective act of political amnesia, depending on one’s perspective.

“I think that we really now are the party of unity and inclusiveness,” said Jennifer McGrath, a delegate from Las Vegas, Nevada. “We really are the place to be at this point.”

David Botkins, a member of the Virginian Republican Party’s State Central Committee, said he thought the assassination attempt had changed Trump and that he would be “different, better and more effective” in a second presidential term.

“I think the policies are going to be the same, the conservatism is going to be the same, but there may be a tenderness and a compassion and a gratitude and a respect for divine providence that will inform the tone with which he conducts himself as president for the next four years.”

As for those policies and proposals, the Republican convention offered scant details.

The first three nights of the convention each had a theme – the economy, safety and foreign policy. They formed a framework for the former president’s acceptance speech and offer a useful guide for the key points the party is seeking to emphasise in the campaign ahead.

While Trump only mentioned President Biden by name once, he noted that “this administration” was presiding over soaring inflation (which has now eased), knowing that economic concerns are the bread-and-butter of bids to oust an incumbent officeholder.

Crime and immigration, two issues on which Republicans joined at the hip all week, served as the centrepiece on “safety” night. Polls show that a majority of Americans now favour lowering immigration levels and support Trump’s call for removing millions of undocumented migrants residing in the US. During Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s speech, some convention attendees waved pre-printed signs reading “mass deportation now”.

Conflicts abroad were another prong of the Republican case against Mr Biden. In a particularly dramatic moment on Wednesday, families of six of the 13 US soldiers killed by a car bomb during the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan took the stage to blame the current president for the deaths and claim that the president wasn’t fit to lead the nation’s military.

“With our victory in November, the years of war, weakness and chaos will be over,” Trump said in his speech.

And while there were more specific policy discussions in events held on the sidelines of the convention, they took place well away from prime-time network television cameras.

For instance, on Monday, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, hosted a “policy fest”, where former Trump administration officials and Republican politicians offered their views on topics like foreign policy, education, immigration, the economy and energy.

The Heritage Foundation is behind the 1,000-page Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump presidency, which has generated controversy, media attention and relentless attacks from Democrats – and many of the speakers defended their efforts to provide a detailed plan for a new Republican administration.

On Thursday, Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita made it clear what he thought of these outside efforts, describing Project 2025 – which many officials from the first Trump administration are part of – as a “pain in the ass”.

“The issues that are going to win us this campaign are not the issues that they want to talk about,” he said.

Eight years ago, when Donald Trump first ran for president, the Republican National Convention in Cleveland was a sometimes chaotic event, with then-establishment conservatives making last-ditch efforts to deny him the nomination.

Trump’s 2024 campaign is run by wily operatives, rather than political fringe characters, and they kept the convention participants on a tight script this week. The party, from the top to the grass-roots, has been fully remade in the former president’s image.

In 2016, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who finished second behind Trump in the primary voting, pointedly declined to endorse the winner, saying only that Republicans should vote their “conscience”. He was roundly booed.

This time around, he started his speech by saying “God bless Donald Trump” and went on to lavish the former president with praise.

Trump’s other Republican critics were nowhere to be found. His former vice-president, Mike Pence, spent the week on holiday in Montana. Senators like Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine stayed home. Former President George W Bush also kept his distance.

On Wednesday, it was Trump’s new vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance, who laid out the core tenets of this new, Trump-dominated Republican Party in his nomination acceptance speech.

“We won’t cater to Wall Street, we’ll commit to the working man,” he said. “We won’t import foreign labour, we’ll fight for American citizens. We won’t buy energy from countries that hate us, we’ll get it right here from American workers. We won’t sacrifice our supply chains to unlimited global trade, we’ll stamp every product ‘Made in the USA.’”

The political festivities in Milwaukee were Trumpism from start to finish – a carefully calibrated machine, promoting the party’s most popular agenda items and focusing criticism on one man, President Joe Biden.

But what if Republicans are going after the wrong guy? A growing number of Democrats have called on Mr Biden to be replaced as their presidential nominee and speculation is growing that he might actually listen.

The Democratic convention isn’t until the end of August, leaving time for the president to step aside either for his running mate, Kamala Harris, or for an open process to select another candidate.

On Thursday evening, the Trump campaign sought to highlight their candidate’s strength and vitality by giving him a raucous entrance, preceded by appearances by former wrestler Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Fighting Championship impresario Dana White and a performance by Kid Rock.

The campaign’s intention – to draw a contrast with Mr Biden’s perceived frailty and target younger male voters – was obvious.

That strategy may be less effective against Ms Harris or one of the more youthful Democratic governors who are mentioned as possible Biden successors.

But for the moment, the Republicans are riding high and optimistic about their victory in November, convinced that the former president’s run of good fortune is just getting started.

There was little to indicate what had happened on the fifth floor of the Grand Hyatt Erawan in Bangkok until police officers opened the door.

No-one was heard to scream, or had rung for help. No-one had even made it to the door.

Even inside, there were apparently no signs of struggle – the untouched late lunch still laid out neatly on the table for the occupants to enjoy.

From outside of Room 502, the only clue to the horror inside the locked room was the fact the group were late checking out of the hotel.

And yet inside were six bodies, alongside tea cups laced with cyanide.

