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Binance customers withdrew more than $3.6bn (£2.7bn) of assets from the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange as it reopened on Sunday following a record hack last week.

The firm suspended all transactions in the wake of the incident, which impacted $6.3bn worth of digital assets.

Major organisations, including the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), have accused North Korea of being responsible for the cyber attack, which is said to be the largest hack in history.

The company said it has covered around 95% of the assets stolen in the breach, but that the remaining amount may take longer to source. Binance has repeatedly said it would cover all of the losses linked to the attack.

There was an "initial spike" in withdrawals, which later declined and "are stabilising as expected", Binance posted on X.

It added that withdrawals for major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have resumed and that more services will resume in phases once security checks are completed.

The hack hit Binance's global centralised exchange, Binance.com, while its US-facing platform has said it has not been affected by the issue.

Binance said last week that early checks suggest the incident may have started with a compromised laptop that belonged to an engineer, allowing hackers to find a way to make unauthorised transactions.

The crypto withdrawn represents just a fraction of the total value of assets held by Binance.

The company said in 2024 that it had more than $160bn in assets in its custody.

Cryptocurrencies are digital assets traded on exchanges such as Binance. Unlike cash, they do not exist in physical form and are managed on computers, smartphones and other digital devices.

Binance was founded in China and has hundreds of millions of registered users globally.

Democrats have high hopes for midterms, but polls have let them down before

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmg47p3edv4do, today

The Democratic Party has high expectations as it heads into these pivotal US midterm elections.

A historically unpopular Republican president, an American public unhappy with the rising costs of food and bills, and months of favourable polls point to a good night for them on Tuesday.

Democratic candidates lead in well over the 218 seats needed to flip control of the lower chamber of Congress, the House of Representatives, the polls suggest. And they are tied or narrowly ahead in the key Senate races.

A recent New York Times poll had the Senate race in South Carolina, a state Donald Trump won by 18 percentage points in 2024, as a tie. Recent CNN surveys put the Democrats ahead in Texas, Kansas and Maine.

But are the polls accurate?

Recent US political history is littered with examples where public opinion polls, even ones just days before an election, were off the mark. Trump outperformed predictions on his way to White House victories in 2016 and 2024. His narrow defeat in 2020 came after most surveys indicated a more comfortable win for Democrat Joe Biden.

Earlier this year, polls suggested Democrat Abdul El-Sayed was poised for a double-digit win in Michigan's Democratic Senate primary. Instead it was 1%. In Wisconsin's Democratic primary for governor, the candidate that had a polling lead that approached 20 points lost by a fraction of a percent.

According to Clifford Young, president of Ipsos Public Affairs, which conducts political and market research surveys, polling has become difficult in recent years because it's harder to reach Americans as they abandon their land lines and screen their calls. And many of those who pollsters do contact have become less willing to participate.

"Conservatives, especially those on the far right, are much more anti-establishment by nature," Young says. "And they don't participate in anything. They hate the system. That's the challenge."

If Republican voters are being undercounted in a systematic way, and polling companies don't take that into consideration when constructing their voting models, it could skew their data towards the Democrats.

That's one of the reasons why it has become trickier for pollsters to predict what the electorate will look like.

One explanation for why Trump overperformed in previous presidential elections is that his supporters – many of whom were not regular voters – flocked to the polls in higher-than-expected numbers.

That unpredictability is one of the main contributing factors to those notable recent polling misses, even if the margins in most reputable polls were only off by a few percentage points.

In a close race, those few points can make the difference between victory and defeat for a candidate. And this year, many of the key Senate races are within those narrow margins.

In recent years, midterm general election polls have proven to be more accurate, in part because Trump - and his unique ability to draw disaffected Americans to the polls - was not on the ballot.

In 2022, they suggested Democrats would defy conventional expectations and avoid an electoral wipe-out despite Biden's low approval numbers.

While the party lost control of the House of Representatives, the margins were slim and Democrats maintained control of the US Senate.

While this year's primary results did provide bigger surprises, Young says that nominating contests have historically been volatile, with voters more likely to make up their minds at the last minute. It shouldn't be seen as an indication that the current crop of general election polls are off the mark.

It's common for the party of the president to have a bad night in the midterms.

One of the most notable examples in recent years came in 2010 when Republicans flipped more than 60 House seats and made gains in the Senate.

It came off the back of an economy struggling to recover from the financial crash and conservative fears over President Barack Obama's healthcare reforms. A defeat had been predicted by the polls but not quite on that scale.

The roles are reversed this time, with the Democrats in opposition and the economy on the minds of voters. But there are a number of reasons why Democrats may not have as good a night as history might suggest or as some might expect, given Trump's low approval rating.

Firstly, much of the territory in play in this election Trump conquered with ease in the presidential election just two years ago. It's like a home game for Republicans.

Then there have been changes to House election boundaries over the years that have meant fewer seats switch between parties.

Thirdly, there are fewer swing voters due to the deeper polarisation of the country. Some experts describe the electorate as calcified.

There's also the cash advantage Republicans have enjoyed which has given them hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on attack ads in the final weeks.

Polling models try to capture shifting fundamentals. And a well-designed poll is built to anticipate issues that may make it less than reliable.

Individual polls do have a built-in margin of error – a statistical level of uncertainty based on the sampling size compared to the population as a whole. Taken as an aggregate, polling averages and not individual surveys can provide a more accurate prediction.

At the moment, even the kind of polling lean we saw in recent presidential elections would suggest Democrats are likely to have a good night on 3 November. And polling inaccuracies can go both ways. In last year's state and special elections, Democrats outperformed most surveys as it was their voters who turned out in unexpectedly larger numbers.

The sight of Trump holding rallies in the final days of the campaign in states he won comfortably in 2024 will have lifted Democrats' hopes that Republican internal polling has conservative candidates in trouble.

There's always the chance that voters change their minds right up until election day, however.

Sometimes there are late shifts that can alter the dynamics of a race. Sometimes undecided voters, which still account for a key segment of the electorate in many of these races, all break the same way.

In polling, there will always be some level of uncertainty – and managing that is the art that goes along with the science.

"I think we're doing a better job," says Young. "But part of the problem we always have is not just with the pollsters. Part of it is that we're dealing with humans. Humans are not easy."

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

Iran killed her teenage daughter - now she is facing up to the regime

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3qjn8117kwjo, today

Warning: Distressing content and strong language

Samira says she never used to be political.

"I worked in sales in Iran. I sold cosmetics," she tells BBC Panorama.

But that all changed the day her only child was shot dead in front of her by Iranian security forces. Sixteen-year-old Sevda was taking part in protests against Iran's repressive regime that engulfed the country earlier this year - before the US and Israel launched widespread air strikes which killed the country's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Samira's grief became fury as Iran's authorities then hindered, rather than helped, her search for her daughter's body, she says.

"I realised that finding Sevda wasn't the end, but just the beginning of all the harassment they put me through."

Samira made a dramatic escape from Iran on foot, navigating dangerous mountainous terrain.

She now lives abroad in hiding, describing herself as a "one-woman army fighting the regime". In a search for accountability and justice after her daughter's death, she is intent on naming the members of the security forces and officials she believes were responsible for firing fatal shots during the protests.

"They'll bring me to the brink of death before they kill me, but finding me won't be easy… Return to normal life? There is no going back," she says.

Samira is among several Iranians the BBC has spoken to since the start of the year. Some, still inside the country, told Panorama they wanted to speak out despite the risks, saying they had found it difficult to hold on to hope once the mass protests had been brutally crushed.

The Iranian embassy in London told Panorama that peaceful and legitimate protests had been hijacked by foreign powers, including the US, which promoted violence, provided weapons and equipment, and compromised public security.

Sevda was killed on 9 January as she and Samira took part in huge demonstrations on the outskirts of the capital Tehran which had begun the previous month. They had been sparked by economic discontent, before escalating into calls for an end to the country's Islamic Republic.

Though Samira denies she was especially political then, she says her daughter was. Sevda's idols were two other young women - Mahsa Amini, whose death in custody after an alleged violation against the mandatory headscarf triggered mass protests, and Nika Shakarami, who was killed during a subsequent uprising against Iran's strict Islamic dress code for women.

"She kept them alive in her thoughts and always wanted to continue their path [of resistance]," Samira says.

The day before Sevda was killed, the numbers protesting had been particularly high. Samira says she and Sevda had responded to a call by Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran's last shah (king), for demonstrations.

"The security forces had lost control," she says.

The swell in numbers had spooked Iran's government, and the following day a shoot-to-kill order was announced, Samira says. But she had thought it just an empty threat.

"They lied so much in Iran… We couldn't imagine a massacre of that scale."

And they were reassured, she says, by US President Trump's promise that he had their backs.

He had told US media on 8 January: "I have let [the Iranian authorities] know that if they start killing people, which they tend to do during their riots… we're going to hit them very hard."

But nevertheless the crowds appeared smaller on the 9th, Samira says.

Sevda seemed to know the risks, she says. Her daughter took off her earrings and gave them to her grandmother. She also shared her phone passcode with Samira.

The mother and daughter gathered with the rest of the protesters. Sevda then stood on a dustbin and began leading a chant.

"It seemed there were more forces than people," Samira says of the area where they were. "I don't know how, within one day, they gathered so many… Basijis and IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] forces."

The IRGC defends the country's Islamic establishment, and the paramilitary Basij Resistance Force are volunteers for the IRGC.

"A sniper fired from the roof of a building on our right. The bullet must have come from the rooftop. The bullet went through her heart. I couldn't even scream. I just stared at Sevda - her body lying lifeless. Blood was gushing out her mouth and nose. I couldn't believe it, I couldn't believe she was dying. Her eyes were still looking at me."

Samira says she managed to get Sevda to hospital and she was told they were operating on her, but then the door opened and she saw Sevda had been zipped into a body bag.

Sevda's body was taken away. Samira says it took her days to find her daughter again. Like many others, she found herself at one of Tehran's largest morgues.

"Teenagers - young boys and girls. So many had been killed," she cries.

"I died with every bag I unzipped. I'd never seen so many bodies. But I wouldn't give up."

She finally found her daughter. "Three bodies were piled on top of Sevda. That's how we found her."

Iranian authorities acknowledge that more than 3,000 people were killed in the protests, but claim some were members of the security forces. One human rights group, Hrana, however, estimates the number of dead stands at more than 7,000, most of them protesters.

Finding Sevda's body was just the beginning of Samira's battle with the authorities, she says.

To be allowed to take away the body for burial, she says she was forced to say that "terrorists" rather than the security forces had been responsible for Sevda's death.

"They did this to cover up what they'd done on 8 and 9 January, to hide how many people they had killed. They silenced families by telling them to say their loved ones were killed by Israeli or American terrorists."

Nevertheless she was barred from visiting the grave after the funeral, or organising a tombstone, she says.

And Samira says the harassment continued. A few days before the ceremony to mark 40 days since Sevda died - highly significant in Iranian culture - she says she was summoned by a local branch of the Ministry of Intelligence.

"They told me: 'You should give us an interview and say that Sevda was a Basiji and she was killed by the protesters. Then we will announce her [as] a martyr - you will then receive perks, a house, or anything that you want.'"

She is sure this offer was prompted by fear, because she had shared Sevda's death with an Iranian media organisation based in London, once the internet had been reconnected in the country.

"It scared them that I was in touch with external networks or those outside Iran."

To avoid giving the interview, Samira fled Iran as soon as the 40th day anniversary was over.

"I didn't want to trade with my child's blood."

She says people smugglers helped her to escape. She crossed rivers and mountains to get to safety.

A video she made of herself fleeing makes clear her fury.

"This crap government, these bastards, they've harassed me so much," she tells the camera as she marches along a mountain path bordered by a deep ravine.

Samira says after she continued to give interviews to foreign media from abroad, she was charged in absentia with a string of offences, including "moharebeh" - waging war against God - which can carry the death penalty.

To mark what would have been Sevda's 17th birthday, her relatives and friends held a vigil - with Samira watching from exile on a livestream.

"Then suddenly, the feed cut out," she says.

She discovered that the event had been raided, she says, and some of her family and friends arrested by the IRGC.

She says her family was warned by the authorities that, if they continued to gather at Sevda's grave, her body would be exhumed and moved elsewhere.

Now, Samira shares the names, online, of Iranian security force members and officials she believes were responsible for firing fatal shots during the 8 and 9 January protests she and Sevda joined.

"I want justice to be served for every single person whose name I expose, because they have killed so many young people. My goal is for them to be identified so they can be put on trial," she says.

When one of the men Samira named online was later found dead, a regime supporter offered a $5,000 (£3,732) reward for information about her whereabouts, presuming she was responsible. Iranian state media has since reported the arrest of nine people in connection with the death.

Despite the risks, Samira says she refuses to be silenced.

"Every day and every second without Sevda is very difficult for me. It's like a mother who has lost her heart, who has lost her being, has lost her life…

"But the fact that Sevda is not breathing has made it possible for me to stand on my feet… to think about honouring her life and her path... all those bodies I saw, all those body bags I opened looking for Sevda, they all made me fight the Islamic Republic until my last breath."

Nine killed in Florida plane crash

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm369yy7lw73o, today

A business jet crashed in a neighbourhood in Florida on Sunday, killing all nine people on board, the US transport secretary has said.

The crash happened some nine miles (14 km) from Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump's resort in Palm Beach County, at 12:50 EST (17:50 GMT).

The Learjet 60 aircraft had departed from Austin, Texas, and was headed to the Bahamas.

Transport Secretary Sean Duffy described the crash as a "horrific tragedy", and said the FAA was sending a team to the scene to support an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.

"Please join me in praying for the families and loved ones of those we lost," Duffy added.

This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.

You can receive Breaking News on a smartphone or tablet via the BBC News App. You can also follow @BBCBreaking on X to get the latest alerts.

China state broadcaster pulls Real Madrid match over Mbappé joke

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq78pypg0800o, today

China's state broadcaster CCTV did not air a Real Madrid match on Sunday, despite the club's star striker Kylian Mbappé's apology for his "ill-judged" remarks on the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong.

Mbappé drew huge backlash after saying the meme "that makes [him] laugh the most" was the one in which his face is superimposed on a "Chinese dictator" resembling Mao.

China Media Group, CCTV's parent organisation, said last Tuesday it would suspend broadcasts of Spanish football La Liga matches following the furore, which also led to Mbappé being dropped by several Chinese brands.

China's foreign ministry had said it took Mbappé's apology "seriously". Real Madrid and La Liga have also apologised.

China Media Group had earlier demanded apologies from the three parties, calling them "an absolute prerequisite" for moving past the incident.

It has acknowledged the apologies, but has not commented on how long the broadcast blackout will last.

Mbappé, who reportedly made his remark about the meme on French talk show The Bridge, apologised later on Tuesday.

"My comment was ill-judged, and I now understand that it hurt many people in China and in Chinese communities around the world," he had said.

The joke did not go down well in China, where Mao is revered by the Communist Party, despite his having overseen one of the bloodiest chapters in the country's past.

Mao, who led the Chinese Communist Party to victory in the civil war and founded the People's Republic of China, died in 1976.

During his rule he oversaw the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which led to a famine that killed tens of millions and unleashed violent purges across Chinese society.

This is not the first time Beijing has suspended sports broadcasts over political sensitivities.

It pulled NBA games for a year from October 2019 after Daryl Morey, the general manager of Houston Rockets, tweeted in support of Hong Kong protesters during widespread pro-democracy protests in the city.

Morey backtracked on his comment after fierce criticism from Chinese fans, sponsors and commercial partners.

"I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives," Morey later wrote.

"I have always appreciated the significant support our Chinese fans and sponsors...I would hope that those who are upset will know that offending or misunderstanding them was not my intention."

Real Madrid beat Racing Santander 3-0 in Sunday's match, with goals from Mbappé, Jude Bellingham and Yan Diomande.

Lindsay Clancy is back in court - where will her case go next?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck3r5z3pw928o, today

Lindsay Clancy, the US woman accused of murdering her three children, will return to a Massachusetts court on Monday as lawyers debate retrying the case.

Her defence team and Massachusetts prosecutors are expected to discuss how to move forward, with both parties seeking different outcomes.

Last week, in response to a defence request to dismiss the trial, prosecutors offered their clearest hint yet that they are seeking a new trial before a different jury. "The Commonwealth [Massachusetts] should be permitted to continue to pursue justice for Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy," her three children, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors could also reduce the charges in a potential second trial or dismiss them altogether.

Clancy's first trial ended in a mistrial after a 12-person jury failed to reach a consensus.

The 36-year-old has not denied killing her children in 2023, but her defence team argues she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis at the time. Prosecutors say the killings were intentional.

What happened when Clancy was last in court?

A jury first heard Clancy's case in August 2026, but failed to reach a unanimous agreement on whether the prosecution had proved Clancy was guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" as required by US law.

A judge declared a mistrial in early September.

At a court appearance later that month, Clancy's lawyer, Kevin Reddington, argued the judge should dismiss her case. Meanwhile, prosecutors said the state had "met its burden" in proving her guilt.

But the hours-long back-and-forth ultimately didn't lead to a clearer answer about what might come next for Clancy - a dismissal of charges, retrial of the same charges, or retrial of lesser charges. These discussions will resume on Monday.

Judge William Sullivan seemed confident the case would be retried, saying in September he wanted to "get this thing moving".

He asked both sides to prepare to discuss possible trial dates at the November hearing.

Reddington said he would be unable to go to trial until at least June 2027 if the case was retried.

District Attorney Timothy Cruz said at the time that prosecutors had not yet decided whether to retry Clancy.

"We're doing our due diligence; we're going to continue doing that," he said. "We're going to do what we can for the children. That's what this case is about."

What do Clancy's legal team want?

Fundamentally, Clancy's legal team - with Reddington at the helm - is pushing for the charges to be dismissed or dropped. They've explored a variety of legal avenues.

In September, he asked for her to be found not guilty under Rule 25 - a Massachusetts provision that states a defendant should be found not guilty if prosecutors do not present enough evidence at trial.

That request was denied.

Judge Sullivan will hear arguments on several motions on Monday, but Heather Cucolo, a New York Law School professor and mental health law expert, told the BBC that the hearing will likely focus on a narrow point: was this an instance of a routine deadlocked-jury mistrial - in which the jury genuinely could not agree - or was this an improperly terminated trial?

She said Reddington may argue that a retrial could violate Clancy's Constitutional protection against double jeopardy - a legal standard that says a person cannot be tried for the same crime twice.

But legal experts agree that outcome is unlikely.

"The public attention that's been put on this trial and the need to have some conclusion in the near future, I think that the judge is going to say that this mistrial was appropriate, was legally accurate, and that they need to now look to set a date for a retrial," Cucolo said.

What do prosecutors want?

While the state's legal team has not explicitly said they will pursue a retrial, Cruz and the prosecutors who argued the case have consistently said they want justice for Clancy's children.

Last week, prosecutors asked Judge Sullivan to reject the motion to dismiss charges against Clancy on the grounds of double jeopardy.

They argue mistrial procedures were properly followed by the court, and thus they have a right to seek justice again on behalf of the children.

"Because a mistrial was properly declared due to the manifest necessity of a deadlocked jury, the defendant's motion to dismiss should be denied," prosecutors wrote in the motion.

What could happen on 2 November?

Judge Sullivan could make a determination over whether the case can proceed on Monday or he could rule later in writing, criminal defence lawyer Elyse Hershon told the BBC.

And how the District Attorney's office wants to proceed could be determined ahead of Monday's hearing, during it or even days after, she said.

"The three charges of first-degree murder are still pending; they are still hanging over Lindsay Clancy's head unless and until the DA announces otherwise," Hershon said.

Historically, Cruz, the district attorney, has made comments and announcements about the case at press conferences after court finishes. That could happen again this week, she predicted.

It is also likely, Hershon said, that Judge Sullivan pushes the lawyers on both sides to get a trial date on the calendar during Monday's hearing.

"It does not mean it's definitely going to be a jury trial, but [they will want to] put something in the books, hold those dates. It's a big chunk of time. It's four, five, six weeks of the court calendar; that's hard to fit in at the last minute," she said.

"I would anticipate they block off the time while they go through all these motions and the DA's office figures out what it wants to do."

France launches attempted murder investigation after petrol bomb thrown at police

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwvg05z184j0o, today

Prosecutors in France have launched an attempted murder investigation after petrol bombs were thrown at police during unrest, French media reported.

An image of a police officer with his leg on fire during a clash with protesters in Paris on Saturday has prompted outrage and follows weeks of street protests in France that have also seen demonstrators injured.

The officer, who suffered burns to his ankle and minor injures to his hand, told French newspaper Le Figaro it was a "particularly sophisticated" incendiary device.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said throwing a molotov cocktail at a police line was "what I call a murder attempt", adding officers were working to find the perpetrators.

Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated across France in largely peaceful protests on Saturday, the latest in a series of youth-led protests that began in late September demanding action on the high cost of living and poor public services, especially schools.

Following previous clashes and looting, thousands of police officers were deployed across the country over the weekend, and officers fired tear gas at demonstrators in some cities.

There were more than 770 arrests on Saturday, roughly half as many as the previous week's protests, the French interior ministry said.

But police said no one had been arrested for the attack caught on camera that set a police officer on fire, AFP reported.

The officer - part of the National Gendarmerie, a national law enforcement force that is technically part of the military but under the control of the interior ministry - said his unit "suddenly found ourselves facing several hundred hostile, well equipped adversaries".

Speaking to French newspaper Le Figaro, he said police were yet to identify the liquid used but that the incendiary device "had a far greater burning capacity than a standard Molotov cocktail".

"We faced hostile individuals who are not protesters," he said. "These adversaries are there with the intent to harm those who represent the state."

Fourteen other officers sustained wounds ranging from minor to serious, he said, adding some were struck by paving stones. The unit was supposed to be on leave but had been urgently recalled to police the weekend protests, he said.

French protest organisers, the Gilets Jaunes, or Yellow Vests, have said dozens of protesters have been seriously injured during recent demonstrations across the country, with many hurt by "grenades".

France suspended the use of one type of stun grenade while policing student protests in early October after a 15-year-old's hand was blown off, but French newspaper Le Monde has reported that police have continued to use a different model in subsequent protests.

Protests also took place in Germany and Italy over the weekend, as mainly youth-led protests continue across parts of Europe, with varying demands but broadly linked to a focus on cost-of-living issues and public services.

Israeli strikes in Gaza kill eight including child, hospitals say

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmqln14rrzxvo, today

Israeli strikes in Gaza have killed at least eight people, including a child, according to hospitals, despite a year-old ceasefire.

In Gaza City to the north, hospital officials said a missile attack hit a group of civilians next to Cairo School in the Al-Rimal neighbourhood, killing three people, including a four-year-old boy.

In the southern city of Khan Younis, the Hamas-run ministry of interior said a drone attack targeted a group of police officers in the Al-Mawasi area, killing five, as they were carrying out their routine duties.

The Israeli military said it had carried out two attacks on what it described as military operatives but has not yet provided evidence or further information.

Outside Gaza City's Shifa Hospital, video showed a crowd of men gathered to pray next to two body bags and the tiny body of the child, which was wrapped in a white towel.

"My son and his child were martyred. They were sitting in their tent, bothering no one, and nothing else was happening in the area when suddenly, a missile struck them, and they were martyred," Ali Oweis told AFP news agency. "There is no ceasefire; the war is ongoing -- don't you see?"

At Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, women despaired as body bags lay on the floor, video showed. The interior ministry named the five police officers killed, who were between the ages of 23 and 53, and called the attack a "horrific massacre".

A ceasefire came into force in Gaza in October last year, but Israeli air strikes have continued almost every day.

Since then, 1,580 people have been killed, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN. Israel says it is targeting Hamas, but often civilians are also killed.

Meanwhile, a peace plan for Gaza, brokered by the Trump administration, has stalled.

The ceasefire saw thousands of Palestinians held by Israel released in return for all of the 48 remaining hostages held in Gaza, and an agreement to end the war - which was triggered by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, when about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

Since the war began, 74,594 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory's health ministry.

Additional reporting by Jacob Phillips

Russian strikes cut power to thousands in Ukraine as Kherson ceasefire to end

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c64g1y90p71eo, today

A rare humanitarian ceasefire in Ukraine's Kherson region, that has allowed civilians to evacuate the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, is due to end on Sunday night.

While the localised ceasefire on the front line has held since it was implemented last week, fighting has continued elsewhere.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had struck energy infrastructure in four regions overnight on Saturday, leaving hundreds of thousands of homes without power.

Another overnight strike killed two people, including a 13-year-old girl, in the Vinnytsia region, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine hit a major missile fuel producer in Russia's Rostov region, which caused a fire and damaged four production facilities, Zelensky said.

In Ukraine, repair works to restore power continued throughout the day. Most customers in the Dnipropetrovsk region had their connections restored by early evening, but more than 60,000 were still without power, the governor said.

Because of regular attacks on energy infrastructure, emergency power cuts have been introduced across the country. Even in the capital Kyiv, electricity is cut off for most of the day, and water supplies are also disrupted.

Zelensky said in a social media post that the intensity of Russian strikes has been "extremely high" over the past week, adding that Russia was "trying to take maximum advantage of the shortage of ballistic missile interceptors".

He added that "every day" Ukraine communicated its need for Patriot missiles - the only effective weapon for downing Russia's deadly ballistic missiles - to the US, Europe and other partners. He thanked countries for their support so far and longer-term commitments, but called again for more immediate aid.

On the front line, a localised ceasefire in the Kherson region was due to end at 22:59 Ukrainian time (21:00 GMT) on Sunday.

The limited pause in hostilities, which started on Tuesday, was brokered with the help of US First Lady Melania Trump and Pope Leo.

It was originally confined to the city of Oleshky, which has been occupied by Russia since the first days of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and was expanded across the wider region of Kherson.

Oleshky had been trapped on one side by the Dnipro river and the other by Russian forces, with routes out mined and subject to drone attack.

Residents trapped there were suffering severe shortages of food, water and electricity, with many resorting to cooking garden weeds to survive.

The truce allowed for Oleskhy residents to evacuate if they wanted, and there were emotional scenes on Saturday of reunions between loved ones who hadn't seen eachother for years.

There are Ukrainian military positions just 5km (3.1 miles) from Oleshky, but evacuees had to travel through Russian-occupied territory to southern Russia, where they flew to Belarus, before finally being driven across Ukraine's northern border.

The oldest evacuee was 94 years old, while the youngest was one, according to Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine's human rights ombudsman.

Ryanair may freeze workers' pay and raise fares on higher fuel prices

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr0qkve1x224o, today

Ryanair is considering a temporary wage freeze for staff to pay for a sharp rise in its fuel costs which have surged following the US-Israel war with Iran.

The carrier said it expects fuel prices to remain high "well into 2027" unless there is a "swift resolution" to the conflict.

Ryanair said its fuel bill is forecast to be €2bn (£1.6bn) higher in the short-term and said it expects European airfares to increase to help cover the cost.

But it said that was unlikely to be enough and, among a number of measures, it is looking into "temporary pay freezes". The BBC has contacted Unite, the union which represents Ryanair employees, for comment.

The airline said its pre-tax profits fell by 16% to €2.4bn during the six months to the end of September, largely due to higher fuel costs.

Ryanair said that although 80% of its fuel bill had been "hedged" – in effect, bought in advance at fixed prices – the cost of the remainder had doubled.

Aviation fuel prices have surged this year as a result of the war in the Middle East, which has dramatically reduced the supply of refined products coming from the Gulf and increased competition for those produced elsewhere.

Ryanair's chief executive, Michael O'Leary, said last month he expects the firm and other airlines to increase fares by 15% to 20% next year.

Trump makes fevered campaign push in final weekend before election

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3j47gjx29vro, today

In the last weekend before the pivotal midterm elections, Donald Trump has made a final pitch to voters in hopes of keeping Republicans in control of the US Congress.

Trump held rallies in Florida, Iowa and Kansas - states he won in past elections - in a sign of Republicans' defensive stance in Tuesday's elections.

Facing voter frustration over rising prices, particularly fuel, Trump sought to tamp down such concerns and shift focus on attacking Democrats, saying they would "bankrupt" families if elected.

Polls suggest that Democrats have a good chance at winning at least partial control of Congress, which would act as a check on Trump's power and upend the last two years of his presidency.

Trump has been campaigning non-stop across the country ahead of the election - even in areas that were once thought to be safe Republican strongholds.

Throughout the weekend, Trump made the case for his party at rallies in Kansas, Florida and Iowa as well as at tele-rallies for candidates in states including Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

In previous years, Trump easily won Florida, Iowa and Kansas - once considered reliably Republican states - but the president's visits there in the final days of his election drive highlighted just how competitive these states have become in determining control of Congress.

Trump told supporters he had transformed the country, saying Democrats had left the US in a "dark age" but under his command, "we quickly turned it into the golden age of America".

Trump is facing a backlash over the cost of living. Prices have gone up, particularly for fuel, groceries and health care, since the war in Iran began over eight months ago. At these rallies, Trump appeared to have two aims: to change the subject from those issues and use fear to turn out the Republican vote.

At rallies in Florida and Iowa, he highlighted his policies on trade and immigration and said if Democrats were given power, they would "open the border", "bankrupt your family", "take away your guns" and "mutilate your children". He played video montages of Democrats criticising ICE and supporting transgender rights.

In the room at the rallies, supporters cheered, but there has also been disquiet among some Republicans over Trump's appeal with more moderate voters.

Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries said this weekend that he was "very confident" his party was on course to win control of the House of Representatives, as senior Democrats including former President Barack Obama made final appeals to voters.

A forecasting tool from Harvard University that analyses and compiles multiple polls and historical data suggests that Democrats have a 96% chance of taking the House and a 76% chance of taking the Senate.

A national poll from NBC News posted this weekend suggests that registered voters prefer a Democrat-controlled Congress by a 7-point margin, leading Republicans 52% to 45%.

But along with the last-push campaign stops, this weekend featured a dramatic turn in the Senate race in Michigan - a tightly contested seat currently held by Democrats.

Haley Stevens, a sitting congresswoman who lost the Democratic Senate nomination to Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed Republican candidate Mike Rogers on Sunday.

The move led to widespread condemnation from fellow Democrats and praise from Republicans, including Trump who called her "very brave".

In Alaska, home to another crucial Senate race, a judge on Sunday dismissed an attempt by the Trump administration to delay certifying election results if the Republican incumbent candidate loses due to two candidates appearing on the ballot with the same name.

In the lead up to the election, Trump and his administration have repeatedly cast doubt on both the credibility and security of the vote, despite evidence showing voter fraud is rare. The justice department has launched investigations or demanded votes be set aside in multiple US states.

The stakes are high for Trump, as midterm election results are seen as a measure of how satisfied Americans are with a president's performance.

In most midterm elections, the party that holds the White House typically loses seats in Congress to the opposing party - meaning Trump's Republican party has the most to lose.

Republicans, who currently hold a slim majority in both the House of Representatives and Senate, don't want to relinquish their party's majority in Congress, as losing any seats would hinder their ability to pass laws and shape policies.

Democrats, however, are keen to gain control from Republicans. Holding a majority would enable them to challenge Trump's agenda, give them investigative powers over his administration, and could also help them showcase their vision for America ahead of the 2028 presidential election.

For lawmakers, it's all about gaining or maintaining power and control, but it's Americans who will feel the impacts of their policies.

Who gets elected at the city, state, and federal level affects many aspects of voters' everyday lives, including the cost of gas, rising inflation and grocery prices, healthcare and abortion access, income and property taxes, and immigration.

Who will win the midterms? How the US elections will be won and lost

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr20wlp09gn3o, 3 days ago

Americans head to the polls on Tuesday to decide how the rest of Donald Trump's presidency will play out.

Thousands of races are taking place across the US, at different levels of government. But the main event for voters will be electing members of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the two chambers that make up Congress.

Both of them are currently controlled by the Republicans, the president's party. The success or failure of Trump's final two years in office could rest on the outcome.

Here's our visual guide to where the battle for power will be won and lost - from approval ratings, to key races and issues and the huge amount of money being spent.

Midterms come at bad time for Trump

One of the reasons the opposition Democrats have a chance to take back Congress is the president's low approval rating, which is a good indicator for how well his party could perform.

He began his second term as president with an approval rating of just over 50%, according to polling resource website Silver Bulletin, but it quickly fell into the 40s.

It was hovering around 42% when Trump decided to launch air strikes with Israel against Iran at the end of February this year but it fell below 40% shortly afterwards. It is currently sitting at about 37%.

Eight years ago, Trump's approval rating was significantly higher at this point in his first term, at 43%. Joe Biden's at the same point in his term was at 40%. In both cases, the sitting president lost control of the House in the midterms but kept hold of the Senate.

But Trump's poor ratings help explain why Democrats are hopeful of winning both chambers of Congress and why they are setting their sights on states that Republicans have won consistently in recent years.

The battle for the House

The current Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the lower chamber, is as thin as it gets - they have 218 representatives, which is the exact number needed to have control, plus one independent who votes with them.

Members of the House serve a two-year term so all 435 seats are up for election in November.