It didn’t take officers long to work out the occupants of the room had drunk the poisoned tea, or to find out who the apparent victims were.

But days after police revealed the grim discovery, big questions remain: why them – and who did it?

Four of the victims are Vietnamese nationals – Thi Nguyen Phuong, 46, her husband Hong Pham Thanh, 49, Thi Nguyen Phuong Lan, 47, and Dinh Tran Phu, 37.

The other two are American citizens of Vietnamese origin – Sherine Chong, 56, and Dang Hung Van, 55.

According to investigators, Chong was believed to have borrowed 10 million baht ($280,000; £215,000) from husband and wife Hong Pham Thanh and Thi Nguyen Phuong to invest in a hospital building project in Japan. The couple, who owned a construction business, had apparently tried in vain to get their money back.

In fact, the matter was due to go to court in Japan in a matter of weeks.

On the face of it, this meeting appeared to be an attempt to discuss the issue in advance of the case.

Thi Nguyen Phuong Lan was there because Chong – who US media have said lived in Oakland, California – had asked her to act as her intermediary with the couple regarding the investment.

But how were the other two linked to the case?

Dinh Tran Phu – a successful make-up artist whose clientele includes movie stars, singers and beauty queens in Vietnam – was at the gathering working for Chong.

His father, speaking to BBC Vietnamese, emphasised the fact he had travelled to Thailand with his regular clients, not with strangers.

A close friend, meanwhile, said he knew both Thi Nguyen Phuong and Thi Nguyen Phuong Lan, having introduced them to treatments at a friend’s spa in Da Nang, where he lived.

Dang Hung Van’s participation in the hotel suite meeting was not immediately clear.

Police said there was a seventh name in the hotel reservation, the sister of one of the six. That person returned to Vietnam from Thailand last week and police said she was not involved in the incident.

The group checked into the hotel separately over the weekend and were assigned five rooms – four on the seventh floor, and one on the fifth.

Chong checked into Room 502 on Sunday. The five others visited her in her suite that day, but they headed back to their respective rooms for the night.

Before noon on Monday, Dang Hung Van ordered six cups of tea while Dinh Tran Phu, the make-up artist, ordered fried rice from their respective rooms. They asked that it be delivered to Room 502 at 14:00 local time.

A few minutes before 14:00, Chong started receiving the food orders at Room 502. She was alone in the suite at that time.

Police said she refused the waiter’s offer to brew tea for her party. The waiter also found that she “spoke very little and was visibly under stress”.

The rest of the group started arriving soon after. The couple went in lugging a suitcase.

At 14:17, all six could be seen by the door before it was shut. From then on, there was no sign of movement from inside.

They had been scheduled to check out on Monday but failed to do so.

Police entered the room at 16:30 on Tuesday and found the six dead on the floor.

The initial investigation found that two appeared to have tried get to the suite’s door, but failed to reach it in time.

All the bodies bore signs of cyanide poisoning, which can – in certain doses – kill within minutes. Their lips and nails had turned dark purple indicating a lack of oxygen, while their internal organs turned “blood red”, which is another sign of cyanide poisoning.

Investigators say there is “no other cause” that would explain their deaths “except for cyanide”.

Further tests are being carried out to determine the “intensity” of the deadly chemical and to rule out any other toxins.

Cyanide starves the body’s cells of oxygen, which can induce heart attacks. Early symptoms include dizziness, shortness of breath and vomiting.

Its use in Thailand is heavily regulated and those found to have unauthorised access face up to two years in jail.

Police suspect that one of the dead was behind the poisoning and was driven by crushing debt – but have not said who.

According to Vietnamese outlet VN Express, investigators said Chong had been sued by all the other five over their failed investments.

The meeting in Bangkok was called to negotiate a settlement, but the attempt failed.

Police have sought a statement from the group’s tour guide in Bangkok, 35-year-old Phan Ngoc Vu.

The guide reportedly said that before she died, Thi Nguyen Phuong Lan, the mediator, had asked someone to buy traditional medicine containing snake blood for her joint pains.

Then there are the two metal beverage containers that did not belong to the hotel found by police in the suite.

The containers were placed beside the cyanide-laced teacups, near the dining table.

What is certain is that officials want the matter resolved quickly.

Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh has directed officials in Hanoi to co-ordinate closely with their Thai counterparts on the investigation.

As for Thai authorities, it couldn’t have come at a worse time for Thailand. It had just expanded visa-free entry to 93 countries to revive its tourism industry, a key economic pillar that has yet to fully recover from the pandemic.

Barely a year before, a 14-year-old boy shot dead two people at a luxury shopping mall, also in Bangkok.

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin was with police on the scene at the Grand Hyatt on Tuesday night. He said there was no danger to public safety and that it was a private matter.

For the families left behind, the shock is palpable.

BBC Vietnamese got hold of the make-up artist’s mother, Tuy, on the phone, but she was sobbing so uncontrollably that she hung up after a short conversation. She said she thought her son was just on a routine work trip.

His father, Tran Dinh Dung, said in a separate interview that he did not notice anything strange with his son the last time he saw him.

Tshiring Jangbu Sherpa cannot forget the dead body he saw just metres from the summit of Mount Lhotse in the Himalayas more than a decade ago.

The Nepali was working as a guide for a German climber trying to scale the world’s fourth highest mountain in May 2012. The body blocking their path was thought to be Milan Sedlacek, a Czech mountaineer who’d perished just a few days earlier.

Mr Sherpa was curious why the Czech climber had died so close to the top. One of the gloves on the frozen corpse was missing.

“The bare hand might have slipped away from the rope,” the guide says. “He might have been killed after losing his balance and crashing onto the rock.”

The body stayed where it was – and every climber scaling Mount Lhotse thereafter had to step past it.

Mr Sherpa, 46, had no idea then that he would return 12 years later to retrieve the climber’s body, as part of a team of a dozen military personnel and 18 sherpas deployed by the Nepali army to clean up the high Himalayas.

There have been more than 300 deaths in the Everest region since records of mountain climbing there began a century ago, and many of these bodies remain. The death toll has kept increasing: eight people have been killed so far this year; and 18 died in 2023, according to Nepal’s tourism department.

The government first launched the clean-up campaign in 2019, which included removing some bodies of dead climbers. But this year was the first time that authorities set a goal to retrieve five bodies from the so-called “death zone”, above an altitude of 8,000m (26,247 feet).

In the end the team – who subsisted on water, chocolate and sattu, a mixture of chickpea, barley and wheat flour – retrieved four bodies.

One skeleton and 11 tonnes of rubbish were removed at lower attitudes after a 54-day operation that ended on 5 June.

“Nepal has received a bad name for the garbage and dead bodies which have polluted the Himalayas on a grave scale,” Major Aditya Karki, the leader of this year’s operation, told BBC Nepali.

The campaign also aims to improve safety for the climbers.

Maj Karki says many have been startled by the sight of bodies – last year, one mountaineer could not move for half an hour after seeing a dead body on the way to Mount Everest.

Many people cannot afford to retrieve the bodies of relatives who have died on mountains in Nepal. Even if they have the financial means, most private companies refuse to help get bodies from the death zone because it is too dangerous.

The military allocated five million rupees ($37,400; £29,000) this year to retrieve each body. Twelve people are needed to lower a body from 8,000m, with each needing four cylinders of oxygen. One cylinder costs more than $400, meaning that $20,000 is needed for oxygen alone.

Every year, there is only about a 15-day window during which climbers can ascend and descend from 8,000 metres, as the winds slow down during the transition between wind cycles. In the death zone, the wind speed often exceeds 100 km per hour.

After locating the bodies, the team mostly worked after nightfall because they did not want to disturb other mountaineers. In the Everest region, which also consists of Lhotse and Nuptse, there is only one single ladder and ropeway for people climbing up and down from base camp.

“It was very tough to bring back the bodies from the death zone,” Mr Sherpa says. “I vomited sour water many times. Others kept coughing and others got headaches because we spent hours and hours at very high altitude.”

At 8,000m, even strong Sherpas can carry only up to 25kg (55 pounds), less than 30% of their capacity at lower altitudes.

The body near the summit of Mount Lhotse, which stands at 8,516m, was discoloured after exposure to the sun and snow for 12 years. Half of the body was buried in snow, Mr Sherpa says.

All four climbers’ bodies retrieved were found in the same position as they had died. Their frozen state meant their limbs could not be moved, making transportation even more difficult.

Nepali law states that all bodies have to remain in the best condition before they are returned to authorities – any damage could result in penalties.

The clean-up team arranged a roping system to bring the bodies down gradually, because pushing them from behind or pulling them from in front was not possible. Sometimes, the bodies became stuck in the rocky, icy terrain, and pulling them out again was a laborious task.

It took 24 hours non-stop to bring the body presumed to belong to the Czech climber to the nearest camp, which is just about 3.5km away, Mr Sherpa says. The team then spent another 13 hours getting the body down to another lower camp.

Next stop for the bodies was a journey to Kathmandu by helicopter, but the crew was stuck in the town of Namche for five days because of bad weather. They arrived in the capital safely on 4 June.

The four bodies and the skeleton have been kept at a hospital in Kathmandu.

The army has found identification documents on two bodies – Czech climber Milan Sedlacek and American mountaineer Ronald Yearwood, who died in 2017. The Nepali government will be in communication with the respective embassies.

The process of identifying the other two bodies is ongoing.

Sherpa climbers and guides keep track of the locations and possible identities of lost climbers, so they have provided potential information on some of the bodies. They believe all the bodies belong to foreigners, but the government has not confirmed this.

About 100 sherpas have died on the Himalayas since records began, so many families have been waiting for years to perform the last Buddhist rites for their loved ones.

Authorities have said they will bury the bodies if no one comes to claim them three months after identification – regardless of whether the bodies belong to a foreigner or a Nepali.

Mr Sherpa first climbed in the Himalayas at the age of 20. In his career, he has scaled Everest three times and Lhotse five times.

“Mountaineers have got famous from climbing. The Himalayas have given us so many opportunities,” he says.

“By doing this special job of retrieving dead bodies, it’s my time to pay back to the Great Himalayas.”

A former Ukrainian nationalist MP has died after being shot on the street in the western city of Lviv.

Iryna Farion caused controversy in 2023 by suggesting that “true patriots” of Ukraine should not speak Russian under any circumstances.

The 60-year-old linguistic professor’s killing on Friday is being investigated and police say it may have been a targeted attack.