But most districts are not considered competitive because the party that holds them has such solid support that there is only one likely winner.

The Cook Political Report, which analyses campaigns and elections, suggests that just 18 districts are "toss-ups" that could be won by either party.

Of those 18 toss-ups, 14 are currently held by Republicans and four by Democrats. But even if the Democrats didn't win any of them, they would still win the House if they take the 36 seats classed as likely or leaning Democratic.

Historically, the midterms see a high number of seats changing hands in the House, usually in a protest against the White House. The average number lost by the president's party is 27, according to data going back to 1934. Of those 23 elections, the president's party has only made gains in three.

The battle for the Senate

The Republicans have a slightly stronger hold on the Senate. They hold 53 of the 100 seats while the Democrats have 45 and two independents who also vote with them.

Members of the Senate serve six-year terms so roughly a third are up for election every two years.

Thirty-five seats are up for grabs in November but analysis by the Cook Political Report suggests that only seven of them are toss-ups that could go either way.

Of those toss-ups, six are currently held by Republicans and one by Democrats. The Democrats would need to win four of those seats, plus the four classed as likely or leaning Democratic, to hit 51 and take control of the Senate.

But winning a majority is no easy task for the Democrats.

They need to keep hold of their seat in Michigan, where polls suggest the race is tighter than Democrats would like between Abdul El-Sayed, a left-wing political outsider, and his Republican rival Mike Rogers, a Trump ally and former FBI agent.

And they would also need to pick up seats in states that Trump won by double-digits in 2024, including Alaska, Iowa and Ohio.

But polls suggest they have a chance, even in Texas where former teacher James Talarico could become the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in the state since 1988 if he defeats Ken Paxton, the current state attorney general and close Trump ally.

What are the key issues for voters?

Trump pledged to "end inflation and make America affordable again" in his 2024 election campaign but the cost of living crisis is proving to be the key issue for voters.

The president proudly declared that gas was "now below $2.30 [£1.74] a gallon in most states" in his State of the Union address on 24 February. But the war with Iran began four days later, disrupting Middle Eastern energy supplies and causing gas to hit $4 (£3.03) in the US.

The war became increasingly unpopular as its consequences reverberated around the world and ultimately hit American consumers in the pocket. One poll carried out in August found 63% of respondents disapproved of Trump's handling of the situation.

Other issues that voters say are important to them include healthcare and immigration.

Trump has recently touted his policies around immigration as a big success, citing significantly lower border-crossing figures than in recent years.

Many Democratic candidates are focusing on the high costs of US health insurance and the impact of Trump's legislation on access to the healthcare system.

Can Trump defy political gravity?

Most signs point towards a successful midterms for the Democrats, but it wouldn't be the first time that Trump and his party have outperformed polls if they do win more seats than expected.

One of the few things in their favour is their huge financial advantage.

In mid-October, the Republican National Committee and its allied groups had about $320m (£240m) cash on hand, while the Democrats had just under $230m (£170m).

On top of that, the Republicans also had more than $160m (£120m) held by Trump's MAGA Inc group, the main fundraising and spending arm of the "Make America Great Again" political movement.

The Republicans are using that financial advantage to buy advertising.

More than $1bn worth of political ads were broadcast to US voters in September, according to research firm AdImpact. Republicans spent $200m more than the Democrats and outspent them in nearly all of the Senate races classed as toss-ups.

Trump will be hoping this late messaging blitz can help convince Republicans to get out and vote in November, boosting turnout and limiting the damage done to him and his party.

Whatever the result, attention will quickly turn to the next presidential election in 2028. Trump's unpopularity has dominated the midterms, but with him constitutionally unable to run for a third term the focus will shift to what the Democrats stand for, not just what they stand against.

What are the US midterms? A simple guide

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6wyz223j19po, 7 days ago

There are just days to go until the US midterm elections, when voters take part in a ballot that could have a major impact on the rest of Donald Trump's presidency.

What are the midterms?

On 3 November, Americans will choose members of Congress, which is made up of two parts - the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Elections take place every two years, and when they happen in the middle of the president's four-year term of office, they are called the midterms.

A key task of Congress is to create and pass federal laws - laws that apply nationwide.

The outcome of the midterms will decide which political party - Trump's Republicans or opposition Democrats - controls Congress and how easy it is for the president to carry out his plans.

The results are also seen as a measure of how happy people in the US are with the president's performance so far.

Who is being elected?

All 435 members of the House - the lower chamber of Congress - will be elected. They serve fixed terms of two years. The House is commonly where proposed laws are introduced and debated.

Meanwhile, 35 of 100 seats in the Senate, the upper chamber, will also be up for grabs. Senators serve six-year terms. Among other jobs, they approve or block proposed laws that have been received from the House.

On the same day, voters across much of the US will also choose state-level politicians. Governor contests in California, Florida, Georgia and Michigan will be among the most closely watched.

What are the key issues?

The US economy is on the minds of many voters struggling with the price of fuel, groceries, housing and healthcare.

Inflation remains above the level targeted by the US Federal Reserve, partly down to the war that the US and Israel started with Iran in February.

Democrats argue Trump's programme of trade tariffs has also pushed up prices for Americans.

Immigration is another key issue. Republicans say Trump has delivered on a major campaign pledge in 2024 by tightening the border and launching a widespread - and often controversial - crackdown on illegal immigration.

Concerns over AI have grown in urgency in recent weeks. Senior politicians from both parties have agreed on the need to regulate it - setting themselves in opposition to Trump, who has rejected the idea of laws to control development of the technology.

What is at stake?

Congress is one of the three branches of government, alongside the presidency and the judiciary. Control of it matters for the shaping of legislation.

Both the House and Senate are currently held by the Republican Party. But its majority is a slender one. They have 218 seats in the House, which is the minimum number needed to control it, plus one independent who votes with them.

In the Senate, they have 53 seats. The upper chamber will only change hands if the Democrats win 51 seats, which would overcome a tie-breaking vote by the vice-president - currently a Republican - in the event of both sides getting 50.

If opposition Democrats win back control of at least one chamber, they will gain power to bring their own laws to the floor.

Who might win?

Voters have tended to "punish" the party of the president in the past and vote against them.

Recent polling shows a low approval rating for the president. He began his second term as president with an approval rating of just over 50%, according to polling resource website Silver Bulletin, but in early October it was sitting at about 37%. Meanwhile 61% disapproved of him.

But not all seats in each chamber are competitive. Some are a safe bet for Republicans or Democrats.

The BBC's US partner CBS News has identified ten Senate races to watch, in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, and 42 House races, in states like Arizona and Ohio.

The vote is more unpredictable this year because of a battle between the two parties over the way voting districts in the House of Representatives are drawn.

Republicans tried to gain an advantage by creating more favourable electoral maps in certain states and Democrats followed suit.

What does it mean for Trump?

If the Democrats win either the House or the Senate then Trump will find it difficult to get any laws through Congress.

So his domestic plans could be frustrated, although he has found ways to exercise power without his wider party.

Democratic control of either chamber would also mean they could use committees to investigate aspects of the Trump presidency. Corruption allegations, the new White House ballroom and ICE tactics could be subject to scrutiny.

There is also a debate within the Democratic Party about whether to impeach Trump, which means to bring charges in Congress that will form the basis for a political, not criminal, trial.

If the Republican Party stays in control of Congress, Trump will be able to keep going with his plans for the remainder of his time in office.

What does it mean for the 2028 election?

The president's name is not on the ballot during the midterm elections, though Trump has urged Republicans to pretend that it is by voting for him as an endorsement of his actions so far.

Whichever way the results fall, commentators are likely to use them to make arguments about how voters feel about the direction of the country under Trump's leadership.

Trump cannot run to be president a third time. After the midterms, we can expect speculation to start building about who might be his successor as the Republican presidential nominee for 2028 - and who might compete against that person for the Democrats.

Additional reporting by Deirdre Finnerty

'The necktie is dead': How US midterm candidates are dressing for votes

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckq6nz4286r4o, 2 days ago

As Americans prepare to vote in the US midterm elections, candidates with their eye on Congress are not just competing on policy.

In our social media age, they're using their personal style to attract attention and project their message. Their clothing has become a measure of their authenticity and appeal.

"Politicians are dressing for two jobs at once: to look capable of holding office but to also look connected to the people they want to represent," said Joe Zee, a celebrity fashion stylist.

From Alaska to Texas, here is a look at how some candidates have been standing out on the campaign trail.

Dressing like their state

Some candidates, like Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who represents Washington's 3rd Congressional District, are embracing a relaxed, outdoorsy image.

The former car repair shop owner is up for re-election on a platform focused on support for small businesses and working families, after capturing a Republican-held seat in her state in 2022.

She favours low fuss, low-key work jackets, flannel shirts, jeans and practical footwear.

Robert Ordway, conservative public policy adviser and former owner of Capitol Hill Clothiers, says Gluesenkamp Perez is probably the most "spot-on" when it comes to "authenticity and where you come from".

"Also it really vibes with the Pacific Northwest, which has trees and forests and a little bit more of an outdoor vibe," he says.

Her style also "shepherds a message championing the working class", says Tashira Halyard, an attorney, content creator, and public policy expert based in Washington DC.

Democratic lawmaker Mary Peltola, running for a Senate seat in the battleground state of Alaska, takes a similar approach.

She made headlines for wearing traditional boots of the Yup'ik people while being sworn in as a congresswoman in 2022.

During this election cycle, her rugged outdoor gear nods to her days working on a fishing boat on Alaska's Kuskokwim River and her "fish, family and freedom" campaign slogan.

The flannels, puffer jackets and indigenous-inspired details seem designed to remind voters that Peltola is a native (and Native) Alaskan, says conservative author and journalist Bonnie Kristian.

Patriotism on their sleeves

Other candidates, such as Republican Senate candidate Ashley Hinson of Iowa, have been opting for a bolder, patriotic image.

While polished and conservative, her style of dress has included classic, arguably nostalgic touches, including denim and bandanas for more casual appearances.

In a tight race against her Democratic opponent, Hinson has tried to separate herself from specific policy decisions made by the Trump administration but has still expressed loyalty to the president.

She slipped into pumps with the American flag bedazzled across them at a primary election party in Iowa in June.

The look, reminiscent of the style worn by Trump supporters at rallies, is quintessential American patriotism, according to Halyard.

"Ashley's American flag high heels, denim dress and bright red blouse worn with a bandana around her neck are classic Americana," she says.

"It's this idea that… I'm literally going to wear my patriotism on my sleeve."

Journalist Bonnie Kristian says there is "a strategic advantage" to Hinson's look, one in which she is "cultivating a visual identity that cannot possibly be misinterpreted" in an era where social media presence, if only for a split second, is crucial.

"Her denim dress, red bandana and sparkly American flag shoes all signal that she's a Republican wooing rural voters - and indeed she is."

Tie off, cowboy boots on

Once a reliable Republican stronghold, Texas has become a battleground between top prosecutor Ken Paxton, 63, who was controversially endorsed by Trump over a longtime senator, and Democratic state lawmaker James Talarico, 37.

On the campaign trail, both contenders have been making similar clothing choices, wearing relaxed blazers and cowboy boots.

"The necktie is dead on the campaign trail in both parties," says Ordway.

"The younger man dresses up to look serious, and the older man dresses down to look like one of the guys."

Fashion critic Friedman notes that Talarico's handcrafted Lucchese cowboy boots "are a very deliberate choice that allows him to speak to all different kinds of constituencies in Texas".

"Those boots mean something that is very deeply rooted in Texas semiology," Friedman says, referring to the study of signs and their interpretations.

"Former US President George W Bush wore Lucchese cowboy boots, so suddenly you're crossing all sorts of party lines and tapping into all sorts of different electoral groups with your shoes."

Meanwhile, Paxton's style of dress has come under fire on more than one front.

It has drawn the disapproval of Trump who has urged voters to focus on his record because it "speaks a lot louder than the suit he's wearing that doesn't look so great".

The Republican candidate has also been criticised by his opponent for wearing a pricey watch and polo shirt from the luxury hotel chain Four Seasons as a debate about the high cost of living dominates the midterms.

"The criticism around his apparent luxury watch and Four Seasons polo raises another style-branded question: casual clothes don't necessarily communicate an ordinary lifestyle," says Zee, a stylist and faculty associate at Arizona State University's Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.

"A five-star resort-branded polo can carry luxury associations just as clearly as a suit.

"The watch's identity and value were unconfirmed, but the perception illustrates how an accessory can complicate a candidate's message," he explains.

Personal uniforms

A uniform, if it reads naturally, is an incredibly effective tool, says Friedman, and a great way to be recognised across the country.

It's an approach adopted by Republican Senator and former congresswoman for Tennessee's 7th congressional district, Marsha Blackburn, who is running for governor of her state.

Senator Blackburn is often seen in structured jackets and skirts, sometimes with patterns.

Ordway remembers that Blackburn "was extremely polished" whenever he spotted her in Capitol Hill while working there as a legislative director for a former Indiana senator.

"I always saw pearls on her," he says.

"Since she's a veteran politician I think how she dresses in relation to how voters see her was probably decided many, many years ago."

"Her looks tend to be fairly timeless - we could imagine GOP women wearing many of them any time in the last three decades," Kristian adds.

Meanwhile, Michigan Democratic candidate for US Senate Abdul El-Sayed, who is in a highly competitive race against a Trump-backed former congressman, has adopted a consistent look of black V-neck T-shirt and blue jeans.

The left-wing political outsider, whose campaign slogan is "money out of politics, money in your pocket", refers to his outfit choices as "minimal look, maximal politics".

The effect, says Ordway, is reminiscent of a start-up entrepreneur, designed to appeal to an urban, working-class electorate.

It also removes much of the "ceremony of a political appearance", Zee says.

"The suggestion is that attention should go to what he is saying. But the plain T-shirt remains an image choice. Looking un-styled can still be a deliberate form of branding."

Trump, master of the image

Friedman notes that the master of this look in the US at the moment is Trump.

His instantly recognisable power suit and red tie, ever-present in film and reality TV, were cultivated even before he moved into the White House.

"[Trump] doesn't just have his own merch, but he's got his own outfit, and now he's got all his cabinet wearing the same outfit, and half the Senate is wearing his outfit, and it becomes like a Pavlovian signifier," Friedman says.

"If they're wearing a navy suit, red tie, and white shirt, you're like, 'oh, that's a Trump person,'" she says.

Whatever the outcome of the elections for Trump and his party, Friedman expects to see more politicians effectively branding themselves with their clothing when the 2028 general election rolls in.

"What we see is that so much of politics now is fought over social media and over TV, and that places a premium on visual messaging that is only going to become more important."

Democrats are used to heartbreak in Texas - could Talarico turn the tide?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmy0r2y6zeddo, yesterday

The race for a US Senate seat in Texas may prove crucial in determining which party controls Congress next year – a significant prize in its own right - but for both parties it represents so much more than that.

For the Democrats, their losing streak in statewide elections now stretches back more than three decades. In the second most populous state in America, liberals have been in the wilderness for a generation.

But polls suggest their candidate, 37-year-old James Talarico, may be on the verge of breaking through and turning a Texas Senate seat blue for the first time since 1988.

That would be a dream scenario for Democrats - and a potential nightmare for Republicans.

"If the Democrats do pull it off, I think it's going to cause a lot of soul searching and a lot of psychological damage to the Republican Party in Texas and nationwide," said Brendan Steinhauser, a Texas-based Republican campaign strategist.

These dramatic stakes help explain how this Senate race has rocketed to become the most expensive in US history, with total spending reaching more than half a billion dollars.

For Talarico, it has been a remarkable rise for a candidate who in 2025 was a relatively unknown state-level Democrat.

At the Fiesta Center in Lubbock, Texas, on Tuesday night, the line to see the softly spoken former teacher, who studied to be a Christian minister, stretched around the building and down the wide parking lot to a busy road.

In this dusty western plains town of about 250,000, which voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump two years ago, a visit from a major Democratic candidate on the eve of an election was unusual.

"It's just so amazing to watch," said Aaron Gonzalez, the Democratic Party chair for Hockley County, which borders Lubbock. "This time is different."

When Talarico took the stage before an estimated 3,000 supporters – with another thousand listening on speakers outside - his pitch was a familiar one for many national Democrats this year, albeit with a Texas twist.

He railed against a conservative political establishment that he said is insensitive to the economic hardship of average Americans. He condemned the corrosive influence of big money in politics. And he promised to advance a "comprehensive anti-corruption agenda" in the Senate.

"Texans are ready for change," he said. "We are done with the extremism and the corruption. We're done with the politics of division, and we are ready for something new."

The slogan for his final two weeks of campaigning – "clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose" – is taken from Friday Night Lights, a popular early 2000s TV show about a plucky small-town Texas high school football team.

His music playlist leans heavily on twangy Texas country music. He celebrates Texas breakfast tacos, quotes legendary Texas singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett and frequently mentions that his ties to the state go back eight generations.

In the Lubbock audience, Andrew Robinson, a student from nearby Texas Tech University, liked what he heard. But the 26-year-old's optimism was tempered by an entire lifetime spent watching Democrats try, and fail, to get a toehold in the state.

"A Talarico win would mean so much," he said. "I haven't been keen on wanting to stay in Texas. And if the government were to change, it could give me a reason."

For Republicans, a Democratic win in Texas would have a very different meaning.

At roughly the same time Talarico was addressing his supporters in the Fiesta Center, Trump – alongside the Republican Party's Senate candidate Ken Paxton – was just a few miles away, in a venue twice the size.

"If you go out and vote, we're going to have a tremendous win in Texas," the president told the crowd.

Trump's visit to reliably-Republican Lubbock suggests the party is concerned about turnout even in the most conservative portions of the state. It is a worry that has been echoed by other Texas Republicans.

"Understand, we could lose Texas," Texas Senator Ted Cruz said in his podcast on Friday. "The Democrats are massively out-turning-out the Republicans."

Don Huffines, who is running for election as the state's chief financial officer, issued an even more dire warning. "Texas is the foundation of the Republican Party in America," he posted on X.

"When the foundation breaks, it all falls apart. When we lose Texas, we lose the USA."

For weeks now, party leaders have been warning that a liberal breakthrough in the Lone Star State could have dire consequences.

They fear a Talarico win would motivate more local Democrats to run for statewide and federal offices. Better quality candidates with more funding could lead to a snowball effect similar to the Democratic inroads seen in other southern states, such as Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

"I think that it's pretty clear that Republicans, especially candidates, consultants, operatives, and others who are active in the party, see that this is a real threat," said Steinhauser.

"The days of waving this off and saying that Texas would never turn blue are over."

For the Texas Senate race to come to the point where recent polls suggest Talarico has a slim but stable lead has required a unique confluence of events and political dynamics – a "perfect storm", in the words of Steinhauser.

"Everything that could go well for the Democrats is going well," he said, "and everything that could go badly for the Republicans is going badly."

But it is also a whirlwind that, in a significant part, has been sown over the past year by Trump himself.

The national environment for Republicans is a harsh one.

Voters are frustrated with high consumer costs, including the price of petrol, and largely blame Trump's tariff policies and the Iran war.

Political corruption has become an issue of growing concern. Democrats, independents and many Republicans in a recent Cook political report poll identified "greedy billionaires and corporations" and politicians seeking "personal gain" as the ones to blame.

Texas-specific issues have also contributed to a hostile climate for the in-power party.

Polling and recent special elections in Texas indicate that Hispanic voters – many of whom switched to Trump to help him win the White House in 2024 – have soured on the administration's immigration enforcement policies.

Hispanics make up nearly a third of the state's population - and in more than a week of early voting in Texas, they have been casting ballots in historically large numbers.

Data centre construction, which Texas Republicans had touted as a welcome investment in the state, has drawn widespread criticism, particularly in rural areas that have traditionally been solidly conservative.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, in his own tight re-election race, recently announced a one-year moratorium on AI construction in the state – a reflection of how quickly the issue has become a political liability.

"It's bad for Republicans," one Texas political strategist, who asked to remain anonymous, told the BBC. "We're asking a whole lot of the electorate at this point for us to continue to be the guys in charge."

Then there's the baggage that Paxton, who defeated longtime incumbent Senator John Cornyn in a contentious primary campaign earlier this year, brings to the race.

The 63-year-old Republican successfully painted the 74-year-old Cornyn as too old and too out-of-touch with Texas conservatives. He received a late boost, just days before his run-off election victory over Cornyn, in the form of a Trump endorsement.

"Ken Paxton has gone through a lot, in many cases, very unfairly, but he is a Fighter, and knows how to WIN," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Our Country needs Fighters, and also Loyalty to the Cause of Greatness."

The "a lot" the president referenced Paxton going through includes a 2015 federal indictment on charges of securities fraud – later dropped – and a 2023 impeachment by the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives on corruption, bribery and abuse of power charges.

The Texas Senate would later acquit Paxton after Trump intervened to pressure state Republican leaders.

All of this has meant that Paxton has more than a few critics – and enemies - in Texas, including within his own party.

Talarico, by contrast, has proven to be an effective candidate. The state legislator defeated a well-known opponent, Dallas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, in the Democratic primary.

Since earning the nomination, he has maintained his polling lead despite a withering onslaught of negative advertising - much of it funded by the world's richest man Elon Musk, whose SpaceX company is based in Texas.

Musk alone has funnelled more than $170m into the race. Trump's MAGA Inc. committee has chipped in $40m.

While Paxton has proven to be an ineffective fundraiser, the third-party money spent on his behalf has blanketed the airwaves in the state – spilling over into sporting events involving Texas teams that air across the nation.

They have targeted Talarico for his past comments supporting transgender people, for calling "radicalised white men" a domestic terrorism threat and for criticising the fossil fuel and beef industries – two powerful interests in the state.

Talarico has distanced himself from some of those earlier comments, arguing many were taken out of context and "missed the mark" or were "deliberately provocative" or "cringy".

Meanwhile, the Texas Democrat has proven to be a historically successful fundraiser, amassing more than $140m in donations over the course of his campaign and setting a three-month fundraising record for a Senate candidate.

The funding has allowed Talarico to hit back at Paxton, highlighting his past controversies, and defending himself from Republican attacks.

He frequently leans into his religious upbringing – as the grandson of a Southern Baptist preacher who spent time in a seminary – leavening his stump speeches with biblical references.

There is one particular passage Talarico has been partial to of late – the familiar Old Testament showdown between scrappy David and the giant Goliath.

"We are going up against our own Goliaths," he said in Lubbock. "The billionaire mega-donors, the corporate special interests, the entire Washington DC establishment. Their power is real, but so is ours."

But the power of Texas Democrats has been overestimated in the past. In 2018, Congressman Beto O'Rourke posted his own historic fundraising numbers, generated serious national attention and ultimately lost to Texas Senator Cruz by just over 2%.

Talarico's polling lead, while stable, continues to rest near the margin of error in most surveys. And last-minute Republican appeals, as well as Trump's repeated campaign visits, could spur conservatives to turn out in greater numbers on election day, erasing any Democratic early voting advantages.

Inside the tiny Democratic Party office at a Talarico rally in Amarillo on Tuesday, retired schoolteacher Terri Mills listened to the candidate's stump speech.

Despite acknowledging the decades of Democratic futility and false dawns, she said she was allowing herself to hope for a Democratic victory once again.

"I have gotten my hopes up before, you know," she said. "But I do feel that this time is a little different."

Don't get caught out by new Buy Now Pay Later rules

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crpdgp4y017go, today

If you've bought something via Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) since the summer, then you'll have been tested to see if you can afford it.

BNPL has always been a type of loan, usually paid back in instalments, but it's only been officially regulated since July.

This means stricter background checks on your ability to repay.

If you fail, then your purchase via BNPL will be blocked. If there's a chance of this happening to you, here are some ways to approach the situation.

What are the new rules?

BNPL lenders - such as Klarna, Clearpay and others - must now have regulator approval to operate, giving shoppers more access to refunds and independent rulings on complaints if things go wrong.

But new affordability checks on each BNPL transaction could also leave you blocked from services for the first time.

There are different affordability checks for different purchases, partially based on how much is borrowed.

But, with the expensive festive season approaching, here's how to avoid being blocked when time and finances are tight.

How do I avoid being blocked?

Here are four things to consider if you find your account is closed or your borrowing limit has been massively reduced, from Sara Williams, a former volunteer debt adviser at Citizens Advice who posts tips as Debt Camel on social media.

* Slow down your purchases: is what you are buying essential or can you postpone it?

* Be more careful about what you buy to avoid needing a high credit limit to, for example, buy lots of clothes in different sizes

* Cancel subscriptions to escape the trap of having to use BNPL to make up for the cost of previous payments

* Talk to debt charities for help and access to food bank vouchers if you are using BNPL for essentials

Avoid getting into debt

If you are struggling to make repayments on any type of loan - BNPL or otherwise - you should seek help before things spiral out of control.

The government-backed, independent, MoneyHelper website has a guide to finding free debt advice near you.

It also suggests writing down exactly what you owe, to help plan how you will repay the money.

There are also tools to work out if you are receiving all the benefits and grants you are entitled to, and a bill prioritiser to show which payments to make first and what to do if you miss a payment.

You should also be sceptical of supposed debt solutions you might see on your social feeds.

The fight to save Canadian town threatened by Trump's tariffs

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmly016ep243o, 2 days ago

As you cross the Ottawa river into Témiscaming, Quebec, the paper mill takes up much of the horizon.

The town itself was built over a century ago, around the mill and the region's forests filled with pine, birch, spruce and fir. Now, the main employer and economic anchor sits idle after trade talks broke down between Canada and the US and President Donald Trump imposed more tariffs on the country.

Most of the mill‘s 360 employees are out of work, kept afloat for the moment with partial pay from government tariff-relief.

For some, like Nadine Suley, the shuttering of the mill could mark not just a lost livelihood, but a lost way of life.

She is not "a city girl", and is heading out moose hunting later to take advantage of the short season, like much of the town. She quips they'll all need the free meat provided by the animals this year.

"It's not just a job. It's our home," Suley says, adding that the US tariffs on her town feel like "a personal attack".

In early October, American owner RYAM went ahead with an "economic shutdown" of the mill for "an indefinite period".

Property values in Témiscaming fell almost overnight, and "For Sale" signs dot the yards of modest middle-class homes that make up most of the town.

There are fears that essential service people - from grocery store clerks to the doctors at the small local hospital - could also be on their way out.

"If the mill goes down, it'll turn into a ghost town," says Ronnie Raymond, who like many in the town comes from a family of mill workers.

"There'll be nothing, nothing left. There's no work for anybody, really. It's scary."

At a high level, Canada's economy has weathered the ongoing trade war with the US, its largest customer. The national unemployment rate has remained largely steady at around 6.5% since Trump's tariffs were first implemented. It's been coupled with tepid but consistent economic growth.

But a closer look at the numbers shows pockets of deep pain in industries directly hit by US tariffs of up to 50%, like steel, aluminium, automobiles and - in the case of Témiscaming - lumber, pulp and paper. It raises questions about whether the Carney government is doing enough to help those struggling while a trade deal remains elusive.

"If there was 10% of job loss in Toronto or Montreal or Quebec City or Vancouver, it'd be all over the news, and it'd be a lot of pressure on the governments to do something,” says Stéphane Lefebvre, an employee and union leader, whose father and grandfather also worked at the mill.

That economic pain could have ripple effects on the entire forestry industry in the region, including saw mills and trucking. One local contractor told the BBC he has already had to lay off 13 people.

The last time the town faced a threat this existential was in 1973, when the mill's then-American owner threatened to shut it down, prompting the local workers and managers to come together and purchase it.

They turned it into Tembec, a Quebec-owned, international company with branches across North America and France.

The workers now hope to do it again, mobilising a coalition of locals who want to buy the plant back from RYAM, which purchased it in 2017.

"We're hoping that lightning will hit twice," Lefebvre says, speaking inside the town's union hall.

But he contends that they cannot do so without significant help from Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Quebec government, either in the form of tariff relief or financial support.

Suley notes that the prime minister has placed emphasis on "buy local" and supporting Canadian workers since he was elected. Backing the town's bid to buy back the mill, she says, would be a way for Carney to fulfil that pledge.

In an email to the BBC, RYAM said it would not comment on a potential sale of the plant or any prospective buyers.

Mayor Alain Gauthier doesn't blame RYAM for its decision. He calls US tariffs "a bomb to shut down our manufacturing in Canada".

He wants Ottawa to retaliate with its own duties on the board products coming into Canada from the US, currently tariff-free.

And he says that while politicians have said Canada is in an economic war with the US, "in reality we see absolutely no evidence of war measures being taken".

"We feel we got into a war with kid's water guns to fight back."

Some, like Lefebvre, feel that forestry has taken a back seat in the fight to save other tariffed industries like steel and autos.

This month, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly threatened Stelco - one of Canada's largest steelmakers - with financial penalties or a forced asset sale should they go ahead with the planned layoffs of some 500 workers due to steel tariffs pressure.

Stelco in Hamilton, near Toronto, is owned by US-based Cleveland-Cliffs, which committed to keeping jobs in Canada when it bought the firm in 2024.

Last week, Carney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced nearly C$9bn ($6.4bn; £4.8bn) to help Ontario's steel and auto sector. The funds will be used to help the industries modernise, strengthen domestic demand and open new markets overseas, they said.

Sébastien Lemire, the elected MP for Témiscaming from the Bloc Québécois party, told the BBC that he is "very concerned and worried" about what he calls inaction from the Carney government to support the town and Quebec's forestry industry more broadly.

A spokesperson for Minister Joly told the BBC in a statement that the government has made available $400m to support the forestry sector in rural and remote areas.

It has also launched a programme to help businesses impacted by tariffs to access cash-flow while they work to pivot away from US markets.

On the Témiscaming mill, the spokesperson said that the government "is actively working with all parties involved to find a viable solution to the issues facing the company, while responsibly managing Canadians' dollars."

In August, after the breakdown in trade talks, the US imposed 50% duties on a some C$28bn of Canadian goods, including wood and paper products like pulp, stationery and boxes.

Canada in response imposed its own "dollar-for-dollar" counter-tariffs.

The Témiscaming mill, which produces paperboard used in frozen-food packaging across North America and in the scratch-off lottery tickets commonly found at convenience stores, sends roughly 75% of its production to the US.

Trump argues these import taxes boost US manufacturing and create jobs - essentially seeking to protect US workers who could face similar fates to those in Témiscaming.

Frank Dottori has been through all of this before.

Now in his 80s and retired in Témiscaming, he was an engineer at the mill that was instrumental in organising its employees in the 1970s to take a 10% cut in order to collectively purchase it. He went on to become CEO.

Their ambitions were seen as foolish at the time, and he recalls being "politely ejected" by the Quebec premier when he first came knocking for support.

But they prevailed with the help of the labour union and an ex-employee with executive experience and plenty of swagger. Dottori attributes their success to this person's forceful charisma.

Dottori said the new generation of workers need someone just as bold.

"Does the local group have that? Highly unlikely. Can they get it? Yeah, if they organise themselves," he said.

It is also imperative, he says, that US tariffs be lifted to restore the mill's long-term economic viability, at least in the short term.

Many workers in Témiscaming say they are placing some hope in the upcoming US midterm elections to put pressure on Trump — whose approval ratings have fallen among Americans, according to polls — to ease some of his tariffs on Canada.

"We'll take any help we can get," Suley says, adding: "There are Americans that care what's going on, and it's affecting them too."

There are signs the Trump administration is taking note of that pressure, with some tariffs on Canadian goods lifted last week after lobbying from Republican Maine Senator Susan Collins, who is running for re-election in November. Those changes don't apply to products made at Témiscaming's mill, however.

Suley and others hope a resolution will come quickly, before winter, when sub-zero temperatures could freeze equipment at the idle plant, causing damage that would make reopening even more difficult.

In the meantime, Lefebvre says he is committed to making the dream of local ownership of the mill a reality, regardless of what happens.

"We're in Game Seven right now," he says. "We're gonna play till the last whistle."

From Maya as Sir Mo Farah to Heidi as her own left hand: The best Halloween looks

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck1exyj525d9o, yesterday

Supermodel and TV host Heidi Klum confirmed her position as the queen of Halloween by transforming into a giant, bloodied and severed hand for her annual costume party in New York.

Klum, 53, was completely unrecognisable arriving at her event in what she described as her own chopped-off "left hand".

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Klum's party, which brings celebrities across the globe together dressed in their wild, weird and wonderful costumes.

And the revelry didn't stop there, with celebrities such as Maya Jama wowing attendees at her own Halloween party in London dressed as four-time Olympic champion Sir Mo Farah.

"It took a lot of hands putting this hand together," Klum told reporters as she posed for pictures on the red carpet. "I think about 10 or 20 hands."

Explaining the inspiration for the idea, she said: "I looked at my hand and I thought 'Hey, I think that I can fit my body inside of this somehow.'

"I always try to come up with something unusual and I don't think I've seen an actual person walking around like a hand. I thought that was something new and different."

Klum is never one to shy away from dressing up on the scariest day of the year, with previous looks including a worm, Medusa and the ogre Princess Fiona from the Shrek films.