Her attacker has not been identified. Police say a power outage affected CCTV in the area.

Lviv Regional Governor Maksym Kozytskyi said on Telegram that Ms Farion died in hospital after the shooting.

Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said “this was not a spontaneous killing” and police were looking for a motive.

“We already have several versions. The main ones, I can say, are [linked to Farion’s] social and political activities and personal dislike,” he said in a statement via the Telegram message service.

“We do not rule out that the murder has a commissioned character,” he added.

On Saturday President Volodymyr Zelensky said a major police operation was under way.

“All versions are being investigated, including the one that leads to Russia,” he said.

The hardline nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) political party Ms Farion was a member of blamed Russia directly for the killing.

“Moscow shoots in the temple for the Ukrainian language,” it said in a statement.

In 2023, Ms Farion said that true patriots of Ukraine should not speak Russian in any settings, including on the front lines, as it is the language of the aggressor country.

She described Russian as “the language of the enemy, who kills, discriminates, insults and rapes me”, and added: “How crazy should you be to fight in the Ukrainian army and speak Russian?”

Her words provoked a strong reaction in Ukraine at the time, with people accusing her of inciting hatred based on linguistic preferences.

She was dismissed from a university in western Ukraine and was investigated by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).

In May, the Lviv Court of Appeal reportedly issued a ruling reinstating her to the position.

US President Joe Biden is looking forward to “getting back on the campaign trail next week”, fortifying his commitment to stick in the race as more Democrats on Friday called for him to step aside as the party nominee.

“The stakes are high, and the choice is clear. Together, we will win,” he said.

His statement appeared to be in response to the conflicting reports that Mr Biden’s inner circle is discussing the beleaguered president’s future and whether he will remain in the race.

Over the last several weeks, Mr Biden has been caught in a whirlwind of political pressure to step down: Calls from leaders within his own party to withdraw from the race, a loss of big-ticket donors and the added pressure that his decision could cost Democrats control of Congress.

At least a dozen Democratic lawmakers have called for him to step aside on Friday alone, and Vice-President Kamala Harris – considered the top choice to replace Mr Biden – was tasked with comforting worried donors on a Friday afternoon call.

Ms Harris said that she believed “in my heart of hearts” that “we are going to win this election”, an individual who listened to the conversation told the BBC.

“We know which candidate in this election puts the American people first: Our president, Joe Biden,” she added.

Earlier in the day, Mr Biden’s re-election campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon also attempted to push back on speculation that the president would withdraw in an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe

“Absolutely, the president’s in this race,” she said when asked about Mr Biden’s plans.

She described him as “more committed than ever to beat Donald Trump” and said he’s the “best person” to take on the former president.

In his statement, the president referenced former President Trump’s Republican National Convention speech to say he will continue “exposing the threat” of the former president while “making the case” for his record.

“Donald Trump’s dark vision for the future is not who we are as Americans. Together, as a party and as a country, we can and will defeat him at the ballot box,” he said.

As the conflict played on on Friday, the president was under quarantine at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He tested positive for Covid-19 while traveling in Las Vegas earlier this week. Mr Biden is experiencing “mild symptoms”, the White House said.

Since his poor debate performance last month, Mr Biden has insisted he will continue to run, though his perspective on what it would take for him to step down as the Democratic nominee has evolved.

First telling ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos “only the Lord Almighty” would make him stand down, Mr Biden said this week during an interview with BET (Black Entertainment Television) that he would re-evaluate the campaign if a doctor told him he had a serious medical condition.

According to a campaign memo released on Friday, Mr Biden isn’t going anywhere.

“Joe Biden has made it more than clear: He’s in this race and he’s in it to win it,” according to the memo. “Moreover, he’s the presumptive nominee — there is no plan for an alternative nominee. In a few short weeks, Joe Biden will be the official nominee. It is high past time we stop fighting one another. The only person who wins when we fight is Donald Trump.”

Time is running out for Mr Biden to decide if he will step down.

The Democratic National Convention begins 19 August, but the Democratic National Committee is expected to meet virtually the first week of August to nominate Biden as the official party nominee to meet state ballot deadlines.

The DNC rules committee met on Friday morning to discuss the procedures for the virtual roll-call vote, which they intend to hold before 7 August.

When asked whether another candidate could challenge Mr Biden in the roll-call vote, the committee’s co-chair Leah Daughtry said that “any challenger would have to have the verified support of hundreds of delegates”.

With Mr Biden winning nearly all of the available delegates during the Democratic primary, that requirement would be nearly insurmountable.

Ms Daughtry noted that “such a challenge has never happened over the past half century of competitive primaries”.

The pressure continues to build, however.

On Friday, Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich, of New Mexico, became the third Democrat in the upper chamber to call for Biden to step aside.

“By passing the torch, he would secure his legacy as one of our nation’s greatest leaders and allow us to united behind a candidate who can best defeat Donald Trump and safeguard the future of our democracy,” he wrote in a statement on X, formerly Twitter.

His statement follows that of Democratic Senator Jon Tester, of Montana, who called on Biden to end his re-election bid on Thursday.

“While I appreciate his commitment to public service and our country, I believe President Biden should not seek re-election to another term,” Mr Tester wrote in a statement on X.

In the House, Congressman Jim Costa, a Democrat from California, also called for him to withdraw on Thursday.