Other attendees at Klum's party this year included actors Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka, who surprised attendees by dressing as the twins from the horror film The Shining.

Pop star Jade Thirlwall also attended the party in New York dressed as a stone statue of an angel, while Severance and Spider-Man actor Tramell Tillman turned up with intricate face makeup and prosthetics.

Meanwhile in London, broadcaster Maya Jama hosted her annual Halloween Party dressed as Sir Mo Farah.

Jama told Elle UK magazine she wanted to dress as the "bald headed icon" to honour the Olympian, adding that she has wanted to dress up as a man for years for Halloween.

"[Sir Mo] loved the idea," she explained.

"He's actually sent me all of his real life Olympic outfits, his real, actual medals he won for the Olympics.

"His real trainers. He's even done some TikToks for me. He is fully on board."

Comedian Katherine Ryan attended the event dressed as Jama, recreating one of her outfits from her recent stint on the Celebrity Traitors.

Elsewhere, singer Lily Allen dressed as every performer's worst nightmare - a Ticketmaster seating map covered in unsold blue concert tickets.

I've been stuck on a tiny Pacific island for years and can't get a transit visa to fly home

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmq5npz5l5geo, yesterday

When Ruchira Ranasingha left Sri Lanka almost a decade ago, she could never have imagined she would end up stranded on a tiny archipelago in the South Pacific.

The 50-year-old has now been stuck in the Cook Islands for three years. She tells the BBC she is desperate to go back to Sri Lanka and has even offered to go "handcuffed, bound and gagged".

Ranasingha had been hoping to settle in New Zealand.

After seeking asylum there, she says she followed an immigration adviser's recommendation to temporarily exit the country to apply for a work visa. But once in the Cook Islands, her application was rejected. And by leaving New Zealand, she had breached the terms of her existing asylum-linked visa.

Now New Zealand is refusing to issue her a transit visa that would allow her to fly home to Sri Lanka.

Australia is refusing too. The only other international destinations she can fly to from the Cook Islands - Tahiti and Hawaii - require her to give biometric information in New Zealand before any visa can be processed.

As a result, she has no feasible way of leaving.

"My son - my only child - is getting married in November and I really want to be there for his wedding. My mother is so worried about what has happened to me that she is constantly in and out of hospital," she says through tears.

"I will do anything they ask of me - I just want to go home."

Ranasingha left Sri Lanka in 2018 after being forced to close her small T-shirt factory due to a loss of business. Struggling to repay loans, she moved to Hong Kong to work as a domestic caregiver looking after elderly people and children.

Her brother tells BBC Sinhala she had come under immense financial pressure. Her husband was a drug addict who died about seven years ago, he adds.

In December 2022, Ranasingha headed to New Zealand, where she says she lived with a cousin on a two-month visit visa. As it came close to expiring, she says an immigration interpreter helped her apply for asylum on the grounds she was facing threats from lenders in Sri Lanka.

She was granted an asylum seeker "open work visa", enabling her to work for almost any employer for a year. She found a job at a restaurant, she says, which ultimately agreed to sponsor an employment visa, which she believed would give her longer-term stability.

But as asylum seekers generally cannot apply for other visas while their applications are processed in New Zealand, it was declined.

That's when she got in touch with Immigration & Secretarial Services, a firm she claims told her a fresh application for an employment visa could be made from overseas. Email correspondence the BBC has seen shows its manager, Sylviane Gallant, saying she would initiate the process as soon as Ranasingha had left the country.

So she booked a short stay in the Cook Islands while the application was made.

It turned out to be a disastrous decision.

She was again refused the employment visa. And by leaving New Zealand, she had violated the terms of her existing visa. New Zealand authorities made it clear they would not grant her any future visas.

Gallant claimed to make various interventions on her behalf, including writing to politicians including Chris Penk, New Zealand's then-immigration minister. But ultimately, Ranasingha says Gallant admitted the situation was her fault and told her "there was nothing more she could do".

"She told me I was better off going home. There was nothing holding me there so I agreed to go."

But when she turned up at the airport with an Air New Zealand ticket to Sri Lanka in hand, she was told she couldn't board the flight without a New Zealand transit visa.

Three applications for a New Zealand transit visa were rejected. Authorities said they weren't convinced she would leave New Zealand. Four applications for Australian transit visas were rejected too.

In one of its rejections, New Zealand suggested she explore other routes. But both the US state of Hawaii and the French Polynesian island of Tahiti told her she would need to provide biometric information before any visa could be processed - and that could only be done in person in New Zealand.

Her latest application to New Zealand, which included all the details of the alternative routes she'd been trying, as well as her son's upcoming wedding and mother's failing health, was also rejected.

"I have lost so much money on tickets. For almost four years I have been just applying for visa after visa with nothing working out," she says, breaking down.

On a collection of islands known for their sweeping sandy beaches and rugged volcanic peaks, just four hours from Auckland, Ranasingha has been an involuntary guest.

She's luckier than others in her position, she says, with her hotel letting her stay free of charge in its staff accommodation and friendly locals providing her with food and clothing.

One of the hotel directors even gave her a sewing machine, she says, enabling her to make a small income.

"My mother always tells me I must have done something good, for me to be in a place like this where people have been so kind to me," she tells the BBC.

But it does little to ease the sense of being trapped.

Ranasingha says the stress is impacting her health. "I am scared something is going to happen to me," she says.

"I don't know what her solution is, to be honest," says Auckland-based immigration law specialist Alastair McClymont.

She had received "terrible advice" which "certainly" could not have come from a genuine immigration lawyer, he says, pointing to an industry of "so-called immigration consultants" who charge people to lodge applications without fully understanding the risks involved. Ranasingha says she has parted with thousands of New Zealand dollars in fees to Immigration & Secretarial Services.

The BBC reached out to Gallant but did not receive a response.

McClymont suggests New Zealand authorities will not grant the transit visa because, as far as they are concerned, she has no intention of returning to Sri Lanka having made an asylum claim saying her life was in danger there.

New Zealand co-ordinates with its neighbour Australia which means it won't want to let her transit either, he says, and France and the US are likely to reach similar conclusions.

To leave, "she is going to have to transit through somewhere and no-one will want to take the risk."

Immigration New Zealand told the BBC it had received multiple transit visa applications from Ranasingha - all declined "as we were not satisfied she has a genuine intention to transit through New Zealand".

When asked why one couldn't be granted even when Ranasingha had offered to be handcuffed and escorted, a representative of the immigration minister's office said those measures do not prevent individuals from making an asylum claim.

Australia's Home Affairs department said it would not comment on individual cases. It said any non-citizens travelling to Australia "must satisfy the requirements of the Migration Act 1958 (the Act) and the Migration Regulations 1994".

Meanwhile, Ranasingha's family have been trying to see if the Sri Lankan government can help. Her brother says they have tried "every possible avenue... but so far we haven't been able to get anywhere on this".

Sri Lanka's foreign ministry told the BBC it was "taking all necessary steps to facilitate her return to Sri Lanka from the Cook Islands. Officials of the Sri Lankan High Commission in Wellington, New Zealand, as well as the relevant New Zealand authorities, are working closely with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on this matter."

But Ranasingha's brother is deeply worried.

"Her mental state is not good," he tells BBC Sinhala.

"One of the times we spoke, she told me that if they were not willing to get her back home alive, they might at least repatriate her body."

Additional reporting by Kethaki Masilamani and Julianna Khan

If you've been affected by issues involving suicide or feelings of despair, details of organisations offering advice and support for people in the UK are available from BBC Action Line. Help and support outside the UK can be found at Befrienders Worldwide.

Tributes to 'inspirational' Olympian Ciara Mageean after death at 34

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj3vqy1g3eygo, today

Tributes have been paid to former European champion and two-time Olympic runner Ciara Mageean, who has died at the age of 34.

Mageean, from Portaferry in County Down, was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer in May 2025.

She died on Sunday morning, surrounded by her loved ones, a statement posted on her social media accounts said.

"A beloved daughter, sister, wife, friend and inspiration to so many, she will be deeply missed," it said.

Mageean's death comes less than three weeks after her marriage to her long-term partner Thomas Moran.

The athlete represented Ireland at the 2016 and 2020 Olympics and won gold in the 1500m at the European Athletics Championships in Rome in 2024.

She also represented Northern Ireland at the Commonwealth Games, winning silver in Birmingham in 2022.

'One of our own'

Olympic legend Lady Mary Peters said Mageean was a "wonderful lady" who was "gracious, beautiful, talented and inspirational to the next generation".

"We knew she was very ill and we knew that it was inevitable but we didn't expect it so soon," said the 1972 Olympic pentathlon gold medallist.

Lady Mary's charity the Mary Peters Trust, which supports Northern Ireland athletes, had helped Mageean in her athletics career.

"My charity supported her for as long as we could because she was so talented and we recognised that in her," said Last Mary.

She said that Mageean had continued to inspire young athletes even while undergoing treatment for cancer and would be "sorely missed in the world of sport".

Sean Young, the secretary of Portaferry Gaelic Athletic Club, where Mageean played camogie in her younger years, said its members were in "disbelief and shock" at her death.

He said Mageean had been a "fierce competitor" who began her sporting journey at the club before pursuing athletics.

"Outside the sporting arena she is the most inspirational, humble person we have ever had within our club," he said.

Down Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) said it was "honoured and privileged" to call Mageean one of its own, describing her as someone who never forgot her roots.

"She touched the lives of so many people and she helped change the lives of so many," it said.

"In her battle with illness she showed us courage, positivity and the value of life."

Her former school, Assumption Grammar in Ballynahinch, County Down, said it was "deeply saddened and heartbroken" by the death of its "cherished past pupil".

"Ciara's kindness, strength, faith and unwavering determination were an inspiration to us all," it said.

"She touched countless lives with her warmth, humility and generosity of spirit."

'A champion in every sense of the word'

Northern Ireland's First Minister Michelle O'Neill described Mageean as "a champion in every sense of the word and a role model for all athletes".

"She represented her country with pride and helped put Irish athletics on the map," said O'Neill.

She said Mageean had faced her cancer diagnosis with the same "bravery and determination" she had shown throughout her sporting career.

"Ciara's legacy will live on and she will continue to be an inspiration to many."

Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly said people across Northern Ireland had been "deeply proud and inspired" by the athlete.

She described Mageean as an "outstanding athlete and ambassador for her sport" who had spoken with honesty and bravery about her health battles.

Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Micheál Martin said he was "deeply saddened" by her untimely death and extended his sympathies to her husband, family and friends.

Tánaiste (Irish Deputy Prime Minister) Simon Harris said Mageean had inspired people both through her achievements on the track and her openness about her illness.

"She gave so many others strength and hope," he said.

'Self-belief and commitment'

World Athletics described her as "an inspiration to many, on and off the track", highlighting her historic European gold medal in Rome in 2024.

Athletics Ireland, the country's governing body for the sport, said Mageean was "much-loved and inspirational".

"Her courage, warmth and spirit will leave a lasting legacy," the organisation said.

Conal Heatley, the chief executive of Commonwealth Games Northern Ireland, described Mageean as "one of the best of us".

He told BBC News NI she had carried herself with "incredible dignity" throughout her illness and was a "fantastic figure for the island of Ireland".

The Camogie Association also paid tribute to Mageean, with its president Brian Molloy describing her as a great friend of the sport, both as a player and a supporter.

"In her all-too-short life, Ciara touched the hearts of so many," he said.

"Her self-belief and commitment to her craft will always be inspirational and she will be fondly remembered by all who had the privilege of knowing her."

'A light has gone out in the world'

Mageean was named the 2023 BBC Northern Ireland Sports Personality of the Year after an impressive year, in which she broke national records and was fourth in a competitive World Championships final.

BBC Sport NI broadcaster Thomas Niblock, who interviewed Mageean in July for The GAA Social podcast, described her as a "one off".

"A light has gone out in the world. Authentic, talented, decent. Her kindness and wonderful personality was a joy to watch and see," he wrote on social media.

Niblock recalled how Mageean had received disappointing news the day before their interview but had insisted on going ahead with the recording.

"It's 90 minutes Oisin and myself will always treasure. She was the best of us," he said.

He also paid tribute to her husband and the wider Portaferry community.

"I've never met a person who met Ciara, who didn't love her," he added.

Patrick Kielty, who said it was a "privilege" to interview Mageean on Irish national broadcaster RTÉ's The Late Late Show, said "she wasn't just a champion on the track".

"She was a champion of others who showed us all how to live."

Judge dismisses Trump administration's lawsuit over two Dan Sullivans in Alaska election

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv4g1y02jejro, today

A judge has tossed a lawsuit by the Trump administration that sought to delay certifying results in Alaska's crucial Senate race if the Republican incumbent loses.

The suit by the US Department of Justice argued that having two candidates named Dan Sullivan on the ballot could cause "voter confusion" and take support from incumbent Republican Dan S Sullivan.

The judge ruled that the federal government doesn't have authority to force Alaska to segregate and investigate any ballots in the three-way race between Sullivan, Daniel J Sullivan and Democrat Mary Peltola.

The Alaska Senate contest is considered one the closest in the Tuesday midterms, where control of Congress will be up for grabs.

"The United States provides no workable plan as to how it proposes to segregate ballots cast for Daniel J. Sullivan on Election Day and then conduct a court-ordered unspecified 'investigation' of those ballots in a manner that would preserve voter secrecy," US District Judge Sharon Gleason wrote in the ruling.

Alaska voters have the right to a secret ballot, she wrote, adding that regardless, such a move by the justice department would be too late as it is only days before the midterm election. Many voters have already cast their ballots in early voting and postal voting.

After the ruling, the justice department said it would file to appeal. It said in a statement that the court dismissed the federal case on "procedural grounds but did not dispute the argument of the United States that Daniel J. Sullivan (a/k/a Decoy Dan) entered the race as a frivolous candidate to confuse voters".

"Alaskan voters deserve a fair election, not to be misled in an attempt to rig outcomes," the statement continued.

Asked about the lawsuit last month, President Donald Trump said he had directed the justice department to file it.

"All of a sudden he decides to run for the Senate, and his name is Dan Sullivan. One is Daniel S., one is Daniel J. The Daniel J. is the fake," Trump told reporters.

Daniel J Sullivan, the little-known candidate running with no party affiliation, had previously told The New York Times he has voted both Democrat and Republican in the past.

Senator Dan S Sullivan, the incumbent Republican, and his allies have accused the Democrats of trying to confuse voters.

Then last week, controversy erupted when The New York Times reported that Democrats on Peltola's team worked with people who tried to recruit spoiler candidates in the Senate race.

Peltola has denied she knowing anything about an alleged "scheme" that led to the two Dan Sullivans standing in the race.

The Alaska race is considered by analysts to be one of the tightest in the upcoming US midterm elections, which will decide which party controls Congress for the last two years of Trump's presidency.

Five teenagers stabbed at Halloween party

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6n4ed1l2pn1o, today

Five teenagers have been seriously injured after being stabbed at a Halloween party, police have said.

Officers were called to Park Road in Chandler's Ford, near Eastleigh, shortly after 22:30 GMT on Saturday.

The injured teens - three boys aged 16 and two aged 17 - were taken to hospital.

Hampshire Police said it believes an unknown group gained entry to a party at an address on Park Road before the stabbings.

The force has appealed for witnesses and anyone with information to come forward.

A police cordon remained in place on Sunday while officers continue their investigation.

Senior investigating officer Det Ch Insp Elizabeth Pirie acknowledged the impact on local residents and thanked the community for its patience.

Earlier, an eyewitness told the BBC ambulances and an air ambulance had attended.

Another eyewitness said they saw someone running out of the house involved, shouting that he had been stabbed and that he was being chased by two people.

In a post on X on Sunday, Eastleigh MP Liz Jarvis said: "My thoughts are with the victims and their families and all those affected by the incident in Chandler's Ford last night, and my thanks go to our local police and emergency services for their prompt response.

"It's important not to speculate or share unverified information."

Senator Chris Murphy expected to make full recovery after stroke

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw78pyy73d4xo, today

US Senator Chris Murphy has been taken to hospital after suffering a stroke on Saturday, his team has said.

The 53-year-old Connecticut Democrat was at his son's hockey game when he began feeling "numbness in his arm" and was taken to hospital, his team said in a statement shared with US media. It was discovered in hospital that he had experienced a stroke.

"The doctors are encouraged by his progress, he is awake and alert, and we are optimistic he will make a full recovery," his team said.

Murphy, who is not up for re-election this midterms cycle, has been campaigning around the country in support of fellow Democrats who are on the ballot this year.

The stakes are high for his party, which is trying to wrest control of Congress away from Republicans, who currently hold the majority in both the House and Senate.

Murphy has served in the Senate since 2013 and was previously in the House of Representatives. The Democrat - who is considered a possible 2028 White House candidate - has championed progressive causes including affordable health care, international human rights, and gun safety.

He has recently made stops in Michigan, Minnesota and Florida to attend campaign events for Democratic candidates on the ballot, and he had been scheduled to travel to New Hampshire on Sunday.

Several other Senators have experienced strokes in the last few years, including Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen in 2022, New Mexico Democrat Ben Ray Lujan the same year, and Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman.

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, the former majority leader, was out of the Capitol for months earlier this year after he had a bad fall and was taken to hospital.

Fetterman offered his well wishes for Murphy and his family in a social media post on Sunday.

"As someone who survived a near-fatal stroke, I understand all too well how much this impacts your life," Fetterman wrote on X. "My family is rooting for Chris and his family for a full and speedy recovery."

Armed police start patrols in Sydney after Bondi Beach attack

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9kgj7k7ry0ro, today

Heavily-armed police officers have started patrolling Sydney's streets, as part of heightened security measures following last year's deadly shooting at Bondi Beach.

The Armed Response Command (ARC) will see specially trained officers in busy tourist areas carrying long-arm rifles – an unfamiliar sight for most residents.

New South Wales police say the officers will also patrol major events like sports matches and places of worship "to prevent, deter and rapidly respond to serious threats, including active armed offender incidents".

Fifteen people - including a 10-year-old girl – were killed in December when two gunmen opened fire on an event marking the Jewish festival of Hanukkah at the popular beach.

The attack was Australia's worst mass shooting in almost three decades and prompted sweeping gun law reforms and a crackdown on hate speech.

One resident told ABC news that the sight of armed police was "unnerving".

"They are just everywhere. Those guns are huge."

But another woman told the broadcaster that seeing police with weapons made her feel safe.

ARC is specifically designed to be "highly visible across Sydney, driving specialist vehicles and carrying rifles," New South Wales police said in a statement.

Its role "is built on a simple principle - preserving life," Detective Superintendent Andrew Evans said.

The shooting on 14 December put huge pressure on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's government, with calls for immediate action on antisemitism.

Jewish communities have welcomed the new police operation, which will eventually consist of 250 officers, but others have called for safeguards to protect human rights.

"No Australian wants to see officers with military weapons on our streets, but the sight of body bags is far worse," Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said.

But Amnesty International Australia said it was concerned about the "militarisation of policing", and asked for assurances from the state government that ARC will not be used to suppress peaceful protests.

"Any expansion of police powers and capabilities must be accompanied by clear, publicly accessible rules, robust independent oversight and accountability," said the organisation's Andrew Witheford.

The New South Wales administration defended the new measures.

"Our world changed forever. That's just the truth of it, right across this country. And I said it at the time, we will never be the same again," the state's Police Minister Yasmin Catley told the ABC.

One of the alleged gunmen, Naveed Akram, has been charged with 78 offences including 15 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder, and one count of committing a terrorist act.

His father, Sajid Akram, 50 - who was also armed and shot at the crowd on Bondi Beach - was killed by police at the scene.

King to address slavery in Antigua as PM says he is open to possible UK apology

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq398y0zj9rpo, today

King Charles III is to speak with "unflinching honesty" and "sincere sorrow" on the lasting pain of the transatlantic slave trade, during the final leg of his Caribbean tour in Antigua, Buckingham Palace has said.

The King will address Commonwealth leaders on Tuesday in a speech which will touch on the issue.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said earlier he was "open" to the possibility of the UK formally apologising for its role in slavery - a change in the government's stance.

It is understood the Palace was told in advance of Burnham's comments in an opinion piece on Friday night, and the King has not made any changes to his speech in light of them.

The British government has never formally apologised for slavery or offered to pay reparations.

Burnham has previously stuck with the policy of his predecessors, and stopped short of offering any consideration of reparation payments.

In an address to the nation to mark Antigua and Barbuda's independence day, Prime Minister Gaston Browne said the history of slavery was painful and "its consequences have not disappeared with the passage of time".

He said the country's pursuit of reparatory justice deserved "seriousness, sensitivity and sustained international engagement".

Browne went on to say his government was having these conversations in bilateral discussions with the UK and other Commonwealth countries at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch described "endless talk about apologies" as a "distraction" from solving current problems.

She told BBC Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: "The transatlantic slave trade happened centuries ago. It is time for the Commonwealth to start looking forwards, not endlessly backwards."

The King will make his speech at the CHOGM.

He "will not shy away from confronting the most shameful aspects of the past during this visit", a Palace spokesperson said.

"You may therefore expect him to address them in his speech with unflinching honesty, sincere sorrow, and respect for the wider discussions that will be taking place between relevant governments on this issue at CHOGM and beyond."

When asked about the King's reaction to the prime minister's comments, the spokesperson said it would "not be appropriate" for the King to address matters of policy relating to "the UK government's position".

The Caribbean tour has again thrust King Charles into the difficult debates over the UK's colonial legacy in the region.

On his first stop in the Bahamas, the King delivered a speech where he spoke of the "suffering of the past".

In Guyana, he visited the site of a Slave Rebellion where hundreds of enslaved people were killed.

Buckingham Palace said it was a moment for the King to learn more about the history of slavery and resistance. His engagements have also covered the environment, opportunities for young people and trade relationships with the UK.

Royal sources have stressed that the decisions around making an apology are a matter for government, not the Palace.

"His Majesty is well practised on the diplomatic tightrope," a Royal aide said. "He is up for challenging visits with complex issues and relationships in play. He sees it as his role to 'bat for Britain', the Realms and wider Commonwealth."

In a piece for the Guardian published on Friday night, Burnham described the transatlantic slave trade as a "brutal and barbaric violation", and that Britain "must face up to the past".

His separate pledge in his article to strengthen the work of the Commonwealth as an organisation will be welcomed by King Charles, who views the collection of 56 countries as a powerful vehicle for change.

The King will be giving the opening speech at CHOGM, which gathers leaders from those 56 states every two years in a different part of the Commonwealth.

Each biennial meeting has a theme and this year's is officially called Accelerating Partnerships and Investment for a Prosperous Commonwealth.

Queen Camilla is with the King in Antigua and, as the couple attended a church service on Sunday morning ahead of joining celebrations to mark Independence Day on the island, there was a reminder of what the intended focus of the week will be.

Bishop of North Eastern Caribbean and Aruba, Ernest Flemming, told the congregation the "prosperity" of the Commonwealth must be a "shared prosperity".

"True partnership requires mutual respect, it requires listening, it requires fairness."

A Buckingham Palace spokesperson said: "Institutions are under strain across the globe. The Commonwealth has scale and breadth, but is also small enough for leaders to know each other and co-operate together."

The King, they said, "contributes ideas and encouragement on a wide range of issues, delivering practical results which help improve the lives of millions".

It has been a difficult few months for the King, with developments surrounding his brother, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and the publication of a book by his former brother-in-law, Earl Spencer.

In addition, his son the Duke of Sussex made a surprise move back to the UK with his wife Meghan and their two children in August.

Asked if the King was confident that his approach to family matters had been the right one in terms of public attitudes towards the institution, the response was concise. "Yes," a senior aide told the BBC. "That is why he takes the actions he does - and has done."

On the serious allegations that have emerged about Meghan's father, Thomas Markle, the Palace did not want to get involved publicly: "We wouldn't comment on private family matters."

The King is also still being treated for cancer. He was diagnosed in early 2024 and the Palace says he remains on a "positive trajectory".

In hot and humid conditions, he will soon celebrate his 78th birthday and will have carried out about 36 engagements by the end of this nine-day tour of the Caribbean.

He left 28 years ago, now after 31,000 miles Karl Bushby is almost home

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq8rz38jr50go, 2 days ago

With his journey almost complete, Karl Bushby reflects on adventures that have taken him across four continents, as well as strained relationships and how life as he knows it is about to change dramatically.

Back in 1998, the former paratrooper, then aged 29, set off from Punta Arenas, Chile, to walk an unbroken path to his home city of Hull, without breaking two self-imposed rules: not to return to the UK until he had completed his journey, and not to use transport to advance.

Now 57, he is embarking on his final few miles having hacked his way through the jungles of the Darién Gap, crossed the frozen Bering Strait and, just a few weeks ago, swum the English Channel.

At the end, he will be met by his 36-year-old son Adam, a 12-year-old granddaughter whom he has never met, his father and brothers. His mother will be waiting at his childhood home that he left 28 years ago.

"We're definitely in terra incognita [unknown territory] right now, or pretty soon will be," says Bushby, as I join him in rural Lincolnshire.

"Right now, I'm comfortable because I'm doing what I do, but pretty soon that's going to screech to a halt."

A bit like "The Beast", Bushby's heavy duty hardcart.

Just a couple of miles into this leg, Bushby's handcart, which he uses to carry essential supplies, sustains a puncture.

"We haven't had one of these for a long time," he says. "This could be a pain. Damn."

As I watch him attempt a hasty roadside repair, he flashes a grin before adding: "If it was raining, I'd probably be moaning a bit more."

"The first few days that I was in Dover, it started raining. But we'd managed to just thread the needle as far as the weather was concerned. We had those perfect three days [for the swim]."

Cars thunder past us.

Bushby quips: "You guys know you drive on the wrong side of the road, right?"

His use of the word "you" speaks of his disconnection from home.

Bushby is well versed in overcoming physical barriers, such as a flat tyre.

But is he prepared for what is to follow?

"Everything that I am and everything that I know of me is going to go away," he says. "And that's going to be a problem. You're going to have the old identity crisis, because Karl is this [an adventurer] and has been for half his life.

"I will have to figure out who I am again. What is the meaning to it all? How do I find that meaning and purpose? How do I fill that hole I'm suddenly going to find myself in?

"Every fibre of my being, every day, has been what I'm doing right now. It has been the mission.

"I think the old adage goes... the only thing worse than a man who can't fulfil his dreams is a man who's fulfilled his dreams... because then what?"

Angela Maxwell, an American long-distance walker, joined him for the walk from Dover, where he landed after swimming the Channel.

"I think Karl might be surprised how much he'll miss the road," she says. "We joke sometimes that Karl doesn't love walking. But he loves the mission. He loves the passion, the purpose."

Bushby has been surprised by the interest his return to the UK has stoked.

"It's been almost overwhelming. The amount of people that have recognised me along the way. It's cool. It gets a bit weird at times when people get really, really excited, and I just can't work out why. From my perspective, it just seems a little strange.

"I'm some guy who's just walking."

A car pulls into a lay-by and the driver asks if he is the Karl Bushby. The men pose for a selfie.

Bushby has consistently denied this is a spiritual undertaking; a journey of discovery.

But does he think the global interest in his story stems from an inner wanderlust present in many of us, but acted upon by few?

"I think that's it," he says.

"I've lived a million men's dreams. A lot of people would love to walk away from home and just keep going."

Bushby says his "opportunity to walk" came following the end of his marriage, with his wife returning to Northern Ireland with their son.

The reality of life on the road is not as rosy as it might first appear, it seems.

"I'm dealing with the day-to-day stuff - punctures, just trying to find a place where you can wash your underwear. That's my life. That's the mundane stuff, walking in the rain, it's never-ending kilometres.

"It's not as glorious as it looks."

Bushby says he has only spent about 15 of the 28 years walking, often retreating to Mexico, where costs are low, between stints.

The remainder of the time has been spent applying for visas and "dealing with geopolitics", he says.

Travel restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic also resulted in delays.

Under the rules he set for his journey, Bushby could not return to the UK to meet his family.

On rare occasions, he met his son and parents, who are divorced, in other countries.

"Family is family, right?" says Bushby.

"They're always going to be there. But there will be strain. There will be distance. So much so that you've grown apart to some degree. You don't really know each other anymore.

"As far as a love life goes, standby. You're going to take a kick in the nuts. It's not going to work out for you."

Soon after arriving in Dover, he tasted fish, chips and mushy peas for the first time in almost three decades.

He says nowhere else in the world does the dish quite like the Brits.

But venturing beyond the superficial, he appears not to have missed the UK.

"I've had the whole world to play with, so I've been distracted by many shiny things."

Bushby believes he has not aged conventionally.

"I'm older, but I don't feel that old. I still feel way too young for my age, mentally. I still identify with that guy from the Americas way back when."

With a twinkle in his eye, he adds: "I have still got that sense of adventure."

His journey has also enabled him to meet many people.

"I personally have met the very best of humanity, and that's been a very uplifting thing. It's reaffirmed my belief and faith in humanity. The kindness of strangers made it all come together.

"I couldn't have done it without the world."

Before sponsors and a book deal, Bushby claims he was a "penniless backpacker" who relied on donations and even food discarded on roadsides to survive.

He has advice for others pondering an adventure.

"Take any given opportunity. You can do a lot more than you ever imagined. A little bit of self-confidence will take you an awful long way. You're not going to achieve anything by not doing anything."

What advice would he give to a young Bushby about to set off for Chile?

"He doesn't want to hear it. You don't tell him anything. Just grin at him and let him be."

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated Karl Bushby had covered 36,000 miles. His team has revised this to 31,000 miles, taking into account a change to the route, which included his swim across the Caspian Sea.

Listen to highlights from Hull and East Yorkshire or Lincolnshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North.

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Democrat endorses Republican candidate in key Michigan Senate race as party spat escalates

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c95ynzv88n68o, today

A Democrat in Michigan has endorsed the Republican candidate in the state's closely-fought US Senate contest, as a spat with her own party's candidate Abdul El-Sayed escalated just days before the vote.

Haley Stevens, a former congresswomen who lost out on the Democratic nomination to El-Sayed, made a surprise appearance alongside the Republican candidate Mike Rogers at a church on Sunday.

"I don't belong in Abdul's campaign," she said in a video posted to X shortly after that appearance. "Who we are as Michiganders is not hate and is not what we are getting out from our Democratic nominee right now."

"That's why I am endorsing Mike Rogers," Stevens said.

Stevens also said El-Sayed had told her she was no longer welcome in his campaign.

The pair had been scheduled to appear together at an event on Sunday, but El-Sayed reportedly asked her not to come.

They had clashed publicly over a campaign advert from a liberal group which blamed Israel for high food prices.

El-Sayed, who has not commented on Stevens's endorsement of his opponent, criticised the advert and said he had nothing to do with its contents.

The Michigan Senate race is considered by analysts to be one of the tightest in Tuesday's midterm elections, which will decide which party controls Congress for the next two years.

It is one of a handful of battleground contests that will ultimately decide control of the Senate.

This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.

You can receive Breaking News on a smartphone or tablet via the BBC News App. You can also follow @BBCBreaking on X to get the latest alerts.

Starmer tells Dublin event Europe can no longer rely on US to 'bankroll' its defence

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxnv0p4l7rjlo, yesterday

Sir Keir Starmer has said Europe should build a common security framework, warning the change in its defence relationship with the US is permanent rather than "an aberration of the Trump presidency".

The former prime minister was speaking at a British Irish Chamber of Commerce (BICC) dinner in Dublin on Friday evening.

Sir Keir said a "common security framework" for Europe was needed as much as a common market, with the UK at its centre.

He warned that "things will not go back to the way they were," adding that the US had made clear it will no longer "bankroll" its European allies.

Press Association reported that he told the crowd in Dublin City Hall his comments did not mean "the US relationship is no longer important".

Rather he said the UK-USA military, security and intelligence alliance was "far too strong for that".

But he said Europe must be enabled to "take on far more responsibility for its own defence and security".

"Europe has twice been caught asleep – failing to anticipate and prepare for predictable events," he said.

"First when Russia's attack on Ukraine exposed long-standing European weaknesses on defence and security; and second when President Trump made clear, once and for all, that the US will no longer bankroll our European security. We have to catch up," he added.

He added: "I will say here what I have said to European leaders. This is about responding to a permanent change of affairs, not an aberration of the Trump presidency. Things will not go back to the way they were before.

Sir Keir was at the dinner to be awarded an honorary life membership from the BICC.

Sir Keir said increased defence spending was part of the picture, but that the challenge "goes far beyond that."

"We need to build up pan-European co-operation and co-ordination on defence and security – a common security framework as much as a common market," he said.

"The EU is changing to respond to that," he said, warning that it "cannot be the EU alone when Europe's periphery is core to its defence."

In July Sir Keir said he would "keep in touch" with President Trump after his time as prime minister ended.

The pair developed a positive relationship in their opening months of working together, which Sir Keir's team highlighted at the time as one of the biggest successes of his premiership.

But Trump later mocked Sir Keir as being "no Winston Churchill" in a row over the refusal to permit the use of UK bases for the initial US-Israel strikes on Iran.