Democratic congressmen Jared Huffman of California, Marc Veasey of Texas, Chuy Garcia of Illinois and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin released a joint message on Friday saying “the most responsible and patriotic thing” Biden could do is “step aside as our nominee”.

“With great admiration for you personally, sincere respect for your decades of public service and patriotic leadership, and deep appreciation for everything we have accomplished together during your presidency, it is now time for you to pass the torch to a new generation of Democratic leaders,” they wrote in the joint statement.

Illinois Democratic congressman Sean Casten wrote in the Chicago Tribune on Friday that he doesn’t think the president can defeat former US President Donald Trump.

“It is with a heavy heart and much personal reflection that I am therefore calling on Biden to pass the torch to a new generation,” he wrote.

Other members of the House joined the calls for the president to step aside on Friday, including Zoe Lofgren of California, Kathy Castor of Florida, Morgan McGarvey of Kentucky, Greg Landsman of Ohio and Betty McCollum of Minnesota.

Reports this week suggested senior Democratic leaders are leaning in the same direction.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have all reportedly expressed concerns during private conversations with Mr Biden about his candidacy. In public statements, Ms Pelosi’s staff insisted her comments have been misrepresented and Mr Jeffries affirmed his support for Mr Biden.

Former President Barack Obama, Mr Biden’s previous running mate, has reportedly said Mr Biden’s chances of winning the election have greatly diminished.

Lawmakers haven’t been the only ones turning their backs to Biden. Big name donors – including actor George Clooney and Disney family heiress Abigail Disney – have closed their wallets.

Despite the defectors, some are sticking by his side.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most influential progressive voices in the House, has supported Biden over the last few weeks. She broadcast live on Instagram on Friday morning and spoke about the risks of entering the convention without Biden as the presumptive nominee, including potential legal challenges and ballot access deadlines.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which has about 40 members, and the 60-member Congressional Black Caucus, have both met with the president and also indicated their support for his re-election bid.

Bangladesh is in turmoil.

Street protests are not new to this South Asian nation of 170 million people – but the intensity of the demonstrations of the past week has been described as the worst in living memory.

More than 100 people have died in the violence, with more than 50 people killed on Friday alone.

The government has imposed an unprecedented communications blackout, shutting down the internet and restricting phone services.

What started as peaceful protests on university campuses has now transformed into nationwide unrest.

Thousands of university students have been agitating for weeks against a quota system for government jobs.

A third of public sector jobs are reserved for the relatives of veterans from the country’s war for independence from Pakistan in 1971.

The students are arguing that the system is discriminatory, and are asking for recruitment based on merit.

Protest coordinators say police and the student wing of the governing Awami League – known as the Bangladesh Chhatra League – have been using brutal force against peaceful demonstrators, triggering widespread anger.

The government denies these allegations.

“It’s not students anymore, it seems that people from all walks of life have joined the protest movement,” Dr Samina Luthfa, assistant professor of sociology in the University of Dhaka, tells the BBC.

The protests have been a long time coming. Though Bangladesh is one of the fastest growing economies in the world, experts point out that growth has not translated into jobs for university graduates.

Estimates suggest that around 18 million young Bangladeshis are looking for jobs. University graduates face higher rates of unemployment than their less-educated peers.

Bangladesh has become a powerhouse of ready-to-wear clothing exports. The country exports around $40 billion worth of clothes to the global market.

The sector employs more than four million people, many of them women. But factory jobs are not sufficient for the aspiring younger generation.

Under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 15-year rule, Bangladesh has transformed itself by building new roads, bridges, factories and even a metro rail in the capital Dhaka.

Its per-capita income has tripled in the last decade and the World Bank estimates that more than 25 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 20 years.

But many say that some of that growth is only helping those close to Ms Hasina’s Awami League.

Dr Luthfa says: “We are witnessing so much corruption. Especially among those close to the ruling party. Corruption has been continuing for a long time without being punished.”

Social media in Bangladesh in recent months has been dominated by discussions about corruption allegations against some of Ms Hasina’s former top officials – including a former army chief, ex-police chief, senior tax officers and state recruitment officials.

Ms Hasina last week said she was taking action against corruption, and that it was a long-standing problem.

During the same press conference in Dhaka, she said she had taken action against a household assistant – or peon – after he allegedly amassed $34 million.

“He can’t move without a helicopter. How has he earned so much money? I took action immediately after knowing this,”

She did not identify the individual.

The reaction of the Bangladeshi media was that this much money could only have been accumulated through lobbying for government contracts, corruption, or bribery.

The anti-corruption commission in Bangladesh has launched an investigation into former police chief Benazir Ahmed – once seen as a close ally of Ms Hasina – for amassing millions of dollars, allegedly through illegal means. He denies the allegations.

This news didn’t escape ordinary people in the country, who are struggling with the escalating cost of living.

In addition to corruption allegations, many rights activists point out that space for democratic activity has shrunk over the past 15 years.

“For three consecutive elections, there has been no credible free and fair polling process,” Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, told the BBC.

“[Ms Hasina] has perhaps underestimated the level of dissatisfaction people had about being denied the most basic democratic right to choose their own leader,” Ms Ganguly said.

The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) boycotted elections in 2014 and 2024 saying free and fair elections were not possible under Ms Hasina and that they wanted the polls to be held under a neutral caretaker administration.