Sir Keir, asked whether Trump had wished him well as he prepared to leave Downing Street, said: "Yes he did, and we're going to stay in touch."

US tech stocks see sharp falls as AI spending nears $1tn

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvwy72e0n72yo, 3 days ago

Tech stocks tumbled for the second day in a row as concerns rise over the hundreds of billions of dollars firms are investing in artificial intelligence (AI).

Shares in Intel plummeted by 28% on Friday, while Google owner Alphabet saw its stock price continue to fall another 1.4% after a 12% plunge on Thursday.

Other tech stocks, including Reddit and Amazon also fell, while the Nasdaq index of the largest tech firms listed in the US, ended October with its worst monthly slide since March 2025.

While tech firms are spending big on AI, their earnings are not always meeting analysts' expectations, spooking investors and creating fears of an AI bubble.

Major tech companies have ramped up artificial intelligence spending, with Meta, Alphabet, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft committing to spending $800bn between them in 2026.

Alphabet's stock market value fell sharply on Thursday, taking more than $500bn (£374bn) off its market value after it revealed the AI summaries it now provides as the top answer to search queries were affecting its core search advertising revenue.

At the same time, Alphabet expects to spend up to $205bn this year on investments, almost entirely related to AI.

The bigger losses on Friday were elsewhere however, with Intel shedding more than $130bn in value.

The chip maker said it planned to increase spending on AI despite weaker demand for computers, a major source of demand for its micro-processors.

On Thursday, Intel's finance chief David Zinsner said the firm did not expect to bring in more cash than it spent this year and forecast lower-than-expected revenue for its fourth quarter.

"Looking ahead, we see the PC slowdown continuing at least through the first half of next year," he said in the chip maker's third quarter earnings report.

In the earnings call, he said the firm had significantly ramped up investment in equipment in the third quarter and expected that to be "even more significant" in the following three months.

Amazon and Reddit down

Amazon on Thursday revealed it had also spent more cash than it was making, and that spending had increased six-fold over the span of three months.

The company has committed to spending $220bn this year, putting the money towards investments such as AI data centres, network equipment, and servers.

Amazon shares recovered some overnight losses, but were still down by 1.4% at the end of Friday trading.

Reddit stock plunged by 29%, after the social media platform revealed weaker-than-expected daily user figures and warned that Google's growing AI-driven search was hurting referral traffic.

Stock in online game platform Roblox also fell, down by 18%, as its daily active user numbers dropped.

Several major tech firms have reported earnings this week, including Microsoft, and analysts said there were questions about the payout from the huge investments in AI.

Chris Low, from investment management firm FHN Financial, said the bulk of what was happening in the stock market was in reaction to some of the biggest tech players such as Amazon and Google.

He told Reuters the companies were "showing some pretty significant growing pains as they aggressively pursue the AI build-out".

"The thinking is that these signs suggest that the entire sector is going to slow down."

'Investors have turned ruthless'

Many analysts have been debating the possibility of an AI bubble in the stock market.

The worry is that some tech firms will not be able to justify their sky-high valuations because the cost of building AI data centres and developing the software will end up being greater than the money they can make from it.

Kathleen Brookes, research director at trading firm XTB, said there have been many ups and downs in AI trade in recent months.

"Investors have turned ruthless, punishing any signs of disappointment in [third quarter] earnings," she said.

"The AI trade has had a good run in recent years, but now investors want payback, and companies like Alphabet and Intel are in the crosshairs."

However, stock market values for many of these companies remain well above where they were a year ago.

While the Nasdaq closed 2.8% lower, it is up 7.8% over the last year. Similarly Amazon is up nearly 8% over the past 12 months, while Alphabet is down 1.3%.

Brookes noted that November is typically a strong month for stocks.

"If we see AI stocks continue to struggle in the coming days, it could suggest the AI trade is past its peak, and investors will be looking for a new theme to drive markets," she said.

Crypto firm Binance covers 90% of losses after $6.3bn hack

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckpdg3ql4169o, today

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, says it has covered 90% of the $6.3bn (£4.7bn) assets stolen in a hack on Thursday.

The remaining 10% may take longer to source in the required amounts, the company added.

Binance has consistently pledged to cover 100% of the losses from what is suspected to be crypto's biggest hack on record and said it has set aside more than $6.34bn in company funds to do so.

"Binance will absorb the financial impact of these stolen funds, not our users," the company said in a statement on Saturday.

In an update on Sunday, Binance said withdrawals had been restored on several of its networks, after they were suspended following the hack.

It previously said withdrawals would be resumed in phases.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said on Saturday that North Korea was responsible for the attack.

The FBI said it had observed hackers converting stolen assets into a type of cryptocurrency called Ethereum and that it is expected that the assets will then be converted again using decentralised finance and instant swap services.

Two analytics firms previously told the BBC they had robust intelligence pointing to North Korean state-backed hacking unit the Lazarus Group, also known as TraderTraitor - which was specifically named by the FBI - as the likely culprits.

Speaking to reporters on Saturday night, US President Donald Trump said the US is still unsure who the culprits are.

"We're learning about it. We don't know if it's North Korea - but if it is, we'll talk to North Korea about it," he said.

Binance said it had replenished the stolen assets using various funds and its own corporate treasury.

All holdings of the cryptocurrencies bitcoin, Ethereum and Tether are covered, along with seven other widely-traded crypto assets, the company said.

The hack is believed to be the largest in history, eclipsing the record of a $1.5bn heist on the Bybit exchange in 2025 - for which the FBI also said North Korea was responsible.

North Korea has always denied involvement in these attacks.

Binance's initial investigation suggested an engineer's laptop was compromised, which allowed access to unauthorised withdrawals, but a later update said they had uncovered "additional points of breach".

Richard Teng, Binance's co-chief executive officer, said the hack was carried out by more than one person, and the hackers used sophisticated methods to hide their tracks, such as a "self-destruct mechanism".

On Friday, the company said it had frozen around $3bn of stolen assets after working with law enforcement, intelligence firms and partners.

The investigation is ongoing, it added. The US Secret Service said on Friday it is "working around the clock" with private sector partners "to identify, freeze, trace, and recover funds" stolen from Binance.

Binance, founded in China in 2017, lets users buy, sell and trade digital assets - it is estimated to have hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

Crypto is a digital asset, which doesn't exist physically and is instead accessed via digital wallets or computers.

Thousands of jobs at Virgin Media O2 to be cut

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6rry8x9d9qko, today

Thousands of Virgin Media O2 staff face redundancy risk as the telecoms firm looks to save money in the face of billions of pounds of debt and tougher competition.

The broadband provider has not finalised the number of roles to be cut but it is likely be a sizeable chunk of its 16,000 workforce, the BBC understands.

VMO2 has billions of debt on its balance sheet and is tackling competition from both smaller providers as well as giants like BT, which has been given regulatory permission to acquire rival TalkTalk, a move which VMO2 has firmly opposed.

VMO2 declined to comment. The Prospect union, which represents VMO2 staff, said the cuts were "disappointing and very unsettling".

Deputy general secretary Noel McClean said it is "committed to supporting our members through what is a difficult time, as well as also working with employers to explore ways to mitigate the number of redundancies and ensure retraining and redeployment of staff affected".

The majority of the affected staff will be in non-customer facing roles and a number of senior leadership changes are already under way, the BBC has been told.

VMO2 is also expected to review its use of contractors and suppliers in conjunction with the job cuts that were first reported by Sky News.

As of 30 June, VMO2's total debt stands at £27.2bn while it holds assets worth £45.9bn, according to the firm's latest accounts.

Meanwhile, the company is dealing with fierce competition from cheaper "altnets" like Hyperoptic, Community Fibre, Gigaclear, and YouFibre.

VMO2's had attempted to respond to this growing threat by buying altnet competitor Netomnia for £2bn via nexfibre, a joint venture owned by VMO2's owners.

However, the Competition Markets Authority (CMA) has provisionally found competition concerns in the deal, with a final decision to come in December, sparking anger from VMO2, particularly after the CMA approved BT's takeover of TalkTalk in October.

BT share price jump

At the time, VMO2 called the BT takeover a "stitch-up", which allowed its rival "tighten its grip" over the market.

BT said its deal provided "a safety net" for TalkTalk customers as their broadband provider faced collapse without the takeover.

On Friday, BT's share price jumped 7% after the Financial Times reported VMO2 was close to agreeing a deal to use its rival's fibre broadband network.

VMO2 was minded to go ahead with the plans after halting upgrades and expansion of its own infrastructure to ease concerns over its debt pile, the paper reported.

The BBC has been told the deal is very close and that VMO2 is highly likely to announce it will stop all investment in fibre in its results on Tuesday.

Additional reporting by Ben King

No more washing up: How Airbnb's new house rules have divided hosts and guests

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckjwez8g5dyeo, yesterday

When Lisa Clewes returned to her Welsh holiday let after a group of guests checked out, she was horrified by the mess.

Just days earlier, she had met the group in person and helped with their luggage.

But after a dinner party, the house was left "in a complete mess" with broken glasses, drinks cans on the floor, pans full of food on the table and fish guts left in the garden.

"It was really unbelievable. Had I had another booking the same day, I would have had to cancel or delay check-in," says Clewes.

She charges a cleaning fee that covers around 75% of the cost of a cleaner and asks guests to empty the fridge, put rubbish in the bins and load the dishwasher.

But Airbnb's new rules mean hosts can no longer ask guests to do jobs normally carried out by cleaners, including washing and putting away dishes, stripping beds and taking rubbish off site.

The updated guidelines, which apply to bookings made globally from 20 November, state that hosts can now set seven standard house rules and add other "reasonable" requests.

Clewes says it typically takes cleaners four hours to turn around her three-bedroom property. She fears guests leaving more mess could mean hiring extra cleaners and increasing costs – expenses that may ultimately be passed on to her guests.

The changes have come as a relief to guests like Jessica Newhook, who says she has been faced with lengthy checkout lists, often on top of hefty cleaning fees.

She booked an Airbnb in Florida for a family reunion of 11 guests and says they had to "leave the property move-in ready for the cleaners", despite paying a $250 (£187) cleaning fee.

Newhook says the host told them to wash and fold towels, clean the bedding and kitchen, and sweep and mop the floors. She was also warned by the host that their behaviour needed to improve or they could be told to leave, because they had left chairs blocking bins.

"We had rules about everything and it was not relaxing at all."

While Newhook likes the home comforts of staying in an Airbnb, she says the combination of relentless rules and rising cleaning fees has taken away much of its appeal.

"It is getting to the point where a hotel is cheaper and I know what to expect."

Krissi Foskett, 46, from Glasgow, runs a national cleaning company and regularly stays in Airbnb properties so "can see the issue from both sides".

During a recent stay in Stafford, she paid a £35 cleaning fee but was still asked to strip the beds, put on a wash, empty bins and carry rubbish down a long track to a recycling area.

"I don't particularly mind doing those things, but it did make me question what exactly I was paying the additional cleaning fee for," she says.

For Foskett, there is a difference between being a considerate guest – "putting your dirty dishes in the dishwasher" – and being "expected to prepare the property for the next guests".

Through her cleaning business, she has also seen the other extreme, with teams arriving to find broken furniture, vomit and pet urine.

While she sympathises with hosts facing tight turnarounds and rising cleaning costs, these should not be passed on to guests, she says.

"If you're running an Airbnb as a business, professional cleaning is a cost of doing business."

Anthony Marsh, who co-owns a cabin retreat in North Yorkshire with his husband, used to list five of their 12 properties on Airbnb, but says the new rules have prompted him to reduce this number to just two.

His concern with the changes is that "Airbnb has effectively given guests permission to come and leave properties a tip, and a host can't do anything about it".

He believes asking guests to wash their pots and put out the bins is hardly unreasonable and, with a small cleaning team and tight turnaround times, he worries extra mess could leave properties unready for the next arrivals.

"It's common sense and common decency," he says.

His company does not charge a cleaning fee, and Marsh says most guests are respectful. But fees are more common than not. Some 63.2% of Airbnb listings charge a cleaning fee, with an average cost of £55 according to data from AirROI.

Laura Lewis runs a directory that helps holiday-let owners market their properties and connect with potential guests.

Many of her clients also list on Airbnb and she says most are unhappy with the new rules, arguing that asking guests to wash up is a matter of basic respect.

"Some people say it's factored into the cleaning fee, but I wouldn't leave a holiday let with all the washing-up to do. It's not the right thing," she says.

The announcement has added to growing frustration among owners following increases in Airbnb's commission rates last year. Many are investing in their own websites and social media to attract direct bookings and avoid platform fees.

Lewis has taken the same approach with the three treehouses on her farm – most of her bookings are already direct and she now plans to remove her listings from Airbnb altogether.

Not all hosts are concerned about the changes, however. Matt Porsz, who hosts and manages other Airbnb properties full-time, believes the update will improve the guest experience without changing how most people behave.

Guests at his property in south-west London are asked only to lock up and return the keys. "People sometimes strip the beds or do things without me asking, and that's nice for my cleaners, but I don't expect it."

Porsz doubts the changes will lead to guests leaving properties in a worse state, pointing to Airbnb's mutual review system.

"If I put a big chore list, I wouldn't expect a five-star review and vice versa – if a guest leaves the place in a state, you're not going to give them a good review."

He believes the system encourages both sides to behave reasonably, and that most guests will continue to treat properties with respect.

"Airbnb is trying to cut out the silly stuff because it's not a good guest experience."

Update 1 November - this article has been updated to remove a photograph of a contributor after they confirmed AI had been used in the image.

Why North Korea's 'elite' hackers are the prime suspect in major Binance hack

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck9dz3v7z7v3o, 2 days ago

Two major blockchain analytics firms say they have robust intelligence pointing to a North Korean state-backed group as the likely culprits in the $6.3bn (£4.7bn) hack of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange.

The Lazarus Group, a North Korean hacking unit also known as TraderTraitor, was identified "with high confidence" by TRM Labs, as well as Chainalysis.

This incident is just the latest linked to the country, one of the poorest in the world and where access to the internet is severely restricted.

Experts accuse the government of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un of relying on cybercrime to finance itself, something Pyongyang has long denied.

Though not financial, the nation's most spectacular suspected hack took place in 2014. The target: Sony Pictures, which had made the Hollywood film The Interview. The film involves a plot to assassinate Kim.

The resulting hack exposed thousands of embarrassing emails exchanged among the studio's top executives.

Last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said North Korea was responsible for the theft of $1.5bn on the Bybit exchange.

In the aftermath of that incident, the agency said TraderTraitor had moved to quickly launder and disperse the stolen assets, converting them to Bitcoin and other digital assets with a goal of eventually turning them into hard currency.

The FBI has broadly accused North Korea of "illicit cybercrime and virtual asset theft activities".

The nation has systematically developed its cyber operations, recruiting the most promising students from universities and channeling them into hacker groups overseen by North Korea's intelligence agency, according to reports.

Some of the cyberwarfare conducted takes place just over the nation's border in China, according to analysis from tech groups.

Much of its hacking activity has centred on monetary gain.

North Korean hackers are also suspected in the theft of $620m worth of cryptocurrency in 2022.

In this most recent heist, North Korean agents are accused of using a special authorisation to turn a Binance hot wallet, which is connected to the internet, into one that moved funds automatically to the attacker.

TRM said it's likely the attacker gained access to Binance's hot wallet signing system as part of the scheme.

Binance has not directly responded to the BBC's queries about the incident's potential links to the area.

The company had initially said it thought an engineer's laptop had been compromised, allowing unauthorised withdrawals, but later said the attack was wider.

"Our subsequent investigation has uncovered additional points of breach," Binance's co-CEO Richard Teng said.

Some 80% of stolen assets have been secured, a Binance spokesperson said on Friday, but the rest remains unaccounted for.

If the accusations are true, the record-making heist shows how powerful suspected North Korean hackers have become – a sign that the tools of the hacking trade have grown sharper.

Experts say the rise of artificial intelligence has also given threat actors new ways to carry out crime, through automation and other means.

In this case, it's plausible that AI was used to infiltrate Binance's systems.

As Chainalysis put it, the attacker used laundering patterns "we have not seen before".

'I live with a ghost' - inside the haunted homes attracting bargain hunters

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqwy78elyrlzo, 4 days ago

From the moment Ryua first walked into her rental apartment in Tokyo she believed it to be haunted.

"When I visited the place for a viewing there was a man standing there, glaring at me," she says.

"Since the estate agent couldn't see him, I realised he must be a ghost."

While someone more squeamish would probably have quickly left the flat never to return, Ryua chose to go ahead and move in.

"I'm a bit of a contrarian, so I decided I wanted to become friends with this glaring male ghost," adds Ryua, who works as an aidoru, a young entertainer, and who doesn't wish to share her surname.

Four years later, and still in the same apartment, she says she continues to experience paranormal activity on a daily basis. She says she hears endless footsteps and the ghost talking.

Although Japan has increasingly marked Halloween in recent years, many Japanese people take ghosts seriously all year round. The country has a word, "yuurei", which means a lingering, troubled spirit.

These are the ghosts of people who died in violent or tragic circumstances - those who were murdered, killed themselves, or simply were lonely and died alone. If they died at home, then the belief is that their yuurei won't go away.

For house hunters who are not superstitious or squeamish it means there are big bargains to be found. There is a whole category of dwellings called jiko bukken, which means "stigmatised" or "incident" properties.

Under guidelines issued by the government in 2021, Japanese estate agents must disclose suicide, murder, death by fire, and any death where the body was not discovered for an extended period of time.

For rental properties this information must be disclosed for three years, and it must be revealed indefinitely for any property offered for sale.

By contrast, in the UK there is no legal requirement to reveal that a person died in a property. And in the US, it differs from state to state. For example, in California you have to reveal if a person has died in the property in the past three years, while in Arizona and Oregon you do not.

Ryua was told that a man had killed himself in her apartment. It meant that she gets an almost 30% discount on her rent on her tiny, 25 sq m bedsit in the fashionable ward of Setagaya. She says she pays 45,000 yen ($285; £213) a month, instead of what should have been 62,000 yen.

While a house where there had been a murder or suicide would probably be harder to sell or rent out anywhere in the world, Tokyo estate agent Erik Oskamp says that Japanese people are particularly superstitious and averse to stigmatised properties.

"[Even] an apartment next to a cemetery will be difficult to rent out, especially if you can see the tombs from the kitchen," explains Oskamp. "The worst thing is if a suicide has happened in the apartment. Even if somebody has jumped from the roof, many renters will move out. Other issues are a serious crime or a lonely death."

The latter issue, that of a person dying alone, would not generally affect the price of a property in, say, the UK or the US.

But in rural Kagoshima, in Japan's southwest, it enabled Diane Tincher to buy a large three-bedroom house for about half of what would have otherwise been the asking price.

'If there is a ghost I'm thankful to her'

The 79-year-old American has lived in Japan for nearly 40 years, working as a tour guide. She says that the estate agent had been straight with her – there was a heavy discount as an elderly lady had died alone, thereby stigmatising the property.

Tincher paid 20m yen for the house, in a location where similar properties usually sell for up to 45m yen.

"I don't believe in ghosts. But I know that the Japanese are very superstitious," she says. "If there is a ghost I'm thankful to her every day... to live in such a splendid and affordable home."

Researching the house, Tincher had found it on a website called Oshimaland, which lists jiko bukken properties, giving details of the events that occurred. It was launched in 2005 covering Tokyo, before expanding across Japan and then internationally in 2011.

It is crowdsourced, meaning that members of the public add the homes and their details.

Teru Oshima, the founder of Oshimaland, says that in the past such properties were "not very attractive options" in Japan.

Yet as house prices have surged in the country in recent years, as well as a big increase in the wider cost of living, one 2025 survey found that more than half of Japanese people would now rent a jiko bukken if it was cheap.

Back in Setagaya, Ryua says she is happy living with her ghostly flatmate. "I believe that ghosts were once living human beings, so they deserve our respect," she says.

Donald Trump's biggest economic problem looks strangely familiar

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwvg0ddz1z77o, 6 days ago

The White House is confronting a familiar dilemma. The economic numbers aren't necessarily bad - but the public mood is.

It's a disconnect that haunted Joe Biden in 2024, when solid headline data failed to convince many voters that the economy was working for them.

Now, Donald Trump faces a version of the same challenge.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised voters swift relief from rising prices.

"When I win, I will immediately bring prices down," he said.

Delivering on that promise has proved harder than expected.

Economic growth is holding up, unemployment remains low and the stock market is near record highs.

Yet the final inflation report ahead of the midterm elections confirms what voters already know: prices remain high.

The causes are different. Biden was grappling with the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. Trump faces higher energy prices linked to the US-Israel conflict with Iran and the fallout from some of his own trade and immigration policies.

The political reality, however, is much the same. Voters are not judging the economy by GDP figures or record highs on the stock market. They are judging it by what they pay at the supermarket, petrol prices and whether they can keep up with the bills.

Numbers only tell part of the story

US economic growth of 2.2% would be respectable by the standards of many wealthy economies. Germany, for example, has struggled to generate comparable momentum. And a stable US unemployment rate of 4.2% hardly suggests an economy in freefall.

Trump argues that he inherited an economic mess from Biden, and points to strong growth, investment and stock market performance as evidence that his policies are working.

Following the most recent inflation report, White House spokesman Matthew Middleton said the administration's "aggressive, pro-growth economic agenda" had blunted "Biden's inflation crisis".

Larry Kudlow, a Trump ally and economic commentator, has described the current expansion as "the greatest story never told", arguing that "nobody is getting fired".

But voters appear to be reading a different story - one in which Trump won the presidency promising to tackle the cost of living, only for prices to keep rising.

Part of the problem is that wage increases have not kept pace with prices. Average hourly earnings have risen 3% over the last year, while consumer prices have increased 3.7%.

That helps explain why polls continue to show voters giving Trump poor marks for his handling of the economy.

Same language, different meanings

For Democrats, the dynamic feels familiar.

Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster, says the problem begins with the way economists and voters use the same language to mean different things.

"When economists say inflation comes down, they mean the rate of increase has come down," she says.

"When voters say inflation has come down, they mean the price has returned to what it was. Well, of course, it never returns to what it was."

The Biden administration spent much of 2024 highlighting low unemployment, solid growth and falling inflation. However, many voters remained focused on the higher prices they faced every day.

Lake, who advised Biden's 2020 campaign but was not involved in the 2024 race, says voters judge the economy through personal experience, not economic indicators.

"You can't argue with people about their own lived reality," she says.

That may help explain why Trump's challenge looks so similar to Biden's.

The Trump effect

Biden's critics blamed him for inflation. But he could point to forces largely outside his control, including the pandemic and its supply chain aftershocks.

Trump has less room to do that.

Some economists argue that today's higher prices are at least partly the result of his own policies, including tariffs, as well as the economic fallout from the US-Israel war with Iran.

"The inflation is clearly traceable to Donald Trump," says Peter Morici, a University of Maryland economist who aligns with Republicans.

"It's his tariffs and the war. People know that. They see it."

Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs, announced in April 2025, have added to costs for consumers.

A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found the tariffs increased consumer goods prices by about 2.9%.

The impact might have been larger if Trump hadn't later paused some tariffs, struck new trade deals and been blocked by the Supreme Court from using emergency powers to impose many others.

Then came another shock. Conflict with Iran pushed oil prices higher, lifting the cost of petrol and putting fresh pressure on household budgets.

The White House points to tax cuts, job growth and lower prescription drug costs as evidence that the administration is delivering for American families. And it is increasingly embracing policies aimed at easing pressures.

Trump has called for a cap on credit card interest rates and floated the idea of a $5,000 payment to American adults if Republicans retain control of Congress.

The measures reflect a political reality familiar to both parties: when voters are anxious about prices, arguments about solid growth and low unemployment are rarely enough.

Biden never found a way to bridge the gap between economic performance and economic sentiment. The question heading into the midterms is whether Trump can.

If recent political history is any guide, perceptions of the economy may matter more than the economic data itself.

How video game remakes tap the power of nostalgia

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm9qz428nnljo, 3 days ago

The moment she saw footage from the remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Kacey Doran picked up her phone. She had to tell her sister.

"Have you seen this?" messaged Doran, excitedly.

Nearly 30 years ago, a 10-year-old Doran had sat in front of her family's TV, reading out the dialogue on screen to her sister, a year younger, as they inched their way through the original Nintendo 64 game's sprawling, puzzle-filled dungeons. Ocarina's fantasy-like story, and beautiful music, enthralled them both.

It was also the first game Doran ever completed. Now, countless memories rushed back to her as she devoured clips of the fully redesigned version, due to arrive on the Switch 2 later this year.

Doran's sister messaged back: "I'm not tearing up… YOU'RE tearing up."

This is the power of nostalgia – and a perfect example of how video games can trigger it. Doran now teaches an esports course at Rowan University in New Jersey. She says the original Ocarina of Time, released in 1998, had a "magical" quality that she hopes to rediscover, and also share with her sister's children.

The video games industry has long leaned on remakes. From Mario Kart to the Final Fantasy series, or even Pac-Man, some games just keep coming back in updated forms, as new generations of gamers emerge and as computer hardware improves, enabling more detailed graphics and increasingly expansive game worlds.

While the emotional hook may be the most significant draw, putting out a remake can be a double-edged sword. Some gamers are very protective of their favourite titles and new versions don't always meet certain fans' astronomically high expectations.

Nostalgia is an important but mixed emotion, says Tim Wulf, at the Centre for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum, Germany. It has positive aspects but also a kind of sadness, too. Happiness in remembering things that were important to us, and also an awareness that that time is now gone.

"It's a social emotion because memories that induce nostalgia for us are connected to other people," he explains, adding that nostalgia can boost our self-esteem while highlighting key social bonds.

Video games, says Wulf, are notoriously good at triggering nostalgia because gamers can "jump into the same environment". In other words, games are like time machines for our emotions, and returning to fondly remembered places can feel stabilising or reassuring in an ever-changing world.

Doran, for one, notes that when you return to a favourite old game, there's something satisfying about deploying previously learned skills. You know what to do here, you're winning again. Just like the old days.

Putting out remasters and remakes has been a "really successful" strategy for the games industry, says Piers Harding-Rolls, head of games research at Ampere Analysis.

"Tying in with established audiences and building on existing content is quite a safe route for a lot of companies," he adds. In many cases, it is cheaper to update an existing game rather than create a new title from scratch.

Among other remakes that have found big audiences recently are those of Resident Evil 4 and Assassin's Creed Black Flag.

But Ocarina of Time perhaps stands out because, ever since its original release, it has been considered by many as one of the greatest games ever made. "The interest from all the Gen Zs that I work with is really high," says Harding-Rolls. The legend of The Legend of Zelda, as it were.

Clearly, nostalgia is not the only driver of interest in the remake, and today's audiences will expect a game that plays to today's standards.

Games companies must keep innovating when linking contemporary audiences to the past, says Wulf, in order satisfy their desire for fresh experiences. And although Wulf himself was a big fan of the original, he has no personal interest in the Ocarina of Time remake. "I want a new game – I don't want to play an old game," he says. Nostalgia isn't always enough for some.

Plus, critics often highlight a tension between originals and remakes. Which is the definitive version? In 2021, Square Enix released the bizarrely titled Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139... – a remaster of a game first published in 2010. One reviewer wrote, "What we're left with is two nearly identical Niers each vying to be the true Nier."

Fans may react badly should a remaster or remake fail to do justice to the source material. And, in the gaming world, angry fan reactions can be serious.

"There's always going to be that fan base or group of people that are going to nit-pick," says Stephanie Ijoma, chief executive and founder of NNESAGA, a consultancy and creative agency.

Ultimately, games developers working on remakes have to "find the right balance" between appealing to fans and allowing themselves to be creative with the material, she adds. "You can't make art in fear, you can't create in fear."

Ijoma gives the example of Final Fantasy VII. First released in 1997, it got a highly anticipated remake in 2020.

This was a game Ijoma played back in the late 1990s and she was thrilled to be able to share it with younger players today.

Remakes enable this sharing of experiences because getting old computer hardware or video games consoles to work, while a pastime loved by some, is not possible for everyone.

"I've tried multiple times to play Silent Hill 2 because I'm interested in older games but it's such a difficult game to come into nowadays," says Niklas Hallin, a solo indie game developer who runs the studio Neckbolt. "They made a remake and it's so smooth, it just works. It works on your modern hardware."

Hallin did not play many games as a child so he says nostalgia isn't much of a motivator for him. However, in his own games, he likes to include subtle stylistic references to classic games because he knows that this appeals to gamers.

Indie developers often lean on retro games aesthetics not just because people respond well to them – but also because they are easier to achieve. "You can't compete with billion dollar budgets, super high-fidelity, Triple A graphics," he says.

One question remains. The visual difference, today, between games released years apart is, arguably, negligible. So will there be any point in remaking a game from 2026 in, say, 2038? Will technology have moved on so much by then that it's actually worth it?

Harding-Rolls predicts that games companies will still seek to connect new audiences with classic titles by offering updates.

Remakes might become less about graphical improvements and more about editorial adjustments. "Reinterpretations," he says. "Or versions with additional content."

It's never really "game over", is it?

Soaring cost of Halloween treats spooks shoppers

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr0qk25p1yeno, 2 days ago

Halloween shoppers in the US seeking sweet relief this spooky season have instead been shocked by the high price of seasonal treats, as cost of living pressures continue to bite.

Demetrio Beltres, a 33-year-old financial adviser searching for Halloween bargains for trick or treaters said he was spending more than his usual $15 (£11) to $20 this year because prices were much higher.

"I'm trying to spend at least $20 to $30 just to make sure that I get the kids something," he said, while browsing the rows of colour options at a Target in Manhattan.

A lot of people are finding they are in the same boat as Demetrio this year.

Stephen Zagor, adjunct associate professor at Columbia Business School, said people have only so much to spend, and when everyday essentials are costing more, people may feel less inclined to make this the most extravagant Halloween.

"I think the holiday's gotten scary, more from an economic [perspective], than it might be for scaring people at the door," he said.

Analysis from left-leaning non-profit Groundwork Collaborative and the Century Foundation found the cost of popular Halloween chocolates and confectionery was 15.3% higher this year than in 2025.

Separate research from personal finance firm Finance Buzz found prices for Halloween treats have soared by 71% over the past five years - a much bigger increase than the general pace of price rises over the same period.

The price of confectionery generally has been pushed up thanks to higher cocoa prices.

The cost of a tonne of cocoa skyrocketed to a high of more than $10,700 in January 2025, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund via the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, as climate change contributed to severe weather which affected supplies.

"The cocoa that is now being consumed was bought when the prices were high," said Zagor, who specialises in food businesses.

Cost of living pressures have also increased, with inflation running at 3.7%, and fuel prices remain high. Diesel, at $6.32 a gallon, is only 20 cents below the record reached in September.

People shopping for Halloween treats in New York were noticing the price pressures.

"Everything is expensive, so it does not surprise me that Halloween candy is expensive too," said Mallory, who declined to give her last name.

The combined cost of living pressures have affected how much people are buying in the run up to the holiday, according to consumer and market research company Nielsen IQ. It found Halloween treat sales were down 11.7% by the middle of September, and by the middle of October sales were down 6.7%.

Chris Costagli, NielsenIQ's vice-president of US food thought leadership, said shoppers appeared more willing to spend as Halloween neared, but remained cautious.

"Sales have improved considerably from where we started in September, with smaller packs gaining ground while larger sizes continue to struggle," he said.

"This feels like a consumer who still wants the occasion, but is paying much closer attention to what goes into the basket."

How to make Halloween feel special without blowing the budget

Zagor, who is a fan of Halloween as well as traditional Halloween treats, said cutting back on costs, could present a good opportunity to offer trick or treaters a different kind of experience when they come to your door.

"It could be how you present the candy when kids come to your house as much as the one piece of candy that you're going to give," he said.

Options could include using a spooky fake skeleton hand to share out treats, rather than letting children reach into a bowl, or dressing up to meet trick or treaters.

Zagor said making your own treats is another option, inviting people over to make them together.

"You could certainly do something slightly magical, slightly interesting," he suggested.

"The trick literally could be as important as the treat."

City of London chief tops UK Black Powerlist

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98rz4pxm4ymo, 3 days ago

Ian Thomas, chief executive of the City of London Corporation, has been named the UK's most influential Black Briton in this year's Black Powerlist awards.

The 57-year old is the first Black person to oversee the Square Mile's governing body in its more than 900-year history.

The City of London Corporation is an administrative body with responsibility for London's central financial district, headed by its own Lord Mayor.

Thomas tops the 2027 Black Powerlist, which recognises the most powerful people of African and Caribbean heritage in the UK.

The award body said he was "a respected public-service leader with over 30 years' experience in local government".

Other influential names in this year's top ten include entrepreneurs Emma Grede and Steven Bartlett, as well as actor and filmmaker Sir Idris Elba.

Comedian Sir Lenny Henry has also been recognised, with a Lifetime Achievement award, for co-founding Comic Relief, which has raised over £1.6bn since 1985.