Ms Hasina has always rejected this demand.

Rights groups also say more than 80 people, many of them government critics, have disappeared in the past 15 years, and that their families have no information on them.

The government is accused of stifling dissent and the media, amid wider concerns that Sheikh Hasina has grown increasingly autocratic over the years. But ministers deny the charges.

“The anger against the government and the ruling party have been accumulating for a long time,” says Dr Luthfa.

“People are showing their anger now. People resort to protest if they don’t have any recourse left.”

Ms Hasina’s ministers say the government has shown extreme restraint despite what they describe as provocative actions by protesters.

They say demonstrations have been infiltrated by their political opposition and by Islamist parties, who they say initiated the violence.

Law Minister Anisul Huq said the government was open to discussing the issues.

“The government has been reaching out to the student protesters. When there is a reasonable argument, we are willing to listen,” Mr Huq told the BBC earlier this week.

The student protests are probably the biggest challenge that has faced Ms Hasina since January 2009.

How they are resolved will depend on how she handles the unrest and, most importantly, how she addresses the public’s growing anger.

Adidas has dropped the supermodel Bella Hadid, who is half Palestinian, from an advertising campaign for retro shoes referencing the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Israel had criticised the choice of Ms Hadid. It accused her of hostility to Israel and noted that 11 Israeli athletes had been killed by Palestinian attackers at the Munich Games.

Adidas subsequently apologised and said it would “revise” its campaign.

Ms Hadid has been a vocal supporter of the Palestinians and earlier this year donated money to support relief efforts for the war in Gaza.

BBC News has contacted Hadid’s representatives for comment.

The German sportswear company had chosen Hadid to promote its SL72 trainers, which were first launched to coincide with the 1972 Olympics.

Adidas recently relaunched the SL72 shoes as part of a series reviving classic trainers.

However images of the American model wearing the shoes prompted criticism, including on Israel’s official account on X (formerly Twitter).

“Guess who the face of their campaign is? Bella Hadid, a half-Palestinian model,” a post read on Thursday.

It referred to the attack at the 1972 games, which happened when members of the Palestinian Black September group broke into the Olympic village. In addition to the Israeli athletes, a German police officer was also killed.

Other social media users defended Ms Hadid and called for a boycott of Adidas following the move to pull the campaign.

Adidas confirmed to AFP that Hadid had been removed from the campaign.

In a statement provided to the news agency, the company said it would be “revising the remainder of the campaign” with immediate effect.

“We are conscious that connections have been made to tragic historical events — though these are completely unintentional — and we apologise for any upset or distress caused.”

Hadid, whose father is Palestinian property tycoon Mohamed Anwar Hadid, has been vocal in her support for people affected by the war in Gaza.

In an Instagram post in May, Hadid said she was “devastated at the loss of the Palestinian people and the lack of empathy coming from the government systems worldwide”.

Last month, she and her supermodel sister Gigi donated $1m (£785,000) to support Palestinian relief efforts.

The conflict in Gaza began when Hamas gunmen launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 252 back to Gaza as hostages.

Israel responded by launching a military campaign in Gaza with the aims of destroying Hamas and freeing the hostages.

More than 38,900 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

At least 11 people have died and more than 30 are missing after a highway bridge partially collapsed during torrential rains in northwest China.

The bridge over a river in Shaanxi province’s Shangluo city collapsed on Friday night due to a sudden downpour and flash floods, the provincial authority said.

Rescue teams have recovered several vehicles that fell into the river, with efforts still underway according to authorities.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged an “all out” effort to find those still missing.

The 11 dead were found in five cars that were pulled from the river below. It is thought 20 more vehicles plunged into the water, according to state media.

Video and images from Xinhua news agency shows a partially submerged section of the bridge with heavy river waters rushing around it.

According to Xinhua, officials sent 736 firefighters, 18 boats and 32 drones to the scene.

On Friday, at least five people were killed in flooding and mudslides in another part of the province.

Large parts of northern and central China have been battered since Tuesday by rains that have caused flooding and significant damage.

State media reported at least five people died and eight were missing after the rains sparked flooding and mudslides in Shaanxi’s Baoji city.

Last week, Ontario Premier Doug Ford posted a video online with a message for his Canadian province.

It seemed like a typical innocuous political advertisement – Mr Ford sporting a casual black polo shirt and a blue apron, standing at a barbecue grilling burgers, cans of beer at hand.

“It’s summertime in Ontario,” the premier said, beaming into the camera.

Instead, the video was a shot across the bow, with the premier launching an interactive map of local breweries, wineries and distilleries.

It was a strategic move in the midst of liquor labour dispute that has snarled summer alcohol sales in Canada’s most populous province.

For the first time in its history, workers at Ontario’s liquor retailer are on strike. The battle has shone a spotlight on the province’s peculiar and, some say, outdated liquor control system.

On 5 July, the more than 9,000 employees of the provincially-owned Liquor Board of Ontario (LCBO) walked off the job after negotiations for a new collective agreement between their union and Mr Ford’s government fell apart. The LCBO then shuttered all its 650 stores for at least two weeks.

This week, the Ontario Public Services Employees Union (OPSEU) returned to the bargaining table with the province. But talks resumed after another salvo from Mr Ford: the premier has promised to accelerate plans to put canned cocktails in privately-run retailers – the primary sticking point for the union.