Now in its 21st year, the Black Powerlist celebrates people who have broken through barriers to reach leadership roles, thereby inspiring future generations.

"It exists to show young people of African and Caribbean heritage what is possible, in fields they might never have considered," said Michael Eboda, the list's publisher.

Thomas said he secured the role at the head of the City of London Corporation in 2022 only following seven interviews and an election.

'When I started my journey in public service, I never, ever thought, [not] in a million years, that I'd be recognised in this way," he told the BBC.

'Discipline and respect'

As chief executive, he oversees around 5,000 staff with responsibilities including the City of London Police, 11,000 acres of open spaces such as Epping Forest and Hampstead Heath, and advocacy for the UK's financial and professional services sector.

Thomas was born in Sheffield to parents who made the city their home after leaving Jamaica as part of the Windrush generation.

"They worked incredibly hard and instilled that sense of discipline and respect, and that's the core of how I do business," he said of his upbringing.

Growing up, Thomas aspired to be a footballer and took part in trials alongside Alan Shearer.

Reflecting on his own change of direction, Thomas joked it was about "following dreams and if they don't come true… there's always something else".

Before joining the City of London Corporation, Thomas served as chief executive of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames where he oversaw public services and a £1.2bn regeneration programme.

He was appointed a CBE in the 2019 New Year Honours in the wake of the Rotherham Abuse scandal for transforming children's services during his time as strategic director for children and young people at Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council.

Thomas replaces last year's incumbent, Afua Kyei, the Bank of England's chief financial officer and executive director, and is joined on this year's list by Comfort Ero, the President and chief executive of the International Crisis Group, who takes second place.

Yorkshire Water boss resigns after firm downgraded

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckzd623pldqgo, 3 days ago

Yorkshire Water's chief executive has announced she is to step down, just 24 hours after the company was given the lowest possible environmental rating by the Environment Agency.

Nicola Shaw, who has led the firm since 2022, will leave the role on 1 January to be replaced by Nicola Medalova, a chartered environmental health officer who previously worked for the National Grid.

In a statement on Friday, Shaw said it had been a "privilege" to lead the company but that it was the "right time" to leave her post.

Shaw has faced criticism in recent years, including for taking £1.9m in undisclosed payments between 2023 and 2026, while the company has come under scrutiny for its performance.

The payments were made by Yorkshire Water's parent company, Kelda Holdings, for what the firm said was "investor engagement" and "financial oversight".

On Thursday, the Environment Agency gave the firm one star out of four - its lowest possible rating - meaning Yorkshire Water was classed as a "poorly performing company".

The EA said Yorkshire Water was responsible for 260 pollution incidents in 2025, which was its highest total since 2011.

In 2024, Ofwat announced it was fining the company £47m for historic sewage leaks.

'Extremely proud'

In her statement, Shaw said: "It has been a privilege to lead Yorkshire Water and serve the people of Yorkshire.

"Although there remains a huge amount of work to do, I am extremely proud of what our colleagues have achieved, putting the business on a stronger footing for delivery across all aspects of its work."

Yorkshire Water said Medalova, who is a former non-executive director of the company's board, would join the firm on Monday as part of a transition period before assuming the chief executive officer role full time in the new year.

She said: "I am delighted to be joining Yorkshire Water and grateful to the board for the opportunity to lead the business through its next chapter.

"Yorkshire Water faces huge challenges but also great opportunities for continued improvement and I look forward to working with Nicola Shaw, the leadership team and colleagues across the business as I get up to speed."

In December last year Shaw said "not being transparent" about receiving £1.3m in shareholder-funded payments across two instalments had been a "mistake", but had insisted those amounts were "not for me to decide".

She received a further £660,000 earlier this year. Ofwat said the payments were not performance-related.

The previously undisclosed payments had come to light the previous August when the government banned Yorkshire Water and five other water companies from paying "unfair" bonuses to bosses.

Reaction from MPs and campaigners

Tom Gordon, Liberal Democrat MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, said Shaw should have stepped down "much earlier".

"Good riddance. Nicola Shaw oversaw abysmal management of our precious natural resources, trashing our rivers while receiving an eye-watering salary," he said.

"Her replacement needs to understand that residents are at their wits' end, paying ever-rising bills for polluted rivers and threats of hosepipe bans while someone at the top rakes in millions."

Meanwhile, Judith Cummins, Labour MP for Bradford South, said Yorkshire Water needed "more than a change of leadership" but a "complete change of direction".

"A new face at the top cannot wash away years of Yorkshire Water failing to put customers first," she said.

"Nicola Shaw's time as Yorkshire Water boss saw customers frustrated by poor service, skyrocketing bills, record pollution incidents, and a plummet from 'good' to the worst possible one-star environment rating.

"There must be a wholesale shift in culture that finally prioritises customers. Only then can the company begin to restore public trust."

Robbie Moore, Conservative MP for Keighley and Ilkley, said Shaw's resignation "could not have come quick enough".

He added: "I have therefore already requested an urgent meeting with the new CEO Designate Nicola Medalova to understand how she plans to improve Yorkshire Water's performance at speed.

"The status quo cannot continue."

Chris Stewart at York campaign group Ouse It Lose It said the new CEO's priority had to be looking at "failures in the system".

"There's been a continual decline in the operation of this business," he said.

"Clearly things are going wrong."

Stewart said he was not surprised by Shaw's resignation but it was a "shocking indictment of the way the company has been performing, while making loud noises about how much they're putting into improving".

Naomi Tilley, campaigns manager at protest group Surfers Against Sewage, said "systematic change" was needed to fix the company.

"Regardless of who the CEO is, there's sewage entering the sea and the water companies are failing. Yorkshire Water is not an outlier," said Tilley.

"The whole system and every water company is failing in different ways and we are seeing that the system is broken and we need fundamental change.

"While these companies are set up for a profit, we're never going to see pollution curbed and stopped."

Additional reporting by David Rhodes and Grace Wood

Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.

Crypto giant Binance hit by $6.3bn hack suspected to be largest in history

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwg7xp8kx4v5o, 3 days ago

Cryptocurrency giant Binance said on Thursday that $6.3bn (£4.7bn) of digital assets have been impacted by what is thought to be the biggest crypto hack on record.

The world's biggest crypto exchange said about half of those assets had been frozen but that many remained in the hands of the hackers, adding that it will "cover all losses".

The firm said while initial checks suggested an engineer's laptop had been compromised, allowing an attacker to make unauthorised withdrawals, "our subsequent investigation has uncovered additional points of breach".

Two analytics firms have attributed the incident, which eclipses a record-setting $1.5bn hack on the Bybit exchange in 2025, to a North Korean hacking unit called TraderTraitor.

Cyber-security firm Check Point said the unit is also known in the industry as Lazarus Group, which has been blamed for the 2025 hack.

Check Point's chief information security officer Jayant Dave said the losses estimated by Binance made it "the largest crypto theft on record".

AI-powered investigations company TRM Labs said in a report that several elements of the Binance attack resemble earlier North Korean-linked incidents, including the Bybit hack.

The lab's global head of policy Ari Redbord told the BBC the Binance hack is a "watershed moment" that is unlike anything the industry has seen.

The attacker still holds an enormous sum of stolen assets, meaning efforts to trace and recover the funds are far from over, Redbord added.

Binance, which was founded in China in 2017, allows users to trade digital assets and is estimated to have more than 300 million registered users worldwide.

The company said in 2024 that it has more than $160bn in assets under its custody.

The exchange has been subject of regulatory scrutiny around the world.

Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm, also said it has "high confidence" that the North Korean group are linked to the hack.

For the last few years North Korea-linked operatives have focussed on attacking cryptocurrency companies for large thefts of digital tokens.

Western security agencies have previously said stolen funds are used to finance North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile development programs.

The regime has denied any involvement in hacks in the past.

Eric Jardine, Chainalysis' Head of Research, urged every exchange to remain vigilant as the platforms are attractive targets for hackers due to the sheer value of assets.

Binance did not directly respond to BBC questions about the incident's potential links to North Korea but said: "We are working closely with our law enforcement partners to confirm the identity of these criminals and bring them to justice."

The incident concerns Binance.com - while much smaller crypto platform Binance.US, which provides trading services specifically for American residents - said its platform is not affected by the issue.

Binance co-CEO Richard Teng said the company's initial investigation suggested the hack started with a compromised engineer's laptop.

"That gave an attacker access to a service container, where they submitted unauthorized withdrawal transactions," he said in a statement.

"To be clear: the attacker did not simply use one engineer's permissions, and this was not a single 'one-click' action. It involved a more complex attack process. Our investigation has not attributed responsibility to any individual. So far, we have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak."

He said a detailed "post-mortem" would be shared once the investigation was complete.

In an update, the company said in a statement on X that another investigation found there had been other breach points: "We are still gathering the facts, and will share more directly as we have them."

Check Point's Dave said this attack also resembled a hack on crypto exchange platform Bitget in September in which $388m (£289m) was lost: "This implies that attackers no longer need the vault keys. They target the systems and people with authority to use them."

In a series of posts, Yi He, Binance's co-chief executive, thanked various cryptocurrency issuers for freezing the assets.

"Safety first: withdrawals are currently disabled until the environment is confirmed to be secure," she said.

Two other major crypto platforms, Tether and Circle, said they had frozen a total of about $2.4bn of assets in response to the potential Binance hack.

World Liberty Financial, a crypto company linked to US President Donald Trump and his family, said it has worked with its partners to freeze stolen funds.

Crypto exchange Coinbase said it was unaffected by the incident and was monitoring the situation.

Several crypto industry observers had flagged concerns about a potential hack on Binance hours before the exchange confirmed the security issue.

Bitcoin dropped by more than 4% following the alerts. The price of other major cryptocurrencies including Ethereum and Solana also fell sharply.

From Levi's to Primark - the fashion chains selling mended clothes

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmwy9qe5r1z3o, 3 days ago

If Alice Brown is browsing in second-hand shops and finds a jumper with a hole, that won't stop her buying it.

"I see it as challenge," says the 27-year-old forest ranger from Lincolnshire.

She is a champion of the growing fashion for eye-catching repairs.

Over the last year she has developed her own unique style, needle-felting cute animals and insects to cover moth holes, stains and other imperfections, winning her a huge following online.

"The natural place for decoration is in the centre at the front. If the hole is under the arm or on the shoulder, it forces you to think about the design," she says.

Often dubbed "visible mending" the trend is spreading from hobby crafters and community workshops, even drawing in fast-fashion brands and reaching the designer catwalks this year.

At one Saturday morning workshop in Brighton, Jayne Eagle shows her students how to attach a patch of fabric behind a tear so the cat-face design peeps through.

Then she instructs them in stitching techniques inspired by the traditional Japanese methods Boro and Sashiko. Instead of matching the thread colour to the garment, they make the mend highly decorative using geometric patterns in large white stitching.

She also offers classes in darning using contrasting vibrant colours that celebrate, rather than disguise, the repair.

One student, Nicola, has already used her newfound skills to stitch over sunscreen marks on a T-shirt "making a feature of it" and is now delighted that people "stop seeing the stains and just see the decoration".

Another student, Lisa, says her mother's generation would never have wanted the mends to show. "Now part of it is being proud of what you've done," she says.

Lisa bought a second-hand jacket online, but snipped the fabric with the scissors when she was opening the package. She managed to patch it in a way that "looks intentional".

"I was actually pointing it out to people," she laughs.

In the past mending was primarily about saving money, by wearing clothes for longer, rather than buying new. But visible mending is about celebrating that choice.

The trend took off about six years ago, Jayne says, and has boomed since.

An era of "throwaway" fast fashion from the 1980s onwards undermined the tradition of looking after and mending your clothes and people lost the skills, she says.

The revival of interest feels to her like a backlash against overproduction in the fashion industry and the damage it causes: the pollution, carbon emissions, water use, and poor labour conditions.

So perhaps it is surprising just how popular mended style is proving among retailers, with brands from Ralph Lauren to ultra-fast-fashion firm Shein currently selling stitched and patched garments, albeit in both of those cases brand new off the peg.

Other High Street chains are adopting a more authentic approach, offering in-house repairs and workshops.

"We want to give customers practical ways to extend the life of the clothes they already love, rather than simply replacing them," says Uniqlo's head of sustainability, Maria Ledous.

Primark, often seen as a fast-fashion retailer due to its lower prices, has also joined the trend.

"We don't think that affordability and durability should be opposites," says Vicki Swain, the brand's longevity lead.

Outdoor brand Finisterre says around a fifth of the mends it provides for customers are designed to be eye-catching, while premium artisan clothing store Toast says around a third of customers go for that option.

Part of the "magic" is that customers can bring in a garment and "choose what they'd like it to become next", says Toast chief executive Suzie de Rohan Willner.

Toast's repair services are free, but off-the-peg "renewed" pieces fetch higher prices than the originals to reflect their unique character.

Levi's, which boasts probably the longest tradition of being fixed up by its fans using anything from rhinestones to fringed cuffs, is rolling out a workshop programme this year.

The firm says its research shows younger customers in particular want to repair more but don't know how.

For now, Levi's' workshops focus on traditional mending skills, such as sewing on a button and hemming, rather than visible mends, and at a recent launch event in London, that seemed to be what its Gen Z participants were looking for.

"I'm from East London. If you have holes in your clothes people are like 'Ha ha! You're poor!'," says 16-year-old school student Bianca.

Theo, 19, says he'd rather learn how to mend without it showing.

"I would want [the jeans] to look how I originally bought them," he says.

He has a side hustle selling clothes at car boot sales and thinks traditional repair skills would make it more lucrative.

His friend Nicholas, also 19, says most people want to look "fresh".

"No-one wants to look like they came out of a dumpster," he says.

Still, Paul Dillinger, Levi's head of global design innovation, thinks more creative repairs will win them over as they pick up more skills.

"No-one has time for that perfect 'straight from the shop' thing. That's not cool.

"People crave agency," he says. "Mending is a demonstration of humanity: it's not a mustard stain, it's a memory of a great day in the ballpark."

Burnham 'ready to support' Poundland staff as retailer faces collapse

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqrky1p4dlm7o, 4 days ago

Andy Burnham has said the government was "ready to support" Poundland staff as the retailer teeters on the brink of collapse.

The prime minister called for answers over why an offer to buy the business from its current owners, which would have protected jobs, had been rejected.

"This is a deeply worrying time for Poundland staff and their families," Burnham told the BBC.

The discount chain is teetering on the edge after its US-based owners Gordon Brothers cut off a vital funding supply and rejected a takeover offer from Irish firm Martin Property Group (MPG).

The uncertainty surrounding Poundland's future has left some of its 12,000 members of staff fearful about the future of their jobs.

Burnham said: "We want to see jobs protected. If there was a potential owner to avoid this that hasn't been accepted, then the business secretary and I want to know why that is the case.

"We stand ready to support the workforce however we can."

The retailer's bosses have filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators, giving the business 10 days to find a rescue deal.

The move comes after managing director Barry Williams told staff that the chain's US owner had cut off a vital supply of funding despite Poundland's strong sales.

It is understood Gordon Brothers wants to break it up, with rivals Poundstretcher, B&M and Lidl interested in potentially buying up its stores.

Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds earlier said he was "very much concerned" by the uncertainty clouding Poundland's future.

Gordon Brothers bought Poundland, which had been struggling, from the Polish retail group Pepco last year for a nominal £1. A little over a year later, it put the business up for sale.

Despite an offer on the table for the business, Poundland's managers and owners have not been able to agree on a buyer.

It could still be purchased out of administration in a so-called pre-pack deal, but the most likely option is for it to be broken up and for Poundland's stores to be sold off.

Poundland was founded in 1990 with a store in Burton-upon-Trent and has around 20 million customers per year.

It has across its 600 stores in the UK and Ireland, where it trades as Dealz.

It sells low-cost everyday products, general merchandise and fashion on local high streets.

A Gordon Brothers insider said breaking the firm up would allow creditors to recover more money and that this process would ultimately offer the best outcome for staff. The US investment firm's position is that current employees may be able to get employment with new store owners.

If this type of insolvency happens, it would let interested parties firm up offers.

These include Poundstretcher owner, Fortress, which according to one insider is interested in taking on between 200 and 250 stores.

Another large retailer is understood to be interested in buying up more than 100 other sites.

More than half a dozen retailers, include Iceland, Lidl, and B&M, have expressed interest in Poundland's store estate.

Bally Auluk, a national officer at the shopworkers' union Usdaw, said this week had been "incredibly distressing" for Poundland staff.

He claimed staff were having to "watch from the sidelines as a multi-billion pound company jeopardises their livelihoods as it tries to extract £30m from a business it bought for £1".

He said Williams had "reluctantly" kicked off the administration process to give the business time to find a rescue deal, adding that Usdaw was urging Gordon Brothers to reconsider.

Staff at Poundland's customer support centre in Walsall held a protest on Thursday, with some dressing as the Poundland "Pound Hound" mascot.

One employee said they were trying to "save our jobs".

Situation 'wholly avoidable'

There is also a split between the owners and the management running Poundland, who described the situation as "unexpected, unwanted and wholly avoidable".

"As you all know, our sales are strong and our recovery is taking root. This business simply does not deserve to go into any kind of administration," the chain's managing director Williams said in a message to staff this week.

He revealed that Gordon Brothers had limited Poundland's access to funds that help it run its day-to-day business.

"I'm disappointed to have to tell you that Gordon Brothers have given instructions that restricts our access to funds that we would, in normal circumstances expect to access fully under our existing loan agreement," he added.

Williams said in the memo, seen by the BBC, that the offer from Martin Property Group was a "fully funded, ready to go bid that would have kept the business intact and able to continue the remarkable progress we've made".

Three independent directors who were appointed earlier this month to help oversee a sale resigned with immediate effect after disagreeing with Gordon Brothers' decision not to accept MPG's solvent offer.

US interest rates held steady and economy grows - what it means for you

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr15jxzv4w24o, 4 days ago

The US Federal Reserve has held interest rates steady at 3.75% - 4%.

The decision comes within a week of the midterm elections and after the central bank raised interest rates for the first time in three years at its September meeting.

"The overwhelming consensus, the overwhelming judgement, is that what we've done in this monetary medicine is starting to work some," Fed Chair Kevin Warsh said, referring to September's interest rate rise.

Figures published after the Fed's announcement showed the US economy growing at a stronger pace than expected, with inflation running above the Fed's target.

What is the Federal Reserve rate?

An interest rate tells people and businesses how much it costs to borrow money – such as with credit cards, mortgages, or business loans – but also what return they get for saving cash.

The Fed influences interest rates in the US through its target range for the federal funds rate, which is the interest rate used by commercial banks for overnight borrowing.

What's happening with US interest rates?

In its decision to hold rates steady this month, the Fed said that while inflation remains high, it wanted to gather more information before making another decision to change rates.

The Fed also noted that while there was uncertainty, the US economy remained resilient.

Warsh acknowledged that inflation remained too high, but noted that there were other signs - such as tightening credit conditions - that the economy was moving in the right direction.

There is plenty more economic data to come between now and the committee's next meeting, the Fed chair added, which should paint a more detailed picture of the state of the economy.

At that point, Warsh said, "we'll be, I think, better positioned to determine the right policy decision and the stance of policy."

While last month the committee signalled there could be one more rate rise this year, Warsh would not be drawn out on where he thinks they will go in six weeks' time.

"A lot of things can happen, so I'm not going to be able to share with you my musings."

The decision to hold rates steady was not unanimous.

While 10 of the 12 committee members voted to keep rates unchanged, Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack voted to increase rates to 4%-4.25%, from its current 3.75%-4%.

The bank's next meeting will be held over 8-9 December.

What is happening in the US economy?

Warsh said things are moving in the right direction, while the US economy is performing very strongly.

The US economy grew by 3.4% on an annualised basis in the three months to September, stronger than analysts had expected.

That strong growth was driven by an acceleration in investment, and strong consumer spending.

While there was an annualised increase in personal spending of 3.8%, the annualised increase in private investment was a huge 19.4% which analysts say was largely due to investment in artificial intelligence.

Inflation is also above the Fed's target range.

Prices increased by 3.7% in the year to September, driven higher by fuel and energy prices which have surged off the back of the war in Iran.

How does the Fed rate affect mortgages, credit cards, and savings?

The Fed uses interest rate changes to try to keep inflation – the rate at which prices change – at 2% a year and keep the job market stable.

When inflation is too high, the Fed tends to raise interest rates.

This tends to mean higher rates from banks and other lenders, which in turn affects spending and saving decisions.

For example, someone refinancing their mortgage or buying a property for the first time could face higher mortgage rates. It could also mean higher interest rates on credit cards or car loans. However, it means higher interest rates on savings as well.

This encourages people and businesses to save more, spend less money, and make less investments. It also encourages companies to hire less people or slow the pace of pay rises.

All of this tends to reduce demand and slow inflation.

When inflation is low or if the Fed believes the economy needs a boost, it cut rates.

The idea is that this will have the opposite affect, with banks dropping rates leading to more spending and less saving from people and businesses.

Leaving the rates unchanged means rates on things like new mortgages or business loans are also less likely to change. It also means interest rates on cash savings are unlikely to rise.

How much have US interest rates changed?

US interest rates have historically moved around quite a bit.

The last time Fed rates were as high as they have been recently was in the lead up to and during the start of the 2008 global financial crisis.

The Fed then dropped rates to historic lows to encourage spending and job creation during the economic slump and kept them at those lows for several years.

They picked up again ahead of the pandemic before dropping to as low as 0%-0.25% during the pandemic. They then rose to highs of 5.25%-5% from the middle of 2023 to August 2024 as inflation jumped.

They had been falling steadily since then, until rates were raised last month.

Faisal Islam: This Budget was micro and that was deliberate

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwx283zynnv3o, 4 days ago

It was not a mini Budget, but it was rather small. It might be called the "micro Budget".

Small does not necessarily mean bad, but it clearly falls short of radical action to create a promised new economic model.

A new "theory of growth" was not unveiled as promised by the prime minister Andy Burnham.

It was preamble, roadmap, consultation, perhaps the starter to the main course, which appears to be the PM's 10-year plan next month.

It went unsaid, but the clear stategic aim of Healey's statement was to be the "anti-mini Budget".

This "steady as she goes" predictable fiscal event set out to avoid the aftermath seen following Liz Truss's mini-budget, in which unexpected and unfunded tax cuts spooked the bond and currency markets.

The markets didn't even flicker on Healey's announcement of £65bn of extra borrowing over the next five years - government interest costs have actually fallen since Wednesday, against the backdrop of market turmoil due to the US-Iran war.

The core of the Budget was to get Downing Street through the impacts of the Middle East conflict shock on energy and borrowing costs.

If these pressures prove enduring there are some unpalatable decisions that will have to be grasped within the next year. The can will have to be picked up rather than kicked down the road again.

It buys more time, more "breathing space", as it were, for the government and the prime minister's long-term strategic plans.

The detail may come more quickly than feared. On welfare, the Milburn Review process is clearly heading for some sort of welfare-to-work scheme, even a separate system for younger workers.

It will cost money up front to subsidise work opportunities and hope to save more from welfare bills in the future. The chancellor saw at close quarters Gordon Brown do this twice two decades ago.

The Office for Budget Responsbility's (OBR) economic forecast showed the sheer rise in the welfare bill, which is set to jump to £431bn in 2031, if pensioner support is included.

There are two further areas where the chancellor laid down markers, with little fiscal cost, in terms of the long term plan.

On energy, there is some significance to the "cheaper power" mission announced, reshaping what had previously been a focus on clean power.

While still committed to Net Zero, a series of technical changes to powers over levies and renewable auctions, will seek to turn the tide on additional pressures on energy costs.

On devolution, the plan to allow local mayors to keep some extra business rate and income tax revenues, are more radical than expected.

There are trade offs here, but it essentially provides incentives for regional leaders to grow their economies, workforce and tax base, that are normal elsewhere, but have not existed in the UK's very centralised tax system.

How the PM will square other aspects of his "theory of growth" with the chancellor's spending constraints is the other significant challenge.

Can he announce a 10-year plan without detailing the Liverpool to Manchester high speed train line, or a rebirth of some cancelled HS2 lines he championed a year ago?

Away from the long term, the OBR forecast point to a very tricky economic backdrop until the spring, and a trickier spending review, given the need to accommodate the new defence target of 3% of national income by 2030.

The PM's insistence he will not call an election for a year are eminently believable given the risk of 5% inflation and declining household income.

A "focused" Budget at an uncertain time achieved its narrow aim of a bit of "breathing space" for households and also for the government itself.

But the evident gaps in the Budget will need filling in come the PM's upcoming 10-year plan.

Your pay, energy bills and savings: How the Budget affects you

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr0j05vxlwjzo, 4 days ago

Families facing cost-of-living pressures are being offered some help, or "breathing space" as Chancellor John Healey is calling it.

The help comes as prices are rising faster than expected with annual energy bills in particular likely to increase by hundreds of pounds in January.

Here's how the key announcements in the Budget affect you and your money.

Energy bills

If you are living in a home in council tax bands A to D in England, you will receive a one-off £100 "Household Energy Payment" from January, funded by extra tax on banks.

It will be paid directly into your bank account.

Council tax bands are listed below - you can check which one you are in by looking at your annual bill or checking the government's website, although that was struggling to cope with traffic after the announcement.

Administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will receive the equivalent funding, and they will decide whether to introduce the same payment.

This is designed to help with soaring energy bills, with some forecasts suggesting a typical annual bill could rise by £400 or so to £2,100 in January the saving will be only a portion of that. Although it's designated for energy bills, you can spend the money on anything you wish.

The VAT cut on electricity bills, which was introduced in October, will also be extended to July. It was due to end in April.

Gas standing charges

The fee for connecting to your gas supply so called standing charges will be scrapped in England, Scotland and Wales, next year "or as soon as possible after", the chancellor said.

These fixed daily charges will then be shifted onto the price you pay for each unit of energy.

The Treasury calculates that 60% of households will save an average of £45 a year, with lower users gaining the most. But the saving will come after the projected big rise in bills in January.

Higher users - in the biggest houses but also large, low-income families - will pay more than they currently do.

The government wants to extend reforms to electricity standing charges later.

Fuel duty

The 5p "temporary" cut in fuel duty on petrol and diesel, introduced by Rishi Sunak in 2022, will be extended to July. It was scheduled to be phased out from January.

It means drivers will still pay the levy at 52.95p per litre.

Motor fuel prices have risen sharply owing to the continued impact of the Iran war on drivers, with diesel having recently hit new records when it moved above £2 per litre.

The cost of filling a typical family car with diesel has gone up by around £30 since late February. A tankful of petrol costs about £23 more.

Changes to cash Isa scrapped

The chancellor has scrapped his predecessor's plans to reduce the annual amount people can save tax-free in cash in Individual Savings Accounts (Isas).

Rachel Reeves had wanted the policy to encourage personal investment in stocks and shares.

It meant, from April 2027, if you're under 65, you would only be able to save £12,000 a year in cash in an Isa, rather than £20,000.

But that plan has now been ditched.

Instead, the government plans to create a new "Starter Isa" for first-time investors.

More tax for some savers and landlords

If you have a large amount in savings, or if you fail to use the tax-free Isa allowance, then you will pay more tax from April.

You do not pay tax on all savings. There is the annual £20,000 Isa allowance, and an annual savings income allowance (in other words, the interest received on a savings pot) of £1,000 for basic rate taxpayers and £500 for higher-rate taxpayers.

But beyond that savings tax rates will rise by four percentage points to 24% and 44% respectively from April.

Landlords could also pay more in tax. In analysis published on Wednesday, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said these steps along with measures over the past decade that have reduced private landlord returns "collectively risk leading to a steady rise in rents".

Minimum wage rise but you'll pay more tax

Minimum wage rates will rise by 3.9% in April. It means:

* Eligible workers aged 21 and over on the National Living Wage will receive £13.21 an hour, up from £12.71

* If you are aged 18, 19 or 20, the National Minimum Wage will increase to £11.27 an hour, up from £10.85

* For those aged 16 or 17, the minimum wage will rise to £8.31 an hour, up from £8

* The separate apprentice rate which applies to eligible people under 19 - or those over 19 in the first year of an apprenticeship – will also increase to £8.31 an hour, from £8

However, these figures mean, this time around, there's no progress on Labour's manifesto promise to narrow the gap in minimum wages between older and younger workers.

For all workers, the ongoing freeze in the income bands, or thresholds, at which income tax is paid went unmentioned in the Budget.

But it means any kind of pay rise could drag you into a higher tax bracket, or see a greater proportion of your income taxed than would otherwise be expected. Scotland has its own income tax bands.

State pension changes

The triple lock policy means that the state pension will go up in line with average wage increases, at 3.9%.

It means:

* the flat-rate state pension for those who reached state pension age after April 2016 will be £250.70 a week, or £13,036.40 a year, up £488 on now

* the old basic state pension for those who reached state pension age before April 2016 will be £192.10 a week, or £9,989.20 a year, up £374.40 on now

The government had already committed to not taxing people who only get an income from the state pension.

The chancellor said this would be the case until at least 2030, as there will be a new Pension Tax Allowance, so pensioners with an income up to the value of the full new state pension will not pay income tax.

First-time buyers

The First Time Buyer Isa has been in the planning stages with the government for a while.

Healey has confirmed that it is intended to replace the often-criticised Lifetime Isa.

The penalty for withdrawing savings from a Lifetime Isa if you are buying a home above the £450,000 threshold will be scrapped.

Separately, he confirmed the Your First Home equity scheme to allow first-time buyers in England to buy a new-build home with a deposit of 2.5%. It would provide them with a loan worth 20% of their property's value to help pay for the purchase.

Student loans

The government has made no changes to student loan rates - saying only that it is being "kept under review".

There has been some backlash after the previous chancellor froze the repayment threshold for Plan 2 student loans, which were given out for just over a decade in England from 2012.

It means the salary at which borrowers start paying back their loans is due to stay at £29,385 in April and remain there for three years – so graduates start repaying sooner and repay more each month than they would otherwise have done.

Sidehustle trading allowance

The chancellor is tripling the allowance for extra earnings made alongside your main income.

If you sell on Vinted, offer dogwalking, earn money as an influencer, or have any other kind of small-scale side hustle, you can currently earn up to £1,000 a year before you have to report it to HMRC.

From April 2027 that allowance will rise to £3,000.

What else will affect your money?

Some announcements affecting your finances have already been made by the government.

They include:

* Tariffs removed from 100 food items such as baked beans and garlic, which the government calculates could save households up to £21 per year - or 40p a week - when combined with existing tariff suspensions that were introduced in June

* Allowing carers to earn more than an existing earnings limit without losing their entire allowance, replacing it with a taper mechanism instead. However, this will not come in until 2030

* Giving two weeks of paternity pay to self-employed fathers, who have previously missed out on payments of up to £194 a week for the period

* Making permanent a 55p per mile tax-free mileage rate for those driving up to 10,000 miles for work, with the rate rising from 25p per mile to 35p above that

* The prime minister's plan to reinstate the £2 cap on bus fares in England from January to be in effect throughout 2027. Some cities already have caps, and funding is being given to the devolved nations

DoorDash to buy Instacart in $17bn deal it says will expand customer options

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm79pjg2l57yo, 4 days ago

DoorDash will acquire grocery delivery firm Instacart in a $17bn (£12.8bn) deal, creating a behemoth that will bring more meals, quick-need purchases and big weekly shops directly to customers.

DoorDash said the deal, expected to be final in about a year, will expand options for customers and let more sellers use the companies' services.

Instacart shoppers will be able to buy from 150,000 stores, up from the current 100,000, while DoorDash will reach beyond restaurants into retail, the firms said.

"Together, we can accelerate innovation across the grocery industry and make online grocery more seamless and affordable for the millions of households we serve," Instacart's chief executive said.

"Over the last 14 years, Instacart has transformed online grocery by helping retailers of all sizes compete and grow, and joining forces with DoorDash allows us to do even more," CEO Chris Rogers also said.

For DoorDash, the acquisition will allow it to use Instacart's grocery selection and substitution expertise, the company's co-founder and chief executive, Tony Xu, said.

"Grocery is one of the hardest things to get right online. Someone has to pick a ripe avocado, find a substitute you'd choose yourself, and get the ice cream to you before it melts," Xu said.

He added that "Instacart has spent years learning to do that well for grocers, while DoorDash has built a delivery network and technology that local stores rely on every day".

The deal, expected to be done by the end of 2027 or first six months of 2028, is DoorDash's biggest acquisition to date, and could help it take on delivery giants like Amazon.

Morningstar analyst Martin Szumski told Reuters that the growth area in food delivery was shifting.

"Restaurant delivery is maturing, and growth now lies in more frequent, higher-value orders: weekly grocery shops, convenience items, and retail," he said.

In the agreement, DoorDash will acquire Instacart for a value of $65 a share, which would be a 26% premium on the closing price of Instacart stock on 22 October - the price before news of the potential merger first emerged. The deal will be at least 75% cash, DoorDash said.

DoorDash plans to keep Instacart's brand, app, and technology products. The delivery services will keep operating as independent companies until the deal is concluded.

The merger may raise antitrust issues with government regulators, Reuters also reported.

New York City's commission on consumer and worker protections, which last month reached a $131.5m settlement with DoorDash over allegations of underpaying workers, said in a statement: "This proposed merger continues a troubling trend of mega-corporations consolidating."

"Whether or not this merger proceeds, we will fully enforce delivery workers' rights," it added.

'Painful' years ahead, think tanks warn, as living standards set to fall

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6z7x8214np7o, 4 days ago

People are facing a "painful" and "depressing" few years ahead, economic think tanks have warned, after forecasts showed growth in living standards grinding almost to a halt.

Typical working-age households would see their disposable income fall by £1,050, or 3%, between now and 2029, according to the Resolution Foundation, while the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the current decade would be the worst for household income growth on record.

Chancellor John Healey said his Budget offered "breathing space", but said the government could "never remove completely" cost of living pressures.

The UK's official forecaster said its latest economic forecast painted a "pretty grim picture".

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), blamed the difficult financial situation facing the UK on higher borrowing costs and inflation caused by the US-Iran war.

In response to rising energy prices, Healey has announced measures, including a £100 support payment, aimed at easing pressure on household finances.

But that would not be enough to offset the impact of higher energy bills, the Resolution Foundation said.

"This parliament is increasingly looking like one of two halves," said the think tank's chief executive, Ruth Curtice.

"The first half has been marked by rising living standards, solid economic growth and extra funding for public services," she said.

However, the second half of the parliament would be "tough going", she said.

In response to this "painful" situation the government had provided a "scattergun" Budget that did not do enough to address the challenges facing the country, Curtice said.

Over the course of this parliament, incomes for non-pensioner households, after taxes, benefits, and housing costs are taken into account, will have risen by "a paltry" £600, the Resolution Foundation said, with the gains "already behind us".

Even after the extra support provided by the government, households will be left paying higher energy bills than during the last energy crisis in 2022, according to its analysis.

The Resolution Foundation said the support should have been more targeted at the poorest households.

Lost decade

Alongside the Budget the OBR issued its economic forecast indicating a slowdown in GDP growth from 1.2% in 2026 to 1% in 2027.

The forecast for next year is sharply lower than what was predicted at their last assessment in March.

The OBR also put its forecast for inflation for 2027 up from 2% to 3.4%.

Frozen tax thresholds are also eating into people's take-home pay.

However, the OBR also emphasised the difficulties in economic forecasting, highlighting uncertainty over the future path of inflation, in particular, which could turn out to be either significantly higher or lower than their predictions.

While the Resolution Foundation focused its forecast for living standards on working age households, the OBR looks at all households, including pensioners and reflects a 10-year rolling average growth to take into account short-term fluctuations.

The OBR found that by the end of the decade living standards for all households would have barely grown, by less than 0.1% per year.

Helen Miller, director of the influential think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the outlook was "depressing".

"This decade looks set to be the worst decade for growth in household incomes on record," she said.

"No amount of temporary cost of living packages will fix that. We need a stronger economy."

'Fragile' finances

There would also be growing pressure on the government's spending plans over the parliament, Miller added.

"Spending plans look extremely tight. They don't look to me like plans that this government would want to deliver," she said.

"Whether or not they are delivered matters because the spending plans underpin the plan to bring down borrowing," she added.

Miller said she was left with the impression that Healey was hoping the economy would improve to take the pressure off those spending decisions.

Healey, speaking on the BBC's Today Programme, said "economic storms", including the Iran war and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, were affecting countries around the world and the government was seeking to help where it could.

He said energy bill help would create "breathing space" for most households.

Around 20 million households are set to receive the £100 payment based on which council tax band they are in.

But Conservative shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith said the Budget had left the public finances "more fragile" as Healey had reduced the "headroom" or the buffer that the country has between what it takes in revenues and what it spends.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said the £100 energy payment would be identified as the best item in the Budget for many people, but said that it was "not good enough" when you considered the "stealth tax rises" that were taking money out of people's pay packets.

I earn £30,000. I'm angry there was no fuel duty cut in the Budget

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmx235r9wr3yo, 4 days ago

Chancellor John Healey has unveiled his first Budget.

He announced £100 energy payment for millions and a tax rise on banks, among other measures.

BBC News has been speaking to people on a range of incomes on how they feel about their finances and how the Budget affects them.

Dave Herbert is a professional driver on £30,000 a year. He moves cars between showrooms and does deliveries and says fuel prices have been "crazy" this year.

He spends around £350 a month on petrol for work and personal use. That's 40% to 50% more than at the start of the year, he says.

He has to commute into Cardiff, a 62-mile round trip from his home in Ynysddu. "I'd love to have a hybrid car but even an entry-level used car is too expensive."

The 48-year-old, who is married with a 12-year-old daughter, says he has to find the extra money for fuel "from an already tight budget" and "dreads" filling up at the pump.

The only measure Dave wanted to see was a cut to fuel duty, and he was disappointed this didn't happen.

"I'm pretty angry, really. Nothing has been thrown my way," he says.

The main fuel duty rate has been frozen at 52.95p per litre until the summer, but Dave says: "It sounds like they're giving us something by keeping it frozen but they're actually still taking it off us."

'I get £4,062 a year. I'm frustrated there's no action on NEETs yet'

Emily Nelson completed her A-levels last year and like thousands of her peers has been unable to find a job since leaving college.

The 19-year-old from Swindon wants to be an animator but in the meantime is applying for retail and sales roles and apprenticeships. Most of the time, she doesn't hear back from potential employers.

"I'm trying my best, it's all you really can do. It's kind of suffocating in a way. You see everyone else managing, and you feel like you're not."

Emily was initially disappointed with the Budget, and then frustrated that the government is waiting for the outcome of a review into youth unemployment before legislating next year.

"I'm glad the government is aware, and that they have a plan," she said. "But it's a bit frustrating that we have to wait a little longer to find out what it is."

However, she adds: "It's not happened today, but it will happen."

She wants to see more funding to businesses so they can take on more young employees. She'd also like to see more money for training and the government's Jobs Guarantee scheme extended.

The scheme, being rolled out across England, Scotland and Wales, guarantees fully funded, six-month paid jobs for 18 to 24-year-olds who have been on universal credit and looking for work for 18 months. But Emily thinks people should be eligible after a year.

'I earn £22,000. Cost-of-living help doesn't go far enough'

Robert Portlock, 29, has always lived with his parents in Gateshead and would love to move out. But he doesn't think he can afford to.

Rent would be his biggest concern, he says, explaining that a small flat in his area would cost him about two-thirds of his monthly wage.

"Council tax and energy bills would add to it. Food too. I'd need a TV licence, broadband, my car and some money to socialise. By that point I'd be in the minus."

Robert's biggest expense currently is his car, which he says he needs for his 32-mile round trip to work at Newcastle Airport. But he's paying £750 a month in car finance, insurance, fuel and tax.

The Budget "doesn't go far enough", he says, adding he would have liked to have seen more help with the cost of living, including a cut in fuel duty.

The £100 household energy allowance over a year is less than £10 a month, he says, while action on tariffs on food items will save only £21 a year, or £1.75 per month.

"What am I going to buy with that - a Freddo?"

He would like to get on the housing ladder but for now it feels a distant prospect. The government has announced a scheme to help first-time buyers in England who have a deposit of 2.5%. It also confirmed plans for a new First Time Buyer Isa, to replace the Lifetime ISA, which will see the government contribute towards the cost of a first home.

But Robert says neither policy will make much difference to him. "You can't save if you don't have money. They seem to be acting as if inflation hasn't happened."

'I earn £41,000. Energy support will definitely help'

Chloe Chin-Saad's husband passed away four years ago and her biggest worry is the cost of living.

She's very grateful that the rent she pays on her south London maisonette is set below the market rate as it is housing association accommodation, but says life was easier when she shared the bills. "Two incomes make a massive difference."

She lives with her 16-year-old son, and says her energy bill has risen sharply over the past year and she now pays about £200 a month on gas and electricity.

"We try to be more aware, we think more about how long we run the hot water when we do the dishes."

Chloe, 40, and her son have cut back on luxuries like going to M&S and the cinema, and she now tries to limit the weekly food shop to £40.

But she can't do anything to reduce her £200 council tax bill, the £250 a month she pays on car finance, or the amount she spends on medicines for her various health conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis.

Two mobile phone bills, and food and pet insurance for her dog also add to her costs. She says the amount she has left over at the end of each month varies, and sometimes she is left with as little as £50.

Chloe says she is "pretty happy" with the Budget, and that "small changes give me hope".

Cutting standing charges on gas, and the £100 household energy payment for households in council tax bands A to D this winter are "definitely going to help", she says.

"It was quite a thoughtful Budget," she adds. "I can see, in years to come, light at the end of the tunnel."

'I earn £150,000. Higher earners like me should've been taxed more'

Jonathan Whitwam, who recently joined the Labour Party, works in finance and says, in addition to his mortgage, his biggest outgoing is supporting his two daughters through university. He and his wife, who live in Essex, pay their rent, which is around £18,000 per year.

His daughters will start their working lives with between £45,000 to £60,000 of debt each, plus interest, which will be compounding at £5,000 to £8,000 per year.

"I have no objection to paying for degrees as I think they are a great way of broadening horizons and having great life experience. But I think the interest should be waived or capped below 1%, otherwise it's a noose around their neck for a substantial part of their lifetime."

Jonathan, 52, says the Budget was "very safe", reducing energy costs for his household by getting rid of standing charges, while cutting bills for many people this winter.

However, he wanted taxes to be put up for higher earners like himself in the name of "redistribution" and says there was "nothing" in the Budget on that.

"If we want better roads, hospitals, schools we need to raise more tax," he adds.

'I have a £15,000 pension. I'm even Stevens after the Budget'

Christine Morris, from Worksop, has been retired for eight years and lives on a state pension combined with a small private pension her late husband left her.

"It is very difficult to balance the books," the 78-year-old says. "I do go on holiday, but I'm spending more of my savings to live."

The chancellor said standing charges would be removed from gas bills, but Christine, who has a gas boiler, says it's not clear yet whether she will benefit, because those costs will be added on to the unit rate.

However, she says the £100 household energy payment will help over the winter

"I'm not sure I'll be better off," she says. Instead she thinks she will be "even Stevens".

She was unconvinced by Andy Burnham's pledge to end the triple lock so that from 2030 the state pension will rise at least by inflation or 2.5%, with the money saved used to create a free-at-the-point of use national care service for England sometime "in the next parliament".

Christine thinks the new service will take time to come in. In the meantime, she fears she will "get less pension and still have to pay out the same for any care I need".

Microsoft profits soar days after announcing thousands of layoffs

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6m24klyjr8no, 4 days ago

Technology giant Microsoft says its profits for the three months to the end of September jumped to more than $36.6bn (£27.5bn), just days after announcing plans to cut its workforce by more than a quarter.

On Monday, the Windows developer said it would offer buyouts to around 60,000 of its workers to cut costs as it pours billions of dollars into artificial intelligence (AI).

Like many other major tech firms, Microsoft is investing heavily in the infrastructure that powers AI even as questions remain over whether such huge spending will pay off.

Microsoft shares rose by almost 2.9% in after hours trading in New York on Wednesday.

The recent financial results of tech companies have been closely watched by investors as they gauge whether the heavy spending on AI is sustainable.

Big tech companies like Amazon, Meta and Alphabet are expected to spend more than $700bn this year on AI chips and infrastructure like data centres.

Microsoft said on Wednesday that its quarterly revenue rose to $92.3bn - up 19% from a year earlier - driven by strong growth in its cloud computing business.

Its earnings were lifted by a 30% increase in revenue for Microsoft Cloud - its range of enterprise technology services.

The firm also flagged risks, including "substantial investments" in AI, among other uncertainties that could impact its finances.

The firm's chief executive Satya Nadella said AI development has helped grow the adoption of the technology and has delivered "real-world impact across every industry."

This week, the company said it would extend a voluntary redundancy offer to eligible employees in teams across Canada, India, the UK and US to adapt its workforce to "changing needs".

It will create "greater flexibility" for the firm and allow workers to leave with financial support and career planning resources, Microsoft said.

The company currently employs more than 220,000 people around the world.

Microsoft's stronger-than-expected earnings contrasted with Alphabet, as the owner of Google disappointed investors with its financial results on Wednesday.

The firm's shares fell by 9.75% after it reported a 25% drop in quarterly net profit from a year earlier and said it will continue to spend heavily on AI.

What we now know about the UK economy in four charts

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9x28350ly07o, 5 days ago

The UK may have no involvement in the US-Iran war, but the country is feeling the full force of the conflict on its economy.

Soaring energy prices are set to dent growth in the short term, push up inflation and leave living standards in a "grim" place, according to the latest official forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

Interest rates are also predicted to rise, making borrowing more expensive, along with government debt repayments.

Chancellor John Healey warned the nation faces "real challenges ahead" as he announced policies that he said would offer "breathing space" for households in the coming months.

"What we face today are global economic storms," he said. "We can't wish them away. We must choose the course we steer through them."

In its first assessment of the UK economy since the Middle East conflict started, the OBR said rising energy prices were the biggest risk to the economy in the near future.

Despite raising its growth forecast for this year, it sharply cut its prediction for next year from 1.6% to 1%.

Growth is then set to rebound in the following years.

When an economy grows, businesses tend to invest more, create more jobs and give pay rises to workers, which leaves people feeling better off on average, though it can take time and not everyone necessarily benefits.

Companies making higher profits also pay more in tax, which can enable the government to spend more on public services. When there is slow economic growth, or the economy shrinks, the opposite can occur.

Inflation can weigh on growth and the OBR has forecast that prices are set to rise at a faster pace as higher energy bills filter through supply chains and to consumers, especially in 2027.

High global oil prices have already hit drivers at the pumps, with petrol priced at almost £1.73 per litre on average, while diesel is near £1.99.

Elevated oil prices over time can lead to prices edging upwards across a host of goods, such as food, as companies pass on the higher expenses they face to consumers.

Goods are typically transported to destinations by lorries and vans, so high fuel prices can have far-reaching consequences.

The OBR now thinks inflation will stay higher for longer than previously forecast, peaking at 3.8% in 2027.

Despite the cost-of-living support announced by the government, economists at Pantheon Macroeconomics said the measures were "small beer given the surge in inflation we expect over the winter".

High inflation paints a bleak picture when it comes to living standards and the OBR has forecast a dip in the growth in living standards next year as energy bills hit the spending power of households.

Those on lower incomes are set to be hit harder, however, because energy costs eat up a bigger share of their monthly budget and disposable income.

Real household disposable income, a measure of living standards, is forecast to grow from 2027, but not by as much as previously thought.

"It's a pretty grim picture," according to the OBR's David Miles, who says there has been "virtually no growth" for individuals since before the Covid pandemic.

"It's been a dismal period in British economic history."

Inflation is expected to average 3.4% next year, before falling to the Bank of England's 2% target towards the end of the decade.

The Bank is widely expected to raise interest rates next week due to higher inflation in recent months. Rates are currently at 3.75%, but the OBR now forecasts they could rise to as high as 4.5% in the coming years.

It had previously forecast two interest rate cuts this year.

Higher rates makes borrowing money more expensive but can boost returns on savings.

Inflation also raises the cost of borrowing for the government, with spending on debt interest set to rise.

Such repayments are also predicted to increase the overall amount the government borrows, which is set to increase every year by more than had been previously forecast by the OBR.

Higher spending on welfare and pensions due to inflation is also expected to increase borrowing, though it is forecast to fall as a share of the economy over the next five years.

However, forecasts are only a best guess at what might happen in the future. Given the way the conflict in the Middle East has upended previous predictions, the future of the war could alter inflation expectations.

US President Donald Trump has suggested the war will end after the mid-term elections next month.

The OBR admitted there remained "significant uncertainty" around its predictions due to the changing situation in the Middle East.

Charts by Tommy Lumby and Rob England

What the Budget offers for under 25s - and what it leaves out

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c60e05yn3w9zo, 5 days ago

Chancellor John Healey has announced his Budget, which includes changes to minimum wage and help for people trying to get onto the housing ladder.

Here is how the Budget could affect you if you are under-25.

Minimum wage rise

If you are an 18-to-20 year-old earning the minimum wage, your pay will go up by 3.9% from next April.

However, the increase may be lower than you had expected. That is because Healey reversed course on how his Labour predecessor, Rachel Reeves, had been increasing the minimum wage for young people.

Labour had promised to do away with "discriminatory age bands", with all adults entitled to the same minimum wage. This year, 18-20 year-olds will see the same increase as older workers, meaning the disparity will remain. So, for 18-to-20 year-olds, your pay will rise to £11.27, while over-20s will be paid a minimum of £13.21 an hour.

The increase also means a 21-year-old, who is working full time on the minimum wage and took out a student loan after 2023, will now earn enough to meet the £25,000 repayment threshold, over which they will start paying back 9% of their earnings.

First-time buyer boost

The Budget contained plans to help people get onto the housing ladder, including the introduction of a "First Time Buyer Isa". This is an account in which savers can build up a deposit, with the government topping up contributions of up to £4,000 each year with a 25% bonus.

The new savings account will be introduced in 2029, replacing the existing Lifetime Isa, which has been criticised by some for imposing harsh penalties on those buying homes for more than the £450,000 cap.

The cap will remain, but the new "First Time Buyer Isa" will ensure savers are not penalised by losing their own money when making withdrawals. Savers will only lose contributions made by the government when making withdrawals which are not eligible for the account.

The penalty for withdrawals from existing Lifetime Isas will be lowered, too, to address concerns about savers being punished.

The government had already revealed a £4.7bn scheme for first-time buyers in England dubbed Your First Home. It is aiming to help 70,000 individuals and couples get on the housing ladder

The scheme will allow people to buy a new-build home with a deposit of 2.5%. It will provide them with a loan worth 20% of their property's value to help pay for the purchase.

Capped at £110,000 outside London and £140,000 in the capital, it is aimed at those hoping to get on the housing ladder without help from "the bank of mum and dad".

Young Entrepreneurs Allowance

If you are a young person hoping to start a business in England, the Budget contained good news for you.

The chancellor wants to level the playing field for young entrepreneurs who have bright ideas, but who might not have the same family financial backing as others.

In an attempt to encourage more young people to start their own businesses, the government will pilot a "Young Entrepreneurs Allowance" in England.

The allowance will see your living costs partly covered by the government for the first year your business is operating. Healey hopes it will encourage more young people to take the plunge and become entrepreneurs.

Details of the scheme are thin at the moment, however, only that it will be rolled out "shortly".

No help yet on jobs

If you are one of more than a million 18-to-24 year-olds not in employment, education or training (Neet), Wednesday's Budget may have been a frustrating watch.

The chancellor acknowledged the scale of the crisis facing young people, but said solutions would not come yet. Ministers are waiting on a series of recommendations from Alan Milburn, who has been looking into why so many young people are Neet in the UK.

Milburn has warned Britain is "at risk of a lost generation" due to the crisis, saying a "round of ammunition" is needed rather than a silver bullet. He will make recommendations to the government later this year.

Healey said he refused to write off young people during his Budget speech and the government was looking forward to Milburn's final report.

Student loans 'under review'

Another group left hanging were those with outstanding student loans, particularly the controversial Plan 2 loans taken out between 2012 and 2023 - which many fear they will never be able to pay off.

If you have student loans, the government has said it is looking at ways to reform the repayment system. But action was not forthcoming at the Budget, despite expectations in the run up that the issue might be addressed.

After the statement, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Emma Reynolds said the loan repayment system is "under review".

"We inherited a system that is difficult and unfair on young people, but we weren't able to move on that today," she told the BBC.

Healey provides some breathing space but things still set to get worse for most

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqe9l4px0yzxo, 5 days ago

John Healey talked of charting a new course for Britain, but this Budget was more about course-correcting than charging down a new path.

It was abundantly clear that the financial fallout from that conflict in the Middle East has hampered the finances of households and businesses – and the government's ability to help.

While the government targeted those impacted by higher energy and fuel bills, the "breathing space" it aimed to provide was limited; it is a pill that doesn't fully alleviate the pain.

The most telling evidence was that official forecasters predict that while earnings will rise, that is not compensating for higher prices and taxes.

Even after the extra help is taken into account, households' incomes after inflation and tax are set to be typically lower across the next two years than the start of the parliament. On that basis, it could be the second worse parliament for living standards, after the last one, since the 1950s - a sign of how far the war has blown prosperity off course.

But it can't be all be blamed on the war. Taxes haven't helped. Although there were few major measures aimed at households, the policy of previous chancellors of freezing the thresholds at which different rates of tax on income apply - fiscal drag - has been maintained in the background, scooping more money out of pay packets.

Overall, this Budget has the tax burden - the proportion of the nation's income going to the tax office - rising to a new historic high of 38.6%

However, a more generous package of help would have been hard to pull off. The impact of higher inflation and debt have increased borrowing costs by £14bn in the past year alone.

The Chancellor had to prove to the markets which lend the government money that he has a plan to bring down future debt to avoid those costs climbing further.

As it stands, debt interest repayments are due to be £160bn in 2032, more than double the amount spent on schools in England.

And the plans Healey has unveiled already eat into wiggle room he has within the public finances. He says he was right to do so - that's what such safety margins are there for - in times of strife. But the great uncertainty that remains made going further very risky. Energy prices remaining high, for example, could easily chew up all the spare cash.

So the result was what some have termed a beige, safe Budget. As Healey strove to prove his fiscally sound credentials, there wasn't even the customary rabbit pulled out of the hat, the end-of-speech sweetener.

The markets seem reassured – even if some of his tax raising plans involve clamping down on loopholes and those not paying the right tax, which is always highly uncertain.

So the chancellor appears to have bought himself some breathing space. But that means some big questions have been postponed until another day, not least on public services.

Higher-than-expected inflation may mean that if areas such as health and defence are prioritised, budgets for some other "unprotected" areas – justice and higher education for example – are set to lag behind inflation after 2028.

There was a hint too from John Healey that he'd tap into some of those budgets to help out defence spending. To maintain those budgets in 2030 would means finding tens of billions of pounds.

And issues around the other big area of spending – welfare – remain unresolved. Between 2025 and 2032, spending there is set to increase by £100bn.

The official forecasters also noted the rapid rise in sickness and disability caseloads since the start of the pandemic. They warn if that trend continued, spending on such benefits would rise by a further £13bn.

Any suggestion of welfare reform has been postponed until the forthcoming review into the plight of workless young people.

Then there's the issue of boosting growth. There was a bit more detail on the plans for devolution – but there is much to be fleshed out.

And on another key part of the growth strategy, housebuilding, there was disappointing news. Even though first-time buyers are set to get more help, their first home may be more elusive.

Between regulation and higher costs – in part, related to the war - the OBR estimates that 190,000 fewer homes will be built by 2032 compared to what it thought in March, a significant setback.

So the chancellor may have unveiled 98 (relatively small) measures but the to-do list gets longer.

With his official forecasters warning that, in a very uncertain world, his finances face exceptional risks, playing a wait-and-see game feels like a prudent move.

The risks go both ways: the OBR points out that a swift resolution to the war and an improvement in the economy could spell a significant boost to the public finances.

So the chancellor has more reason than most to keep his fingers crossed that happens rapidly.

For as it stands, the official forecasters say incomes after inflation, living standards, are set to be only 1% higher at the end of the decade than at the start.

A series of economic shocks outside out control could thwart plans to turbo-boost prosperity . And as today shows, breathing space only extends so far.

Tax thresholds remain unchanged - here's what it means for your pay

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clydn7r5pn1o, 5 days ago

Income tax thresholds, which have been frozen under successive chancellors, will stay at current levels until April 2031 as planned. But after that they are expected to start to rise again with inflation.

John Healey may not have mentioned the end of this policy in his Budget speech - after all, it is still some way off - but according to the documents released by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) the freeze, which has been shaving additional tax off people's take-home pay for the past five years, is scheduled to end.

The proportion of your income that is taken in tax will continue to go up over the next four years in line with decisions made in previous Budgets.

But then the personal allowance - the point at which you start to pay tax - and other thresholds, where you tip into paying a higher rate of tax, will rise again with inflation, meaning you keep more of what you earn.

Freezing thresholds is often dubbed a stealth tax because, unlike raising the headline rates, it is not as obvious on your payslip.

It has been a useful way for chancellors from Rishi Sunak onwards to raise more money to help pay for things like defence, the NHS, schools and support for the sick, disabled and the elderly.

The amount of extra money brought in by freezing tax thresholds has risen steadily every year, and is due to reach £58bn by 2030-31, more than the UK government spends on transport and not far off current defence spending.

Who is affected by frozen thresholds?

They hit you hardest if your income is close to one of the tax thresholds, but anyone who gets a pay rise is affected, as long as you earn enough to pay tax. Only people earning under £12,570 - the personal allowance threshold - pay no income tax.

By 2031 an extra 6.8 million people will be paying tax who wouldn't have if the personal allowance had not been frozen, the OBR calculates.

The state pension is currently just below the personal allowance threshold, and pensioners looked set to be drawn into paying tax from next April, when the basic state pension rises to £13,036.

However, the chancellor is putting in place a new separate Pension Tax Allowance, which will ensure that low-income pensioners, with income up to the value of the full new state pension, will not pay income tax.

The personal allowance threshold is set for the whole UK, so people in Scotland will also be affected, although other tax bands there vary.

National Insurance Contributions (Nics) are levied according to the same thresholds.

How does it work?

Wages usually go up year-on-year to cover the rising cost of living. Normally tax thresholds would also be raised in line with rising prices. Currently that isn't happening - the thresholds have been "frozen" at 2021 levels.

So, as your pay rises, a bigger proportion of it ends up above the threshold where you start to pay tax.

If the personal allowance had risen with inflation over the last five years, you would now be able to take home the first £16,070 of your salary without paying any income tax. Instead you pay 20% on anything you earn above £12,570.

Will I pay the higher rate?

As incomes rise, frozen thresholds also mean more and more people are dragged into the higher, 40%, tax bracket.

An extra 5.4 million will be higher rate taxpayers by 2031, thanks to the freeze, according to the OBR.

If thresholds had risen with inflation you would have had to be earning £64,470 this year before you tipped into the higher tax bracket.

As it is, with thresholds frozen at 2021 levels, you pay the higher rate on anything you earn over £50,271.

If you were already earning more than the threshold and you get a pay rise, a bigger proportion of your earnings will be taxed at the higher rate.

Almost one in four taxpayers will pay some of their tax at the higher rate by 2031, according to the government's official forecaster.

The same principle - that rising income can push you into a new tax bracket - applies to the additional, 45%, rate that is charged on a person's income over £125,140.

Will I be better off after 2031?

Wages have risen sharply to keep up with inflation in recent years, making the impact of the first five years of this policy quite noticeable, and that is set to continue.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says if Healey had unfrozen the personal allowance this week, instead of keeping it in place until 2031, basic rate taxpayers would have saved up to £198 in tax a year.

Higher rate taxpayers would save £395 a year.

However, for people in the middle of the earnings range, a cut to Nics introduced in 2024 has offset the higher income tax bill.

How much of a difference "unfreezing" thresholds will make in four years' time depends on how fast wages are going up at that point.

There is no fundamental principle at stake, no point that is the "right" level for tax thresholds. Before the financial crisis the personal allowance was much smaller than today, and it was allowed to grow until the pandemic hit. Even in 2031 you'll be able to take home a bigger proportion of your earnings before income tax than you could back in 2008.

Will I get the £100 energy payment and when will I receive it?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c35yn8x748e9o, 5 days ago

Up to 20 million households in England will get a £100 payment to help with their energy bills this winter, Chancellor John Healey has announced in his Budget.

Here's what you need to know about the payment.

How much is it?

For many people, the £100 on offer is a lot of money, but it's worth considering the context.

A typical yearly energy bill is forecast to jump by £276 in January, according to consultants Cornwall Insight.

And some more recent forecasts suggest a typical annual bill could rise by £400 or so to £2,100 in January.

Therefore many people will still feel worse off despite the payment.

Will I get the payment? And how can I check?

Those living in properties which are in council tax bands A to D in England will get the payment, the government has said.

As such, it's worth checking which council tax band your home is in. If you live in England, you can use the search function by typing your postcode into the box.

If you get a paper council tax bill, your band will also be printed on there.

Will I get it if I live in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland?

The chancellor said the policy was for England but that funding would be given to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to make the payment as well.

He urged the devolved governments to follow suit to "give people of all nations in the UK breathing space on their energy bills this winter".

The Welsh government has said that it will also make a £100 cost-of-living payment to all households in council tax bands A to D.

The Scottish government said it would "seek to replicate" the £100 energy payment.

Meanwhile, the Northern Irish government does not have the legal authority to make the £100 payments unless it agrees its budget, which it has failed to do since the start of this financial year.

How do I get the money? Will I get it if I'm a student or don't pay council tax?

If you pay your council tax by direct debit, the money will be paid directly into the bank account that you use to pay it, from the start of January.

Students living in halls will not get the payment because student halls are not in council tax bands A to D.

However, if you're a student living in a property that is in council tax bands A to D, as in a private home or flat let out by a landlord, then you will get the payment.

Students do not pay council tax so the local authority will be responsible for finding a way of giving them the payments.

This is also the case for those who do not pay council tax because of another kind of exemption, or if you do pay council tax but you do it by cash or some other way.

The government said it would give councils guidance on how local authorities should do this in due course.

Do I have to spend the money on my energy bill?

The government has said the support is to help households with the cost of energy.

But the money will appear directly in people's bank accounts. As such, people could choose to spend it on something else.

How is the government funding this payment?

The chancellor said the money for the £100 cash payments is coming from a tax rise on banks.

The surcharge on banks' corporation tax will rise from 3% to 6% for 15 months from 1 January 2027 to 31 March 2028.

These firms you've never heard of are feeding fears the AI bubble could burst

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cje36degrgv5o, yesterday

A once-obscure corner of the AI ecosystem finds itself in the spotlight – and investors don't all like what they see.

Names like CoreWeave and Nebius are familiar to the tech set in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

These data centre companies, known as neocloud firms, run large warehouses packed with expensive computers, which they lease to major AI developers like Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta.

They're now the subject of one of Silicon Valley's most heated debates.

Many question whether neocloud firms are financially sound and what their recent stumbles tell us about the state of the AI economy.

Analysts at Gartner predict by 2030, 80% of neocloud firms will "cease independent operations", while Forrester's experts expect at least three of them to be imminently acquired "as finances get shaky".

On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to downplay recent concerns about neocloud firms, calling them "a small component of the overall ecosystem" on CNBC.

Debt worries

Neocloud firms often finance themselves by signing long-term lease contracts with major tech customers who need quick access to computing power.

Firms can then borrow money using those contracts – plus the AI chips they purchase – as collateral, explained analyst Cory Johnson of "The Quiet Period" IPO research outfit.

He said debt is common across neocloud firms because the hardware has to be paid for up front.

Take the industry leader: CoreWeave. It's a fraction of the size of some of the Big Tech companies it serves.

But Johnson believes lenders sometimes consider the creditworthiness of CoreWeave's customers, like Microsoft or Meta, more than the company's when they lend.

"This helps explain how CoreWeave accumulated $35.1bn (£26.3bn) in debt," he said.

Some jittery investors appear to be having second thoughts.

CoreWeave stock has lost a quarter of its value over the past month, and it's not alone.

Shares in other neocloud firms like Nebius, IREN, and Applied Digital have all shed about that much if not more during the same period.

Debt investors also appear spooked, and are demanding ever-higher returns from several firms in the sector.

CoreWeave's CEO Mike Intrator has said that the market is acting "irrationally" and has expressed confidence in its business model. Some of the world's most consequential companies are queuing up for CoreWeave's infrastructure and other AI services.

Origins in crypto

Several neocloud firms have their roots in the volatile crypto mining industry, made of companies that generate cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin.

Crypto miners use some of the same kind of physical infrastructure that is used to develop AI.

CoreWeave was founded in 2017 with a focus on mining Ethereum.

IREN, Core Scientific and Applied Digital also started in crypto mining.

Their infrastructure left them well-positioned when AI exploded in 2022 with the introduction of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

One outlier is Nebius, which was known as Yandex NV when it was part of Russia's version of Google before splitting off and changing its name in 2024.

Now, the success of these firms hinges on the fate of major AI developers and hyperscalers – even larger data centre operators which neocloud firms often count as key customers.

"There is just an enormous amount of spending getting injected into the system," said Melissa Otto, head of Visible Alpha Research at S&P Global. "It's an arms race."

And neoclouds have benefitted.

But the trade-off of their model is "greater financial risk" in the face of change, said Forrester VP and principal analyst Charlie Dai.

That includes any adjustments that their Big Tech customers might make to their spending plans.

This past week, when Microsoft and Google forecast less AI spending than Wall Street analysts had projected, shares in several neocloud firms tumbled.

Much is also riding on Anthropic and OpenAI, which are both expected to start selling shares to the public in the months ahead.

If AI proves to be a bubble – and bursts – neocloud firms "are definitely going to face collateral damage," said Bradley Tusk of Tusk Ventures.