For a brief moment on Friday, it seemed the dispute was resolved, after the union representing LCBO workers announced that a tentative deal had been reached that would reopen liquor stores in a few days.

But it backtracked during a scheduled news conference with reporters that lasted just two minutes, during which they claimed that Mr Ford’s government had refused to sign their return-to-work order.

“We were prepared to come here to announce a deal,” said union spokesperson Katie Arnup. “We do not have a deal. The strike continues.”

Soon after, the LCBO told its side of the story: It accused the workers’ union of negotiating in “bad faith”, saying it introduced new demands around money that should have been dealt with at the bargaining table. It also vowed to file an unfair labour complaint against the union, signalling that the fight is not yet over.

The LCBOs scattered through Ontario today – generally well-stocked, clean and some consumers will argue, overpriced – are the product of a nearly century-old decision that gave the Crown corporation control over the distribution and sale of liquor in the province.

For years, the whole system maintained distinctive traces of temperance-era policy.

Customers were required to obtain a separate liquor permit before placing an order with a clerk, who could deny any order they believed was too large. Alcohol was not openly displayed. Stores were hidden away from main streets, and purchases were packed away in discrete paper bags.

Slowly, starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the LCBO evolved into a more consumer-friendly operation, now with wine tasting and free drink samples and a glossy LCBO-branded food and drink magazine. (Though self-service, which allows customers to grab their preferred alcohol directly off store shelves, was only fully phased in by the late 1980s).

Ontarians could get beer from the brewer consortium-owned The Beer Store and, later, in the 1990s, Ontario-made wine from The Wine Rack, owned by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

But for the most part the LCBO has enjoyed an iron-clad monopoly on Ontario alcohol sales.

As most other provinces, like Alberta, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island, moved to liberalise their liquor sales and allow for privately-run stores, Ontario stayed mostly the same.

In 2015, things started to shift. The first grocery stores in Ontario were authorised to sell six-packs of beer – a change described at the time as the biggest shake-up to alcohol sales since Prohibition.

“It was one small purchase for a politician, one giant leap for Ontario beer consumers,” read one article in the Toronto Star of the very first grocery store beer purchase by then Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Today, 450 grocery stores across the province are licensed to sell beer, wine and cider.

So amid the strike, Ontarians are not facing an entirely dry summer. They can still place limited LCBO delivery orders online, and purchase wine, beer and cider from some stores.

A bigger change is now around the corner.

Starting this month, convenience stores, big-box stores and grocers will all be eligible to sell wine, beer, cider and ready-to-drink cocktails like hard seltzers.

OPSEU says pre-made cocktails pose an existential crisis to the LCBO’s business.

“This is our line in the sand and we are making history,” said president JP Hornick on the first day of the strike.

“We are here today because of the Ford government’s plan to try and expand privatisation of alcohol sales… That puts every Ontarian at risk.”

And, OPSEU says, the change threatens the C$2.5bn ($1.83bn; £1.42bn) LCBO sales net for provincial coffers.

But Mr Ford argues the plan will give small businesses a shot at the market while still leaving the LCBO with a considerable competitive advantage.

Under the new plan, the LCBO remains the only retailer of high-alcohol spirits like gin and whisky, as well as the only wholesaler and primary distributor of alcohol in Ontario.

“Keep in mind when, when you’re the wholesaler, that’s where you make money,” the premier said last week.

The proposal also gives Mr Ford a chance to deliver on a pledge in time for the next election, currently scheduled for 2026.

“He campaigned on this,” said Walid Hejazi at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

“It’s a winning issue for the Conservatives,” added Mr Hejazi, who noted he worked as a consultant for the LCBO about 15 years ago.

“The province is proposing a strategy that will lower the price I have to pay and make it more convenient… who doesn’t want cheaper alcohol and more convenience?”

Another problem for the LCBO is that the sting of the LCBO’s strike has been dulled considerably by the small amount of liquor liberalisation the province already has.

Ontarians, for the most part, are not up in arms, with access to alcohol at hundreds of wineries, grocery stores and beer stores that remain open.

“What if you went on strike and hardly anyone noticed?” read the first line of a Globe and Mail editorial.

Public polling has seemed to reflect the ambivalence, with just 15% of Ontarians saying they have been personally affected by the strike.

(A tourism industry group says the strike is affecting the operations of 35% of poll respondents in the sector due to limited product availability and slow fulfillment).

But they aren’t necessarily on Team Ford, either. An internal poll by Mr Ford’s government indicates that while many support liquor liberalisation, a little over half back the strike action.

Many Ontarians did, however, take notice of the Conservative premier’s interactive alcohol retail map, which may have annoyed more voters than the shuttered stores.

The province’s efforts to unveil an alcohol-finder soon after the strike began raised questions about the government’s priorities, with one resident suggesting a better use would be a map of family doctors that are accepting new patients.

Dr Adil Shamji, a provincial Liberal politician, said he “routinely” gets calls from constituents for help finding doctors, childcare or affordable housing.

“Never, including after this strike, have I had people calling my office asking for help in finding booze,” he said.

Dr Shamji said he wants both sides to get back to get a deal done, one with protections for the LCBO.