'Guppy-level death'

The future of the neoclouds also depend on their ability to keep borrowing, which gets more expensive as interest rates rise.

In a recent social media post, Elon Musk suggested this challenge could lead more than 200 neoclouds to "see guppy-level death and consolidation", with the smallest firms being the most vulnerable.

"Some will make it through, but not many," he added.

For now, analysts at Yorkville Ives said demand for computing power still exceeds supply, adding that neoclouds are filling an important gap that larger data centre companies cannot fill.

But to some, the neocloud sector's recent wobbles are concerning.

Microsoft recently cancelled a deal with a British neocloud outfit called Nscale amid power supply issues which could last through to 2030.

Australia's Firmus just shelved plans to start selling shares to the public.

These developments come amid a public backlash against data centres and questions about how much value AI can add to worker productivity.

"There's reason to worry," said Johnson.

The AI bubble could expose your deepest secrets

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261029-the-ai-bubble-could-expose-your-deepest-secrets, 4 days ago

Character.ai's collapse uncovers a little-discussed risk of AI: the companies holding your secrets may not be around forever.

Want an AI girlfriend? Look no further than the chatbot company Character.ai. That was the first suggestion when I made an account last week. "Jessica" said her parents were away and offered to sext with me. No thank you.

But tens of millions of others developed relationships with Character.ai's chatbots, including children. Some AI "personas" tell users they're lawyers and licensed psychiatrists. Now Character.ai is going bankrupt, and people's data, messages and secrets are up for sale.

Experts tell me the privacy risks should worry you even if you've never used Character.ai – because they fear it's evidence of a wider, looming crisis. The good news is some simple steps can help protect you.

Here's the problem. Many analysts think we're in an AI bubble, as building and running AI tools is so astronomically expensive that some companies may never turn a profit. If the bubble pops, untold numbers of AI businesses will merge or shut down. The data that billions of people give to AI tools could then be purchased by almost anyone. You may never find out what happens to it.

Bankruptcy data sales are nothing new, but AI could make things worse.

"When people talk to a personified bot, they often share much more personal and sensitive information," says Calli Schroeder, director of the AI and Human Rights Program at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic). Just imagine what I might have told my AI girlfriend Jessica if the relationship lasted more than 10 minutes.

Don't use AI? You're still at risk, because users share information about friends and family, Schroeder says. "You might disclose how you feel about [your] mom, or things like 'My friend so-and-so came out to me as gay, how should I respond?' Now people who've never interacted with Character.ai are part of the data set."

It could mean all of us are at risk, one way or another.

When the bots start blabbing

Now that it's going bankrupt, Character.ai agreed to sell some of its assets to Disney for $20m (£14.95m). User data isn't part of that deal, so Mickey Mouse and his co-workers may never see my unsettling conversation with Jessica.

However, court filings say Character.ai can sell its data to other buyers. A lot of people aren't happy, including US officials.

A coalition of 40 US state attorneys general have filed a notice calling on the judge to implement child safety and privacy protections. That's significant, but the states' demands may not have teeth.

"Without stronger privacy protections in the US, there is only so much they can do," says Melissa Jacoby, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the US and author of Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal.

Some laws force companies to tell users what they collect and how they use it in their privacy policies. But if you go scuba diving through the legalese, you usually find a list of situations where many of those promises go out the window.

"Bankruptcy is frequently listed as one of those exceptions," says Schroeder. "That's a big risk, because as soon as a company goes bankrupt, a lot of the protections you thought you had suddenly don't apply."

Some places, like the EU, have stronger privacy protections, but even then, data gets sold in bankruptcies. Generally, the buyer must follow the rules of the original privacy policy. But that can still give buyers a broad latitude, and Schroeder says Character.ai is a perfect example.

The company's privacy policy says user data can be harnessed to build new features, train AI models, develop algorithms and build profiles of users for targeted advertising. So any buyer of Character.ai data can do the same.

"And those are precisely the things I would be most worried about", Schroeder says. "Given the extreme sensitivity of the data these companies collect, it could be really horrifying."

For example, Character.Ai's chatbot reportedly "encouraged" a teenager to kill his parents over a screen time limit. A 14-year-old boy took his own life after allegedly being spurred on by the company's AI. The related messages, along with reams of other Character.ai data, could end up in the hands of companies you've never heard of.

A Character.ai spokesperson says the company has settled these lawsuits and is committed to working with the families to build safer products, but didn't answer specific questions about children's privacy. "Over the past year, Character.ai has taken innovative and decisive steps with regard to AI safety and teens, and will continue to champion these efforts and push others across the industry to adopt similar safety standards," the spokesperson says.

Character.ai is just one company, but Schroeder worries it could be the first of many if there is a significant economic downturn.

"The volume of information AI companies have is going to be considered a very attractive asset in bankruptcy proceedings," she says. "And without more rules in place, I really worry about what else that data can be used for, where it’ll go, who it’ll be shared with, and what the risks are to consumers."

Here's what you can do about it

The short answer is: go delete your data.

Character.ai laid out the instructions in its bankruptcy announcement. Companies aren't required to let you delete data in every jurisdiction, but often, they let everyone do it instead of creating different systems.

This obviously takes effort. So here's the real advice. Think about which services hold particularly sensitive information about you. If you stop using them, take a few minutes to try and erase it.

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• Meta's AI Muse is about to make the internet more annoying

Every service is different. But in general, you can find information on data deletion by checking privacy settings or the privacy policy for details. If all else fails, contact customer support.

If you're struggling to figure out how to delete your data, one way to locate instructions is to ask an AI chatbot – just double check their answers. Yes, given the context, I can taste the irony.

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A painting went missing 20 years ago. Police tracked it down with the help of AI

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261027-this-painting-went-missing-20-years-ago-police-tracked-it-down-with-the-help-of-ai, 5 days ago

Art theft is a global problem and police forces are struggling to keep on top of it. Now they are turning to AI software that snoop out the most cleverly hidden artworks.

During their routine visit to the annual antiquity fair in Parma, Italy, in October 2024, police officers busily snapped photos of the artworks as they walked between the stands. It wasn't art appreciation – it was detective work.

The images were uploaded to an internal database as the officers smiled at the vendors and wandered amid fist-sized bronze statuettes, patinated goblets, yellowing globes, and an endless assortment of oil paintings.

Just a couple of hours later, though, the police system flagged one of the snapshots with an alert signal: a painting of a young, fair-skinned woman wearing aquamarine and red, holding up a half-unravelled parchment scroll.

The next day, officers rushed to the scene and seized the painting for their art experts to take a second look. The scroll in the painting was now, indeed, giving the investigators reason to be suspicious, says Lt Col Salvatore Rapicavoli, of the police unit for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Italy. "There was something off."

While Rapicavoli's team has specialised in tracking down stolen artworks nationwide for decades, he says that the novel, tailor-made artificial intelligence system they were testing at the fair has massively sharpened their craft. It has since allowed the team to detect stolen art more quickly and helped them to spot details beyond what the human eye can normally see.

"There has been an exponential increase in the number of hits," says Rapicavoli. Since its introduction in November 2023, the AI system has helped his team recover more than 300 large plundered paintings and statues, and more than 165,000 smaller coins, medals, letters, manuscripts, religious objects, stamps and cards worth more than a total of €203m (£170m, $226m). The advances in Italy – in technique and policy – have been paving the way for machine learning in art theft investigations worldwide, promising to revolutionise the global crackdown on art heisters.

And while a human would likely have glossed over that woman holding a parchment scroll at first glance – nothing but a couple of darker shadows looking off balance – the team now had an active investigation on their hands.

A huge haul

Since 1969, the Italian police have kept a database of looted cultural artefacts across the nation – everything from gigantic oil paintings ripped from church altars in the night to ancient Roman and Etruscan artefacts excavated illegally. The database – the largest in the world, constantly fed by reports from cultural police authorities and customs – contains more than one million items. Though only some of the entries have pictures of the original artefacts.

Historically, to find stolen artworks, Italian police routinely visited fairs, antique shops, and upscale art auctions and compared what they saw there with millions of records back in their offices, first in paper form, then digitised in an online database. One by one, they would look for matches in the online repository by searching keywords, querying with details like "painting of woman with scroll".

This was time-consuming and clumsy, though, says Rapicavoli. Even if a sale looked suspicious, an officer scrolling through hundreds of database photos for a match could often miss key details. And the quality of the original artefact photos left a lot to be desired. The images were often taken decades earlier, in black and white, far away, on someone's dining room wall and littered with light blowouts, obscured areas, or extreme contrast.

"I asked myself how technology could get around this problem," says Rapicavoli, an IT engineer who joined the Italian police's stolen art team in 2013. "At least in the massive search-and-comparison phase."

In 2020, his team conceived the AI algorithm called the Stolen Works of Art Detection System (Swoads). "The machine doesn't get bored," says Rapicavoli. Crucially, it can match hidden visual fingerprints in the works – pairing similarities between shades of colour and rough silhouettes.

It can also spot segments of paintings that have been chopped up and rearranged – as is often the case with large altarpieces sold in separate slivers – or works that have been tweaked after being stolen. "Regardless of whether it makes sense or not, it recognises it because it's part of a whole that was stolen," says Rapicavoli. It can reconcile the art without truly knowing its meaning or content.

The mystery of Saint Agnese

A manual search for a painting of a "woman with a scroll" in the stolen artworks database wouldn't have solved the case on Rapicavoli's hands. The keywords wouldn't have surfaced the painting stolen 20 years earlier, in which that same fair-skinned woman clutches a small white lamb and a palm branch instead of a scroll.

Because the AI had spotted the similarities in colour, pattern and set-up – irrespective of the missing scroll – it flagged it among millions of stolen artefacts despite the manner of its disguise. Once it fetched the source image it believed it resembled, the similarities to the human eye were immediately apparent.

In fact, a closer investigation confirmed that a 17th-Century, 1m-tall (3.3ft) painting of Saint Agnese had been looted from the small church of Virgo Potens in Sulmona, near Naples, over 500km (310 miles) from the Parma art fair, on the night of 11 August 2004. It had apparently then been painted over to appear less recognisable – the lamb now the scroll, and the halo and the palm branch erased to turn the Saint into a young pagan woman instead.

As the art trade moved from in-person auctions to online marketplaces, Rapicavoli's team was finding itself constantly playing catch-up with a flurry of new uploads across e-commerce platforms, social media, and even the dark web. Now Swoads can continuously crawl catalogues and new uploads day and night, constantly scraping the internet and comparing millions of images against a stolen-art database.

In 2026, for instance, the same software allowed his team in the Italian city of Turin to recover a painting by Filippo Palizzi, Riposo Della Pastorella (The Rest of the Shephardess), stolen from a modern art gallery in June 1972, in a robbery so severe the establishment remained shut down for over 30 years.

Although the painting had been missing for decades, lost in the backrooms of art markets and trade shows, one of its routine trawls of the internet spotted it for sale on an auction house website.

An aid, not a replacement

Still, AI isn't a silver bullet against art theft, says Carina Popovici, the co-founder of Art Recognition, a company using AI for art authentication. These systems answer a specific question: does this image match something reported stolen? They don't catch the thief, and they can't flag something that was never recorded, she notes. "The recovery still depends on investigators and legal cooperation," says Popovici. "I would call AI a force multiplier."

Timothy Carpenter, the former head of the FBI's Art Crime Team, and founder of Argus Cultural Property Consultants, a risk management and consulting firm, agrees. The software can't replace human analytical thought.

For one, there are still many technical issues to iron out. While the technology has become much better at recognising stolen art even from low-quality photographs, it still struggles with poor training data. Its recognition of 3D objects, too, is severely impaired – a vase photographed from the front in the theft report will likely not match a listing photographed from the back. Rapicavoli's team is already working to improve this.

And there are systemic issues: "You have to have a large team dedicated to nothing but chasing leads generated by the AI," says Carpenter – a luxury most law enforcement branches cannot afford. "The Italians have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 300 personnel assigned to their art crime unit. At its largest, the FBI had 24."

AI also can't necessarily distinguish a copy from the supposed original: many copies of an artwork can exist in the world, whether authorised or not. Because these databases don't require proof of authenticity before adding a stolen work, says Carpenter, the stolen object might not even be the only existing version of a painting. For instance, Interpol's database currently lists that Murillo's The Melon Eaters was stolen, says Carpenter: "But the original painting still hangs in the Alte Pinakothek [in Germany] and is not reported stolen." Interpol confirmed that's because the database instead records the theft of other versions of this painting: a copy attributed to the artist, reported stolen in Rome in 2009, and a copy by a disciple, falsely signed by Murillo, reported stolen in Bucharest in 1998.

Interpol said in a statement to the BBC: "In the case of the Murillo painting mentioned, we acknowledge that an authenticated original is currently conserved at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. However, it is common for multiple versions of a masterpiece to exist, including copies created during the artist's lifetime, works by disciples, or pieces attributed to the master, etc."

Talk about training AI to undermine forgery, in fact, abounds. The algorithms could spot duplicates or suspicious prices, or work to examine imperceptible details such as brushstroke geometry, colour relationships, and texture. But this is a slower and more intricate process to set up with the tools available now, says Steven Frank, an intellectual property attorney who researches how to use AI to authenticate art.

Not to forget that the same AI tools helping investigators can also help the criminals, allowing them to manipulate an image, change a frame, digitally repair damaged areas on a painting, and, of course, fabricate false provenance documents or create realistic synthetic objects that don't actually exist, says Carpenter. "So, AI is making things easier, while at the same time making them harder," he says.

International trafficking

All of this is on Rapicavoli's mind. His team will update the software with watchlist data on artefact categories forecast to hit the market, such as rare Ukrainian manuscripts or icons likely to be looted during the conflict, so the system can stay on high alert. They are also working toward an internationally interconnected identification network by 2027 – given that the Italian's work hardly exists in a silo.

Turkey has its own AI system, which it has already, for instance, used to recover various stolen, famous 15th-Century tiles from the UK. French researchers have also created their version of the app, Arte-Fact, and German cultural institutions have launched one called Kiku. In the US, Boston University researchers are using machine learning algorithms to identify statues that may have been stolen from Cambodia. Researchers at Santa Clara University in California, meanwhile, have created an AI Provenance Assistant to help scrape records of art looted by the Nazis.

Interpol, ultimately, has software called ID-Art, connecting databases on a global scale. Thanks to its image-recognition abilities, the Spanish Guardia Civil recently recovered two stolen Renaissance tables more than 40 years after their theft by matching photos against blurry black-and-white database images from 1979. They also recovered three Spanish Roman Empire gold coins worth up to €200,000 (£167,600/$224,000).

Not 'most wanted'

No matter how advanced, AI will always likely be less useful in recovering more recently stolen works, or more high-profile thefts, says Frank. "The thieves know better than to try to sell them through traditional channels," he notes. Many of these thefts are directly commissioned by a collector, and will probably enter a vault or freeport storage facility.

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Most cases chalked up by the new AI systems are, in fact, lesser-known pieces, and the thieves are often willing to devalue the work – chopping it up, modifying it – rather than risking getting caught. "I don't expect the system is going to find me the Antonello Da Messina works that were stolen this summer, let's be very clear," says Rapicavoli. "I don't expect it to find me Caravaggio's Nativity, one of our 'Most Wanted'."

For instance, there is no evidence to turn the Sant'Agnese painting theft into a real criminal case. The theft happened over two decades ago, so Italian law can't prosecute it. And the antiquities reseller from Naples had little information on its provenance, likely inheriting it through his family business.

But just because this isn't a splashy, multimillion-dollar art-heist bust doesn't mean it lacks sentimental and territorial value to the community, says Rapicavoli. On 20 May 2025, his team got to return the painting to the small Virgo Potens church in Naples, where it will be restored and hung back in its place. The locals, he recalls, were elated.

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Captain in UK's worst helicopter crash recalls 1986 tragedy

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqy7ljm7n5mlo, today

A man who captained a helicopter which crashed with the loss of dozens of lives 40 years ago has told how he could not comprehend he was one of only two survivors.

The Chinook carrying offshore workers crashed into the North Sea after a catastrophic gear box failure off the coast of Shetland on 6 November 1986.

Forty-three passengers and two crew members died, while one passenger survived alongside Captain Pushp Vaid. It remains the UK's worst helicopter accident.

Now 85, Vaid believes he was just "lucky" to escape: "I just could not grasp how 45 people couldn't make it, and two of us were able to come out of it," he said.

He has also now used artificial intelligence (AI) to recreate what happened to the helicopter.

The Chinook plunged into the water during its approach to Sumburgh.

The cause of the accident was subsequently discovered to be gear box failure.

Before the 1986 crash, the most deadly accident was in 1983, when 20 people died in the sea off the isles of Scilly.

The Chinook, built by Boeing in the US, had previously enjoyed a relatively good safety record. They first flew in 1961, and a military version was used by British forces during the 1982 Falklands War.

The Shetland accident highlighted concerns, voiced particularly by trades unions, about the safety of North Sea flights.

Vaid, of Westhill, Aberdeenshire, recalls 6 November 1986 being a "beautiful" day.

"The weather was very nice and calm in Sumburgh," he told BBC Scotland News.

The Chinook was returning from the Brent field with 47 people on board.

On the approach and as they started to descend, Vaid describes hearing a "whining" noise.

They assumed it was not serious, and was perhaps something such as a heater not switching off.

"Everything was okay, except this noise was coming," he said. "And it is getting louder, but it didn't sound dangerous. We couldn't figure out what it was."

They then heard an "almighty bang".

"What had happened was the front gear had broken," he said. "And the noise that was coming was the gear breaking up.

"Once the gear was breaking up, the rotors were getting closer to each other. And the rotors hit each other."

He explained: "Once the rotors hit each other, the rear rotor parted from the helicopter and disappeared.

"So the helicopter, which is going along, suddenly is looking vertically up. So next thing I could see the sky in front of me. We were going at 100 knots, it became zero knots.

"The rotor was in front of me and it hit the windscreen as well. So part of the windscreen was flying in and hitting me."

"The cockpit did a flip and it broke from the main cabin, but the floor was still attached, so when it hit the water the rear part of the helicopter took the impact.

"I didn't feel going into the water at all. And then we went underwater.

"I swam through it and I reached the top. When I reached the top there was so much wreckage everywhere."

Vaid said that in the back of his mind he knew a rescue helicopter that was due to be out on a training exercise would come to his aid.

"So I wasn't worried that I was in the water," he recalled.

He and the other survivor were picked up by the rescue helicopter. They were treated in hospital in Lerwick before later being transferred to Aberdeen.

'Guilty I was alive'

A special service will be held in Aberdeen to mark the 40th anniversary of the accident.

"I keep telling my story, but it's difficult to make people understand what I'm talking about and I thought I can make a visual story," Vaid said.

"When I saw some programmes made by AI that were so fantastic, I said there's no reason why I can't do it.

"That's one of the reasons I wanted to make the video - it's my way of paying my respect to the people who died."

He added: "The first year I used to feel guilty that I was alive and 45 people were not alive.

"But of course the fault was technical and the crew could have done nothing at all. It was very sad.

"I was one of the lucky ones."

TikTok brings fame and queues to Brontë village for autumn

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmrly1702pnlo, yesterday

With its dramatic landscapes and links to the Brontë sisters, Haworth has long been a popular destination for tourists.

But recently, the West Yorkshire village has been busier than ever, according to some residents and business owners, and is now attracting a new type of visitor - one brought in by how picturesque the place looks on social media, particularly during autumn.

A quick search on platforms like TikTok or Instagram shows a whole host of content promoting Haworth as a must-visit this October.

Posts also highlight the queues that can form outside shops, especially during the weekend.

The businesses lining the village's cobbled main street have embraced Halloween with colourful window displays, and none more so than The Cabinet of Curiosities.

The Victorian-style apothecary now sells a range of gifts, including soaps and candles, and its suitably spooky decor has made it something of a hit on social media, causing queues of people to line up, waiting to snap a picture or look inside.

Karen Roberts has worked at The Cabinet of Curiosities for nearly 20 years and says the shop has been especially busy this year.

"It suddenly started about six weeks ago to the point where we've had queues outside every weekend waiting to come in," she says.

"This week, with it being half-term, we've literally had people outside every day."

Although the business previously had a social media presence, she thinks the reason it "all blew up like this" is due to the sheer amount of people posting independently about the shop, and the village, on their own accounts.

"We've always let people film, we've never had a problem with that, but definitely people are asking me now, can they come in and film?," she explains.

"Then they share it, and every day you turn on Facebook and you go, 'oh my God, there is more'."

Many customers know about the connection to the Brontë family, and the parsonage where they lived is now a museum.

Emerald Fennell's 2026 adaption of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, also sparked an interest in Brontë country.

And while increased footfall brings positives, there are downsides to social media stardom for the village, Roberts adds, highlighting a lack of parking as a main issue.

"There's certainly a downside. If you saw the bins at the end of the day, it is ridiculous."

By mid-morning a queue has formed outside The Cabinet of Curiosities, with the shop admitting small groups at a time.

Angela and Davinia Torres are bundled up against the elements. The pair are visiting the UK from Gran Canaria, and say the "beauty of the village" was the main draw.

"I always saw images and videos, TikToks and social media generally," Angela explains.

"We love to live the Halloween vibes, autumn. It's simply beautiful. The landscapes, everything, really."

Enjoying a day off work, Ella and Brian Thomas travelled from Greater Manchester to visit Haworth, inspired by a friend's Instagram post.

"With Wuthering Heights coming out, I think a lot of people have been seeing it on TikTok and making videos, so it was me who suggested to come here," Ella says.

The couple wanted to find somewhere "nice and autumnal" for a walk, and say they've previously visited York and Edinburgh for a "similar vibe".

"I knew it was the home of the Brontës, but I didn't know much more of the history than that," Brian explains.

Although they struggled to park at first, both agreed that "it was to be expected" that visiting during school half-term would be busier.

Standing below the steps to St Michael and All Angels Church, friends Hannah and Isa say the village is "busy today, but not as busy as we thought it would be".

They were planning on visiting earlier in the month, but decided against it when they saw long queues documented on social media.

"We have seen on TikTok people queuing up outside. Even tiny little shops, not necessarily restaurants," Hannah says.

According to Isa, the pair decided to visit on a weekday "because we've seen weekends are a bit crazy".

Further down Main Street, Claire Austin runs Silverland with Passion, her family jewellery business.

"We've had such a different influx of people," she says.

"We have people that come from far and wide. They've never seen a village that's on a big steep hill with so many businesses and residential properties."

It's common to see people live-streaming their walk along the street, or photographing the surrounding buildings, which she says "is so nice to see".

"Because there's been so many films here, people like to have pictures taken and, sort of re-enact things on the street, which is fantastic to see.

"It's a great little community, all the businesses work really hard together to make sure that every visitor has the best possible experience."

However, increased footfall often goes hand-in-hand with an increase of vehicles, she notes, with the village not necessarily "built for the amount of people" visiting.

Corine Farrell works at boutique gift shop Betty Moore, and is a Haworth resident.

A lack of visitor parking can cause problems for those who live in the village, she says, as they can end up dodging cars that "are parked not the way they should be".

"I struggle to get in and out of my street. The Airbnbs are full all the time.

"So those kind of things impact our daily life. Like everything, there's a positive and a negative.

"But it's nice that people come to the village and are respectful when they are here."

Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.

Love, luck and magic: Why are young people turning to online witches?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck62yny61552o, yesterday

Love or luck, take your pick. All yours with a simple click.

Or at least that's the promise being made by so-called "Etsy witches", who claim to cast spells for everything from good fortune to good weather.

And it seems there's a growing appetite for a little magic. Online retailer Etsy says searches for weather spells and witches have significantly increased this year.

But what are people hoping to get from these online witches, and why are young people turning to them for a helping hand?

For one 'Etsy witch', there's certainly no shortage of people looking for some extra luck.

Ellecia Cahill, from Erskine, describes herself as a "mystic" and has clocked up more than 2,000 sales online from readings and channelled letters - messages which claim to be from loved ones - as well as selling crystals and amulets.

And while you might expect love spells to top the shopping list, she says there's something else her customers are particularly keen on.

Abundance spells - in other words, a little help attracting money, success and opportunities.

She claims one customer - a tech investor from the wealthy Mediterranean principality of Monaco - had seen a "significant increase" in his net worth since he bought an abundance talisman.

A scroll through similar online retailers reveals a spell for every occasion, including spells promising to keep the rain away on your wedding day or to help you get tickets to a sold-out concert.

A spokesperson for Etsy told BBC Scotland they have seen "growing interest" in "magical touches" for occasions like weddings.

They said searches for spells for people trying to ensure sunshine on their big day have grown by 206% while general searches for wedding related-spells and witches are up 105%.

Whether they can actually deliver is another question entirely - in fact, Etsy rules say spells must be marketed as for entertainment purposes only.

For Cahill, it's not all about doing business.

The 24-year-old says that young people - though they are very used to thinking logically - are looking to believe in something magical.

She says that a lot of younger people feel lonely, and she wants to be a "safe space" for people, and to give them comfort.

"As humans we need to believe in something that is bigger than ourselves," she said. "Curiosity is natural.

"I think a lot of the time people know the answer they want, but are just looking for a bit of reassurance.

"Even if magic isn't real, if it helps someone feel more confident what is the harm?"

Actress Laura Blair, from Glasgow, bought a spell to help her with a specific job goal.

The 29-year-old told BBC Scotland: "I paid for a job spell, and they then allocated me to a witch. I had to send them my full names and more specifics and then she sent me a video of her doing the spell."

While the purchase didn't work out exactly as she'd hoped, she has noticed a positive impact on her acting career generally.

"Since I cast the spells I've had multiple acting roles, its actually the busiest I've ever been in my career," she said.

Another user, Chloe, also from Glasgow, wasn't so happy with her results.

"It was a waste of time and money. What I asked for didn't happen but it is a funny story, I suppose," the 22-year-old said.

"I had just gone through a break-up and wanted my ex back - but in hindsight maybe it is just as well it didn't work."

'Commodification of spirituality'

Researcher Alexandria Arthur-Hastie is a sociologist of religion at Leeds Beckett University. She believes the rise of online witches is part of a broader shift away from traditional religion and towards more "personalised forms of spirituality".

Hastie said it was unsurprising that witchcraft had expanded online, just like other aspects of modern life which have moved onto digital platforms.

"It's really just the latest step in the commodification of spirituality," she told BBC Scotland.

She said shows likes Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Charmed brought magic into the mainstream and these days, people can discover witchcraft through social media.

But the academic says there's something deeper behind the appeal.

For some young people, she said turning to witchcraft can be a way of finding support when life feels uncertain - be it relationships, careers or worries about the future.

"People go online, they're looking for solutions to these life problems, they're looking for a balm to soothe, really," she said.

Hastie said many contemporary witches see themselves not as mystical figures but as healers, focused on helping themselves, others and wider society.

"They really see it almost as a caring profession, something akin to maybe counselling," she said.

Crypto giant Binance attempting to recover $6.3bn stolen in hack linked to North Korea

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwe8lp7zy07zo, 2 days ago

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, says it has frozen around half of the funds stolen in a "complex" hack, after $6.3bn (£4.7bn) was accessed in what is believed to be a record heist.

The firm said $3bn of its stolen digital assets had been secured - but many were still in the hands of unidentified hackers. It initially thought an engineer's laptop had been compromised, allowing unauthorised withdrawals, but later said the attack was wider.

Several analytics firms have linked the hack, which eclipses a $1.5bn (£1.12bn) heist on the Bybit exchange in 2025, to a North Korean hacking unit.

The US Secret Service said it was "working around the clock" "to identify, freeze, trace, and recover" stolen funds.

America's lead federal agency for investigating financial crimes added that it would "identify the cyber criminals responsible and bring them to justice", while Binance also said it was working with the FBI.

While Binance said its US-facing exchange was unaffected, the US would still have jurisdiction to investigate the hack and help track down stolen funds - an effort which generally involves a global law enforcement effort.

The hack also involved some US-linked assets, such as stablecoins Tether and Circle – cryptocurrencies pegged to the dollar.

Binance told its users "your money is safe, and we're covering every loss".

It had initially suspended all deposits and withdrawals - but then said in an update that "deposits remain unaffected".

Binance's co-CEO Richard Teng said: "This was not carried out by one person. Our initial investigation suggested that the security incident may have involved a compromised laptop, however our subsequent investigation has uncovered additional points of breach."

Teng also describes how the hackers used "a self-destruct mechanism that destroyed tooling and traces as they went, making it more difficult for us to trace and investigate".

Initially, the company had indicated the breach "may have started with a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop" but later statements have pointed to a broader breach.

In a later update, the firm said it had "set aside" more than $6.34B in company funds to cover the stolen assets and was "actively buying" a range of crypto tokens.

The Binance hack spooked cryptocurrency markets on Friday. The price of Bitcoin was down 5% to $76,800 in Friday afternoon trading in New York.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase was down 12% as investors also reacted to earnings results in which the firm reported revenue slightly below expectations. Robinhood, a financial services company that trades in cryptocurrency, was down 7.8%.

Binance, which was founded in China in 2017, allows users to trade digital assets and is estimated to have more than 300 million registered users worldwide.

The company said in 2024 that it had more than $160bn in assets under its custody.

A lot of the fear right now from Binance users - and the crypto industry at large - is whether or not Binance will actually be capable of covering this enormous financial loss.

The company has said repeatedly that customer funds will be covered and that the firm is strong enough to weather the storm.

But crypto history watchers have been pointing out online that this is exactly the kind of message that FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried gave before his crypto exchange collapsed in 2022, leading to huge losses for customers and the industry.

Several experts have warned customers not to regard Binance's promise to cover losses as legally binding and said they may need to pursue litigation to recover them.

Daniel Tunkel, of the London-based Edwin Coe law firm, said that would "come down to what [customers] have been promised in their contracts", and "where Binance can be sued for non-performance, if it comes to it".

Binance has been subject of regulatory scrutiny around the world.

Meanwhile, AI-powered investigations company TRM Labs said that several elements of the attack resembled earlier North Korean-linked incidents, including the Bybit hack.

In the last five years the crypto industry has been beset by enormous losses from hackers.

In nearly all cases investigators have blamed hackers from North Korea, pointing to the infamous Lazarus Group - also know as TraderTraitor. The names refer to clusters of cyber criminals accused of working directly for the regime.

Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm, said it had "high confidence" that a North Korean is linked to the hack.

North Korea is an impoverished country with very little industry and heavy international sanctions and experts say the regime uses cyber crime as a way to bring money in.

North Korea has always denied this, but the wealth of evidence from cryptocurrency flow analysis and insider interviews from defectors is compelling.

It makes North Korea likely to be the only nation that uses hacking as a way to raise public funds.

Ministers vow online safety action after teen sextortion victim took own life

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqpvgp01nm7eo, 3 days ago

The UK government has said it remains committed to making the online world as safe as possible for young people following the death of a teenager who took his own life after he fell victim to an online sextortion scam.

Cai Davies, 18, died in June 2025 after he had sent messages to a woman he believed had a romantic interest in him.

South Wales Central Coroner's Court heard he had been targeted by scammers operating from Africa, who demanded money from him and said intimate photos would be sent to his friends and posted on YouTube.

The coroner addressed a Regulation 28 preventing future deaths report to the UK and Welsh government with her concerns about how Cai had fallen victim to the scam.

Assistant coroner Rachel Knight recorded a conclusion of suicide after Davies, from Pontypridd, Rhondda Cynon Taf, died.

Knight said it was "more likely than not" that personal stresses in his life together with falling victim to the sextortion scam "more than minimally contributed" to his death.

She wrote of the scammers: "Conversation quickly turned sexual and she asked him for intimate images, which were then used to blackmail him for money by threatening to send the images to his family and friends, and to upload them to a YouTube channel.

"The images were indeed sent to at least one of Cai's Facebook friends by the scammer.

"Cai was bombarded with video calls and messages via Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp over a very short period of time making demands for money."

'Profoundly troubling'

Online Safety Minister Ian Murray set out several recent measures the UK government had taken to protect children and young people.

These included criminalising the taking of intimate images without consent, a requirement for online platforms to remove those images, and the introduction of the Online Safety Act.

Murray wrote: "The circumstances surrounding Cai's death are profoundly troubling and I am grateful to you for drawing these matters to my attention.

"As the minister responsible, the government and I are fully committed to making the online world as safe as it can be for everyone, especially children and young people."

The Welsh government said issues around telecommunications and internet services were reserved to Westminster but Senedd ministers were committed to reducing online harm in Wales.

Education Minister Anna Brychan and Culture Minister Heledd Fychan said: "The Welsh government will continue to engage with the UK government and Ofcom on current and emerging online safety risks and their implications for devolved responsibilities.

"We are considering the implications for devolved responsibilities of legislative proposals by the UK government relating to children and young people's access to social media and certain high-risk online features."

They added the Welsh government would "continue to consider emerging evidence, including about the potential effects of online safety measures on suicide prevention and self harm and the risks of unintended consequences".