For his part, Mr Ford says he is ready to keep negotiating but on canned cocktails at least, he is not budging.

“If they want to negotiate over [ready-to-drink beverages], the deal’s off. I’m gonna repeat that: that ship has sailed,” he said.

A massive tech failure has caused travel chaos around the world, with banking and healthcare services also badly hit.

Flights have been grounded because of the IT outage – a flaw which left many computers displaying blue error screens.

There were long queues, delays and flight cancellations at airports around the world, as passengers had to be manually checked in.

Cyber-security firm CrowdStrike has admitted that the problem was caused by an update to its antivirus software, which is designed to protect Microsoft Windows devices from malicious attacks.

Microsoft has said it is taking “mitigation action” to deal with “the lingering impact” of the outage.

Here is a summary of what we know so far.

• Follow live updates on this story
• How a single update caused global havoc
• What are my rights if my flight is cancelled or delayed?
• GPs, pharmacies and airports hit by outage

This is still a little unclear.

CrowdStrike is known for producing antivirus software, intended to prevent hackers from causing this very type of disruption.

According to CrowdStrike boss George Kurtz, the issues are only impacting Windows PCs and no other operating systems, and were caused by a defect in a recent update.

“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” he said.

“This is not a security incident or cyber-attack.”

What exactly was wrong with the update is yet to be revealed, but as a potential fix involves deleting a single file, it is possible that just one rogue file could be at the root of all the mayhem.

It could be some time.

CrowdStrike’s Mr Kurtz, speaking to NBC News, said it was the firm’s “mission” to make sure every one of its customers recovered completely from the outage.

“We’re deeply sorry for the impact that we’ve caused to customers, to travellers, to anyone affected by this, including our companies,” he said.

He has since told CNBC that while some systems can be fixed quickly, for others it “could be hours, could be a bit longer”.

CrowdStrike has issued its fix. But according to those in the know, it will have to be applied separately to each and every device affected.

Computers will require a manual reboot in safe mode – causing a massive headache for IT departments everywhere.

Something important to note here, is that personal devices like your home computer or mobile phone are unlikely to have been affected – this outage is impacting businesses.

Microsoft is advising clients to try a classic method to get things working – turning it off and on again – in some cases up to 15 times.

The tech giant said this has worked for some users of virtual machines – PCs where the computer is not in the same place as the screen.

“Several reboots (as many as 15 have been reported) may be required, but overall feedback is that reboots are an effective troubleshooting step at this stage,” it said.

It is also telling customers with more in-depth computing knowledge that they should delete a certain file – the same solution one CrowdStrike employee has been sharing on social media.

But this fix is intended for experts and IT professionals, not regular users.

The problems have emerged across the world, but were first noticed in Australia, and possibly felt most severely in the air travel industry, with more than 3,300 flights cancelled globally.

• UK airports saw delays, with long queues at London’s Stansted and Gatwick.
• Ryanair said it had been “forced to cancel a small number of flights today (19 July)” and advised passengers to log-on to their Ryanair account, once it was back online, to see what their options are.
• British Airways also cancelled several flights.
• Several US airlines, notably United, Delta and American Airlines, grounded their flights around the globe for much of Friday. Australian carriers Virgin Australia and Jetstar also had to delay or cancel flights.
• Airports in Tokyo, Amsterdam and Delhi were also impacted.

Meanwhile, the problems have also hit payment systems, banking and healthcare providers around the world.

Railway companies, including Britain’s biggest which runs Southern, Thameslink, Gatwick Express and Great Northern, warned passengers to expect delays.

In Alaska, the 911 emergency service was affected, while Sky News was off air for several hours on Friday morning, unable to broadcast.

The outage might also impact people getting paid on time.

Melanie Pizzey, head of the Global Payroll Association, told PA news agency that she’d been contacted by “numerous clients” who couldn’t access their payroll software.

She said the outage could mean firms are unable to process staff payments this week, but there may be a knock-on effect too.

“We could see a backlog with regard to processing payrolls for the coming month end, which may delay employees from receiving their monthly wage,” she said.

If you’re worried about your own, personal devices, we have some good news.

The software at the centre of this outage is generally used by businesses, which means that most people’s personal computers won’t be impacted.

That means if you’re wondering whether you need to delete a certain file to avoid your computer restarting constantly, the simple answer is no, you don’t.

It’s a reminder of the complexity of our modern digital infrastructure that CrowdStrike, a company that’s not exactly a household name, can be at the heart of such worldwide disarray.

The US firm, based in Austin, Texas, is a listed company on the US stock exchange, featuring in both the S&P 500 and the high-tech Nasdaq indexes.

Like a lot of modern technology companies, it hasn’t been around that long. It was founded a mere 13 years ago, but has grown to employ nearly 8,500 people.

As a provider of cyber-security services, it tends to get called in to deal with the aftermath of hack attacks.

It has been involved in investigations of several high-profile cyber-attacks, such as when Sony Pictures had its computer system hacked in 2014.

But this time, because of a flawed update to its software, a firm that is normally part of the solution to IT problems has instead caused one.

In its last earnings report, CrowdStrike declared a total of nearly 24,000 customers. That’s an indication not just of the size of the issue, but also the difficulties that could be involved in fixing it.

Each of those customers is a huge organisation in itself, so the number of individual computers affected is hard to estimate.