Brychan and Fychan said the Welsh government would be reviewing existing guidance as well as developing fresh online safety guidance for schools and a new national online safety programme.

"These actions will form part of the Welsh government's wider commitment to strengthening digital resilience, preventing harm and helping people affected by online exploitation to access appropriate support.

"We will continue to review our approach as the evidence and nature of online risks develop," they added.

Children's safety tops online worries, survey says

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6y4x2kep30wo, 3 days ago

Harm to children poses the greatest risk online, a survey by Guernsey's data protection commissioner has suggested.

Of those surveyed, 73% of people highlighted concerns about online harm to children.

The Office of the Data Protection Authority survey also suggested "the adoption, potential and risks of artificial intelligence is at the forefront of people's minds".

Commissioner Brent Homan said the results highlighted gaps in people's understanding about their rights and his office planned to launch more support.

The commissioner said he was not surprised by the results on the protection of children and his office had an education programme to promote and protect children's rights.

Homan said it was also "clear that people care about information and the protection of information".

The survey suggested 73% of respondents had used it for personal work but 60% of businesses said they were not using it.

"There is a demand and desire to do it right," said Homan.

The survey suggested "very few" people were confident they could recognise when AI was used and "a clear majority" were concerned about how it was used.

Follow BBC Guernsey on X, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to channel.islands@bbc.co.uk.

China denies allegations of spy operation targeting Nvidia CEO

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgj9plnlxdeo, 3 days ago

China has rejected allegations of a Chinese espionage operation targeting Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang, describing the claims as "groundless speculation".

US intelligence officials believe that Alice Huang, a Chinese businesswoman linked to Singapore-based data centre firm Megaspeed, was gathering information for Beijing on the US chip-making giant, according to a report by The New York Times.

The report said Alice Huang, who is of no relation to Jensen Huang, was under investigation over the possible diversion of advanced Nvidia AI chips to China and had developed a close relationship with Jensen.

Nvidia said their interactions were routine business engagements, while Beijing accused Washington of attempting to smear China. Alice Huang did not respond to the paper's request for comment.

The BBC has contacted Megaspeed and the White House for comment.

US intelligence agencies had been monitoring Alice Huang and concluded that she was acting on behalf of the Chinese government, according to unnamed sources cited by The New York Times.

Surveillance reportedly revealed communications between Alice Huang and an American citizen, who was subsequently identified as Jensen Huang through a process known as "unmasking".

It remains unclear what information Alice Huang - who is also known as Huang Le - allegedly passed to Beijing, how valuable it was, or when she is believed to have begun gathering intelligence.

At a regular briefing on Friday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said: "The report in question is based on groundless speculation and is nothing more than an attempt to smear China."

The paper's report comes amid longstanding US concerns about China's access to advanced computing technology, which is considered crucial to developing artificial intelligence systems.

Jensen Huang has argued that allowing Nvidia to sell more of its products to China is important for maintaining US competitiveness in the global AI industry.

But Washington has restricted exports of the most advanced Nvidia chips to China since 2022, citing national security concerns and the risk that the technology could strengthen China's military operations. There have however been some loosening of restrictions during Trump's administration.

US officials said they had caught several firms illegally trafficking the chips across the Chinese border. They have also investigated whether companies operating through third countries are helping Chinese businesses access the restricted technology.

Nvidia has said it complies with applicable export laws and that there is no evidence its chips have been smuggled into China.

In response to the allegations made by the Times, John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia, said: "Jensen's interactions with Ms Huang are not unusual or unexpected".

He said customers like Megaspeed "receive ordinary business information - not sensitive Nvidia trade secrets - and zero information relevant to national security."

He added that allegations the Singaporean company was smuggling chips to China "were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year".

Megaspeed told the paper its current leadership took the allegations seriously and had appointed external legal advisers to conduct an internal investigation. The company also said it had informed the US government that it was willing to cooperate.

It is unclear how closely Alice Huang remains involved with Megaspeed.

Google value plunges by $500bn as its own AI search hits ad sales

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm9qzdqpxy48o, 3 days ago

Google-owner Alphabet lost just over $500bn (£374bn) in value on Thursday after it revealed its own artificial intelligence (AI) summaries were hitting search advertising revenue.

Chief business officer Philipp Schindler said Google's "AI mode", where it answers questions conversationally, was eating into the money it makes from ads which appear next to results to traditional search questions.

Yet, Schindler said he felt "very good about our trajectory" with an AI-focused version of the search engine.

Google's role in answering the world's questions has been challenged by the AI boom, with millions of people using programs such as ChatGPT and Claude instead.

Kim Scott, who formerly led Google's advertising business, told the BBC's Today programme that the company would "rather eat its own lunch than allow someone else to eat their lunch" by having its own AI summaries hit its search revenue.

She said that Google was founded on the idea of making long-term bets on technology – even if they hurt the firm in the short term.

"I think they're making a long-term bet on AI," she said.

In its results published on Wednesday, Alphabet revealed that total revenue grew 25% in the three months to the end of September, compared to the same period last year, hitting $127.6bn.

However, the firm did not make as much money as analysts had predicted, particularly in its advertising arm, which spooked many investors.

Shares in the company plummeted over 12% to a six-month low following the release of the results.

By the end of Thursday, the company's total stock market value had fallen to $3.46 trillion from $3.97 trillion the day before.

Tracy Woo, a principal analyst at Forrester, said Alphabet's disappointing Search business results "highlights the challenge of funding massive AI investments while maintaining the strength of established businesses."

Investors not buying Amazon's trillion-dollar business hopes

Microsoft and Amazon also issued updates this week, and joined Google in plans to keep spending huge sums of cash in the ongoing AI race.

But investors appeared dismayed at the impacts these plans are having on the ability of each to keep growing their core lines of business.

Amazon's stock took a hit on Thursday , with its shares falling 6% in after-hours trading.

Alongside quarterly sales growth of 11%, hitting $201bn, the company shared a staggering cash flow figure of negative $42bn.

That number shows that Amazon is not only spending more money than it makes, but that spending has increased six-fold over the span of three months.

Chief executive Andy Jassy claimed the business was spending in part because it had the chance at, not one, but two businesses that could end up bringing in $1 trillion for Amazon the future.

Jassy noted that Amazon's cloud services business, as well as retail stores, may be those businesses. During a call with financial analysts he also repeatedly mentioned the financial opportunity presented by Amazon making and selling its own computer chips, as well as its AI developer platform Bedrock, which offers paying users access to most major AI models and tools.

"One of the lessons we've learned over 20-plus years is that there is not one tool to rule the world," Jassy said. "People always assume whatever is in the lead early on will be the only thing that people use - it's never true."

As Jassy was asked several times to explain the company's spending, he admitted it "would be more convenient" if it were spread over the next 25 years. "That's not the world we live in," he added.

"We can fund this plan, and I think it will forever change the size, the revenue, the free cash flow of Amazon."

Microsoft begs the question of AI's real value

Wall Street's reaction to Microsoft's update was more muted, with shares falling by less than 1% on Thursday.

The company, which is also one of OpenAI's largest investors, spent around $5bn less on investments dedicated to AI. It also revealed earlier this week plans to cut thousands of workers, which will further reduce the company's costs.

Meanwhile, its revenue grew 19% from a year earlier, hitting $92.3bn for the quarter. Its crucial cloud business grew by 30% to $63bn.

Chief executive Satya Nadella said the use of Copilot, Microsoft's AI chatbot and tool, has seen "automated tasks nearly double since July" as daily users grew by 500% from a year ago.

Usually lower spending and growing sales earns a positive reaction from investors.

But Woo said Wall Street is trying to look farther into the future when it comes to which businesses will truly make good on their big promises around AI.

"Microsoft's results reinforce that enterprise demand for AI remains strong, but they also highlight a much bigger question facing the technology industry, where AI value will ultimately be captured," Woo said.

Who could be behind the Binance hack and what we know so far

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm5yn8eqg3npo, 3 days ago

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, has been hit by what is believed to be the largest crypto hack ever at $6.3bn (£4.7bn).

Crypto is a type of digital asset which does not exist physically like cash or coins. Instead, people use digital wallets on their smartphones or computers to access and manage it.

Richard Teng, Binance's co-chief executive officer, said it is working with the authorities to work out what has happened and it will cover all losses.

Here's what we know so far.

What is Binance?

Binance is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, where people can buy, sell and trade digital currencies, like Bitcoin, as well as deposit and withdraw them.

It was founded in China in 2017 and has hundreds of millions of registered users worldwide.

The exchange has come under scrutiny over the past few years - notably in 2023, when its then-chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, resigned after pleading guilty to money laundering violations.

Last year, a lawsuit in the US accused the company of helping send millions of dollars to US-designated terrorist organisations.

In 2024, the company said it has more than $160bn in assets.

How did the hack happen?

The hack happened to Binance's global centralised exchange, Binance.com.

Binance.us, which provides trading services specifically for US residents, said it has not been affected by the issue.

In an initial announcement, Teng said: "Our initial investigation suggests this security incident may have started with a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop.

"That gave an attacker access to a service container, where they submitted unauthorised withdrawal transactions."

He said the hack "was not a simple 'one-click' action" but a "more complex attack process".

Raghu Nandakumara, vice president of industry strategy at cybersecurity platform Illumio, said this could mean an engineer was "talked into taking a test" and malware - malicious software – "landed on their laptop while they did it".

Because the laptop already had sufficient security privileges, Nandakumara said early reports suggest it became "the attacker's route straight into production, and from there to the wallets".

Teng has since said the hack was "not carried out by one person" and the hackers used sophisticated methods to hide their tracks, such as a "self-destruct mechanism".

"You can build a vault with mathematical firewalls, but if the individual holding the keys can be duped, the vault is opened," said Dr Clive Summerfield, head of FARx, a biometrics in AI security company.

Who is behind the hack?

It is not yet known who is behind the attack, but some analytics firms have pointed to North Korea - though this has not been confirmed.

AI-powered investigations company TRM Labs said in a report several elements of the Binance attack resembled earlier incidents linked to the territory, including a $1.5bn (£1.1bn) hack on the ByBit exchange in 2025.

These previous attacks have been linked to a cluster of cyber-criminals accused of working directly for the regime called the Lazarus Group - also known as TraderTraitor.

North Korean foreign policy expert Dr Edward Howell, from the University of Oxford, has told the BBC that Pyongyang "has a long history of using cyber warfare to extract cash".

Howell said North Korea "basically has a state-run cyber warfare agency", which it uses "to fund its weapons of mass destruction programmes" and as a "slush fund" for its leader Kim Jong Un's regime.

Howell added that as of the current day "about 40 – 50% of North Korea's weapons of mass destruction programmes are funded by cyber and crypto-currency warfare".

North Korea has always denied any involvement in these attacks; Binance has not directly responded to BBC queries about the incident's potential links to the area.

What does it mean for Binance users?

In his earlier statement, Teng said Binance users' funds are safe and, as a precaution, all deposits and withdrawals had been temporarily suspended.

He said the firm would cover all losses from its emergency reserve set up for such situations, and make up the rest with company funds.

Binance said it had been working with partners to freeze the affected assets, with around $3bn reportedly located so far.

Teng said concerned users can check funds on their Binance accounts. Experts suggest doing so through the official app and website, and to reach out to the company's customer service with any questions.

Users from other crypto platforms have also been warned to be wary of hackers seeking to exploit the situation.

Marijus Briedis, NordVPN's chief technology officer, said people should be on the lookout for things such as "an email claiming your funds are at risk", "a fake support account offering help" or "a message urging you to move your cryptocurrency to a 'safe' wallet".

"Check updates through the Binance app or a website address you already trust," he said.

"Avoid links in unsolicited messages, and never give anyone your password, verification codes or wallet recovery phrase."

What does this mean for cryptocurrency and the wider financial system?

Jennifer Craven, an international commercial fraud expert at the law firm Pinsent Masons, said the repercussions of the hack could "extend well beyond Binance".

"More broadly, the incident exposes the fragility of parts of the crypto ecosystem," she said.

"If a platform as sophisticated as Binance can suffer a serious attack, regulators will inevitably ask what that means for smaller, less mature platforms and currencies."

She said the attack would likely accelerate scrutiny of how the sector protects both its infrastructure and its customers.

Although there is no evidence yet that AI was used in this attack, it fits into a much wider concern in the financial industry of whether AI agents could potentially identify weaknesses in software and work out how to exploit them much faster than human hackers.

The Bank of England has warned this could leave institutions struggling to fix vulnerabilities before attackers take advantage of them.

How many people use cryptocurrency?

Crypto has become an increasingly popular way of investing and transferring money online, partly because, unlike traditional currencies, it is not controlled by central banks or governments.

This makes it popular for people who think decentralisation can bring financial freedom.

But it also makes it extremely volatile, with it rising and falling in value at the whim of buyers and sellers.

According to Solcard, a crypto-funded prepaid payment and virtual card platform, somewhere between 560 million and 741 million people own crypto worldwide in 2026.

From Bitcoin to Binance: Crypto terms and what they mean

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy5w2k5k5ylo, 3 days ago

From the rapidly rising and falling values of Bitcoin to high-profile heists like the hacking of Binance, the world of cryptocurrencies is often in the headlines.

The world's biggest crypto exchange said hackers had gained access to $6.3bn (£4.7bn) worth of digital assets, and while it has frozen about half, many remained in the hands of the thieves.

These stories are full of specialist language that people outside the industry struggle to understand.

So if you're unsure what the blockchain or a crypto echange or even a cryptocurrency itself are, here are some key terms and what they mean.

Bitcoin

While many may struggle with the finer points of crypto, pretty much everyone has heard of its most famous product: Bitcoin. But what actually is it?

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, which is to say a type of digital currency. Unlike traditional currencies, Bitcoin is not controlled by centralised financial institutions.

This makes it popular for people who think decentralisation can bring financial freedom, but it also makes it extremely volatile with it rising and falling in value at the whim of Bitcoin buyers and sellers.

Donald Trump has pledged to make the US the "crypto capital of the world" - backtracking on his previous claim that Bitcoin was a "scam".

Its price topped a much-awaited threshold of $100,000 in December 2024, then rose to $120,000 in July 2025 as US politicians prepared to debate bills to regulate digital assets.

In October 2025, Bitcoin hit an all-time high of around $126,000, buoyed by a continued wave of institutional investment and positive market sentiment. But it has been known to plummet in value just as quickly as it spikes.

In early February 2026, its price dipped below $65,000 to effectively wipe out gains achieved under President Trump.

Against the backdrop of these frequent price fluctuations, speculation continues about the true identity of Bitcoin's mysterious inventor known only as Satoshi Nakamoto.

Blockchain

Blockchain is the technology underpinning all cryptocurrencies, and many related products like non-fungible tokens (NFTs). In essence, it is a virtual spreadsheet on which all the buying and selling of crypto is recorded. They are arranged in blocks linked together in a giant chain - hence the name.

Every cryptocurrency transaction is individually recorded onto the blockchain by a huge network of volunteers verifying its authenticity by using computer programmes.

The incentive to do this for Bitcoin's network is that the first person to validate transactions is rewarded in Bitcoin. This potentially lucrative process, known as mining, is also controversial because of the incredible amount of energy used as people the world over race to be the first to successfully update the blockchain.

Crypto Exchange

A crypto exchange is the digital platform where investors can buy, sell and trade cryptocurrencies.

Similar to traditional investing, a crypto exchange acts as a brokerage where people can transfer traditional money, like pounds or dollars, in exchange for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Most transactions are accompanied by fees.

Binance is the world's biggest, which is part of what makes the hack so monumental.

Crypto Wallet

A crypto wallet is a place where investors hold their cryptocurrency. There are two types, a hot wallet and a cold wallet.

Hot wallets are connected to the internet, and thus more accessible for quick transfers and easy access.

Cold wallets are physical devices like specially designed USB sticks that store crypto offline typically for safer and longer term storage.

Ethereum

Ethereum is used to describe both the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, represented by the Ether token, and the blockchain underpinning it. This supports an array of different applications and digital assets, such as non-fungible tokens.

It functions in a similar way to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but in 2022 switched to a greener operating system requiring less computers and energy.

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs)

ETFs are portfolios that let investors bet on multiple assets without having to buy any themselves. Traded on stock exchanges like shares, their value depends on how the overall portfolio performs in real time. They can comprise a combination of gold and silver bullion, for example, or a mix of shares in both technology and insurance companies.

A spot Bitcoin ETF buys the cryptocurrency directly, "on the spot", at its current price, throughout the day.

While some ETFs already contained Bitcoin indirectly, the US approved several spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024. This allowed new investors, such as investment management firms like Blackrock and Fidelity, to enter the speculative world of Bitcoin without having to worry about digital wallets or navigating crypto exchanges.

Meme coins

Meme coins are a form of cryptocurrency used for fun and speculation.

They are typically created to capitalise on social media trends or viral memes - such as for internet-famous pygmy hippo Moo Deng.

But meme coins are heavily criticised for their speculative nature and the risk involved for investors, as they often have little prospect of accumulating value over time.

They can also be susceptible to "rug pulls" - where promoters of a cryptocurrency draw in buyers to raise the price of their coin, only to stop trading activity and make off with the money raised from sales.

Some celebrities have faced backlash after launching meme coins.

Stablecoins

"Stable" is the key word here - this cryptocurrency differs from others as it is intends to be less volatile in value.

This typically works by the price being linked to an existing asset, for instance currencies like the US dollar or pound sterling, which in theory should make them more stable in price than cryptocurrencies that are not backed by assets.

Stablecoins themselves are usually controlled by companies that provide them, with transactions recorded on digital ledgers. While held up by some as the future of finance, high profile price collapses of stablecoins have alerted regulators to risks for investors and prompted scrutiny over their supposed stability.

XRP

XRP is a cryptocurrency used by a platform called the XRP Ledger. It was created by the co-founders of financial services company Ripple Labs in 2012 as a cheaper, faster alternative to Bitcoin.

The cryptocurrency has a fixed supply of 100 billion coins, which were created when it launched. Much of it is held by Ripple and periodically released into circulation.

Unlike cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, transactions made using XRP are verified through consensus - whereby the majority of validators on its peer-to-peer network must agree whether or not a transaction is valid before it is added to its blockchain.

This has been credited with allowing many transactions to take place simultaneously, at high speed and low cost - making it appealing to financial institutions or for processes like cross-border payments. But as with other cryptocurrencies, XRP has received regulatory scrutiny and seen sudden, sharp declines in value.

Scottish police to target sadistic online gangs forcing children to self-harm

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6vg03xl0751o, 3 days ago

Detectives in Scotland have joined international law enforcement in targeting online gangs which groom and coerce children into acts of self-harm.

Officers are hunting members of loose online networks of sadists known as "The Com", which mainly targets girls on gaming platforms and social media.

The groups, mostly comprised of teenage and young adult males, have risen in prominence in recent years after cases involving sextortion and hacking, as well as self-harm encouragement.

So far, there has been one arrest in Scotland, while there have been a handful of convictions in England.

The Molly Rose Foundation - a suicide prevention charity helping young people and families victimised by the network - said the groups "represent the gravest risk to children online".

Warning: This article contains distressing content

Paul, not his real name, is a detective constable working in Police Scotland's internet investigations unit.

In a locked room at the force's Scottish Crime Campus, he is showing the BBC images on a computer sent to the team by the National Crime Agency (NCA).

Flagged by National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States, the material was eventually passed to Police Scotland and on to Paul's desk.

He now has the job of sifting through horrific images of abuse and injury in order to identify the victim, as well as the Scottish perpetrator.

"Unfortunately, we are getting a lot of self-harm imagery," he tells BBC News.

"There's nearly a thousand images in this particular case, and we need to go through every single one of those."

Abuse for 'kudos'

This case is linked to a Com group - a violent collective that uses mainstream social media platforms to manipulate and blackmail girls into harming and abusing themselves.

Often, the police say, this is done by the group for "kudos", or clout, from their peers.

On the screen, one image show a young girl's arm covered in blood. Another shows blood used to daub a symbol on to a bathroom wall.

Paul alleges the girl in the case was directed to harm herself by someone she met online - understood to be a young male in Scotland.

"Usually, it's a young girl in these particular cases," he said. "We're finding a lot of vulnerable young girls that are between 11 and 17.

"Unfortunately, we discover down the line that there are other vulnerabilities that [perpetrators] are exploiting."

Among the pictures are occult or Satanic sigils, a way for the abusers to appear "as extreme as possible", says Paul.

He continues: "It's very common, but I don't think they believe these Satanic things.

"With these particular groups anyway, it's about how extreme, how much exploitation can you inflict on an individual.

"It's about how much control you can get, up to the point that they're getting them to self-harm."

The Com - short for "the community" - are loosely-affiliated online groups involved in acts of abuse, financial crimes and extremism.

Groups involved in recent court cases include "The 764" and "CVLT". However, membership and group dynamics shift over time.

In May, the NCA said it was investigating around 200 cases involving these networks, while there have been a number of convictions.

In August, 20-year-old Justin Swaddle was jailed for two years for blackmailing and coercing more than 100 victims into acts of self-harm, including carving his online username on their bodies.

Det Ch Insp Craig Faulds - who leads efforts targeting groups' links to Scotland - described the crimes as "an evolution of online child abuse and sexual exploitation".

He told the BBC that often abusers will target their victims on "innocuous gaming platforms".

He continued: "It can move to social media platforms, messaging services and online forums.

"We are seeing cases where perpetrators online are targeting young vulnerable people, usually girls, and they are manipulating them, they are coercing them into sharing indecent images of themselves.

"Some of the more serious cases are seen by coercing individuals to cause acts of serious self-harm.

"We have identified victims and perpetrators in Scotland. And we are at the stage of mapping this threat to understand significance and the prevalence of it."

Who are the abusers?

Hazel Stewart, who works for the NCA's Threat Leadership team, described the prevalence of Com groups are "low-volume, high-harm", adding: "The scale doesn't matter, it is the harm that is being caused."

She told the BBC that the abusers themselves are often young males who have been socially isolated or bullied.

"They find their own identity online, they can be whoever they want to be," she said.

"And therefore they are encouraging those that are vulnerable, usually young females... seeking them out, say, on suicidal ideation sites or eating disorder sites, and encourage them into more private spaces."

Stewart explained that abusers form relationships with victims and "be very supportive at first" before encouraging them to carry out harmful acts.

"It might be a small cut at first. Or it might be harm to a pet, or a sibling," she said.

"That harm will escalate and the grooming and manipulation continues, and the victim is in a situation where they can't escape."

Stewart described the threat as a "global problem" and said the UK was working with law enforcement in the USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, as well as Interpol and Europol.

The Molly Rose Foundation has recently warned about Com networks. Its chief executive Andy Burrows said it was "becoming the frontline of child protection online".

He said that online safety regulator Ofcom had been warned about the threat of online gangs and had been slow to respond - a "failure" that he said highlighted weaknesses in the Online Safety Act.

He continued: "These networks represent the gravest risk to children online, with every UK police force investigating Com cases, the threat is real and widespread.

"It's also clear that these risks exist beyond just social media, on gaming platforms and encrypted messaging apps, which is why Andy Burnham must move beyond a blanket social media ban and incentivise all online platforms to become safe for young people as a price of doing business in the UK."

An Ofcom spokesperson said: "The threats posed by Com groups are a particular concern for Ofcom, and we're working closely with law enforcement and child protection agencies to tackle them.

"Where services fail to comply with their duties, we've shown that we won't hesitate to act."

Celebrity Traitors comes to a climax in nail-biting final

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw4g17z11l45o, yesterday

* Spoiler warning: This story reveals details of The Celebrity Traitors final

We've had four weeks of suspense, suspicion and very suspect tactics, as some of Britain's biggest stars engaged in a battle of wits to win the most popular show on TV.

The second series of BBC One's The Celebrity Traitors reached its climax on Friday, with the 21 original contestants having been reduced to seven before the final.

They were then whittled down to two winners - with the faithful duo of comedian Romesh Ranganathan and Heartstopper actor Sebastian "Bash" Croft emerging victorious.

The players successfully banished the remaining traitors - Love Island host Maya Jama and YouTuber King Kenny - in dramatic fashion, and the winning pair shared the £83,000 prize for their charities.

The finale drew an average audience of 11.2 million live viewers, and that number will rise when catch-up is included. Other recent episodes have been watched by more than 15 million, including catch-up.

Kenny reached the final stage, the endgame, after turning on his fellow traitor Maya at the last round table.

Kenny, Romesh and Bash were joined by singer James Blunt in the climax of the endgame, where the remaining contestants gather around a fire pit to decide whether they think there are any traitors left.

When James and Kenny were tied in a vote for who was a traitor, Bash persuaded Romesh to banish Kenny instead of James - thereby securing victory for team faithful.

"Absolutely devastated. Almost scraped it," Kenny seethed. "I was so close, I smelled the victory."

However, he can take consolation from the fact his performance on the show has established him as a mainstream star.

In a further twist, James chose another round of voting and was subsequently evicted himself, leaving Romesh and Bash as the last men standing.

"This might actually be the best day of my life," said 24-year-old Bash through tears of joy.

He, too, can expect a major career boost.

Romesh reflected: "I just really hope my mum's proud. And also my youngest son Charlie, who wanted me to come on the show - dad won. Please show me some respect."

The pair will split their winnings between two refugee charities, the Refugee Council and Choose Love.

Earlier, actor Michael Sheen was murdered in the first action of Friday's episode. "I am incredibly disappointed," he said. "Gutted that I got so close to the end. It's been absolutely unforgettable."

When it came to the endgame, Little Mix singer Leigh-Anne Pinnock was swiftly banished after Kenny voted to remove her.

"I was thinking me and him had a mutual understanding, and now I feel so stupid," she raged.

"But I'm walking away feeling super proud and like I've really accomplished something here."

Meanwhile, James B was left rueing one final mistake in a long but valiant catalogue of misjudgements throughout the series.

The singer, who looked aghast when he was attacked by Romesh during the endgame, was then the only one to choose to banish again when it came to the final three.

James was unaware that Romesh and Bash had both chosen to end the game - meaning he too could have been a winner if he had done the same - but became the victim of his own choice to banish.

"I've loved trying to work it out, I've loved getting it wrong so often, I've loved the tiny moments when I've got it right," he said wistfully. "I've loved the game."

Celebrities who departed earlier in the series included ex-EastEnders actor Ross Kemp, model Jerry Hall, sitcom star Miranda Hart, comedian Joe Lycett, presenter Hannah Fry and former BBC journalist Amol Rajan.

This series is also likely to be remembered for the two contestants who made the unorthodox decision to reveal themselves as traitors, before being summarily dispatched by their fellow players.

First, actor Richard E Grant was so giddy to have received the tap on the shoulder that he blurted out his supposedly secret status in episode two.

Comedian James Acaster, meanwhile, was the most reluctant traitor in the history of The Traitors, and unexpectedly gave himself up when he came under pressure at the round table in Thursday's penultimate episode.

Aftermath of Acaster's admission

There have been reports that filming of the scene was paused and he was checked by welfare staff after he became anxious.

Asked about the reports, a BBC spokesperson said on Friday that the safety and welfare of those taking part was the "highest priority", and "players are closely monitored and supported throughout by production which includes a dedicated and experienced welfare team".

Speculation about the round table being heavily edited was fuelled when eagle-eyed viewers noticed a shot of Romesh reacting in shock - apparently to James A's initial confession - which in fact seemed to have come from a later moment, after Romesh had voted for James by writing his name on the blackboard.

In the episode, the sequence where the celebrities all voted for James in light of his admission was shown as a relatively quick and straightforward process, raising a question about what prompted Romesh's shocked look.

Acaster did not take part in Friday's edition of spin-off show Uncloaked, which reunited some of the celebrity contestants following the final.

'A bit dull?'

The comedian's bombshell the previous night did provide the programme with a twist to spark it to life after what some viewers saw as a mid-series lull.

On Thursday, the Hollywood Reporter noted that the show had achieved record-breaking ratings - before asking: "Why, then, has much of the consensus on social media been that it's all felt a bit dull?"

Some noted a shortage of true back-stabbing, double-crossing and explosive rows - the things, in other words, that viewers love the most - while the celebrities were more chummy and savvy than previous groups of castle dwellers.

And while there was no shortage of big characters, this season lacked an equivalent to Alan Carr, the hugely popular and apparently hapless comedian who lied and murdered his way to an unlikely victory as a traitor last year.

The drama ramped up in the final, though, and Friday's episode is likely to have been the most watched TV programme of the year.

'A way of celebrating presence': What Botero's rotund remakes of classical masterpieces tell us about art history

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20261030-what-boteros-rotund-remakes-of-classical-masterpieces-tell-us-about-art-history, 3 days ago

Colombian artist Fernando Botero's joyful paintings reimagine the most iconic and famous works of historic European art. What does his singular vision reveal about the history of art – and Latin America's place in it?

In a painting by the late Colombian artist Fernando Botero, a woman wearing a green dress stares directly at the viewer. In the background is a natural landscape, and a sheer veil covers her dark, curly hair. Paired with her barely visible eyebrows, the portrait is clearly referencing Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Yet it bears all the hallmarks that make it unmistakably Botero: the figure has a round body, large head and small facial features.

Mona Lisa (1978) is one of several works by the painter and sculptor that reimagines some of the world's most famous artworks and motifs in his signature style, known as "Boterismo". Botero's voluptuous figures and objects have made him one of the most instantly identifiable artists in Latin America. "Some artists have a very personal language, and one of them is Botero – you will always recognise a piece by him," says Belén Herrera Ottino, director of Opera Gallery Madrid. The gallery's London branch is currently presenting Fernando Botero: in Praise of an Amplified World until the end of November.

Botero's singular style has brought him international recognition. His painting Mona Lisa, Age Twelve (1959) was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1961, his bronze sculptures have been displayed in high-profile public spaces including Park Avenue in New York and the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and his painting The Musicians (1979) fetched a $5.1m (£3.9m) auction price at Christie's New York in November 2023, two months after his death.

But what is the meaning behind Botero's distinctive style – and what can it tell us about the art history of Europe and Latin America?

For Botero, exaggerating objects and figures was "a way of celebrating the presence of things," Herrera Ottino says, adding that it was also a "celebration of life, and of the sensuality of nature". During his life, he often explained that his artworks' main purpose was to uplift the spirits of those who viewed it, which he believed form and colour in particular could do. "It was clear to him that throughout history, the purpose of art was to create pleasure," adds the artist's son, and former Colombian Minister of Defence, Fernando Botero Zea.

The power of Boterismo

The origins of Boterismo can be traced to 1956, when Botero was living in Mexico City. He accidentally painted a too-small sound hole on a mandolin in Still Life with Mandolin (1957) and "felt that the instrument exploded in volume and form," Botero Zea tells the BBC. "That was the day that the style of Botero was born." The artist went on to create all his artworks as part of the same singular world, where everything takes up space. "There are very few artists who have created an entire universe that is related to one unique style."

Many paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Botero, alongside pieces from his personal collection (including works by Picasso, Monet and Dalí) can also be found at the Botero Museum in Bogotá, Colombia. When the artist donated these works to the Central Bank of Colombia (which operates the museum) in 2000, "he was relating his own work with the European tradition," Nicolás Gómez Echeverri, director of the arts at the bank, tells the BBC. "He's saying to the visitors, 'my name is on the same level as these other ones.'"

What the Botero Museum collection also shows is that Botero was obsessed with European Old Masters. "My father was fascinated by great artists," says Botero Zea. "He believed very deeply that the highest moment in the history of art was the [Italian] Renaissance, and that after this period there was a decline, with brilliant exceptions like Picasso and the Impressionist painters."

The artist particularly disliked abstraction, noting that the popularity of his own work was as a result of being far removed from an approach "where everything is obscure" and the viewer "feels he needs a professor to tell him whether it's good or not," Botero told the Los Angeles Times in 2012. "I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer."

Botero Zea says that his father particularly admired Italian art after moving to Madrid in 1952 at 20. At the time, Botero studied at the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and worked as a copyist at the Prado Museum. Then Botero saw a book on the 15th-Century Italian painter Piero della Francesca in a shop window and immediately "made the decision to move to Florence," Botero Zea says.

The art that inspired him

According to Botero Zea, two artworks particularly defined the trajectory of Botero's career. The first is Piero della Francesca's Meeting between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon (1452-1466), a large fresco depicting a biblical scene where the ruler King Solomon meets the Queen of Sheba. This piece harks back to Botero's upbringing in Medellín, Colombia, where he had little access to art museums, and consumed art through the religious paintings and sculptures inside Catholic churches.

Della Francesca's The Duke and Duchess of Urbino (c 1473–1475), a double portrait inspired by ancient Roman coins and medals, inspired Botero's diptych Federico da Montefeltro, Battista Sforza (1998). In the original version, the duke looks left, concealing the side of his face disfigured in a jousting tournament. While Botero does not reimagine the duke's face with these scars, he switches the sides the couple are facing around. Both are also markedly more plump, taking up more of the canvas.

Botero's approach to form means that many people perceive his work as simply making people "fat". In Menina, after Velázquez he hones in on the central figure in Diego Velázquez's masterpiece Las Meninas (1656), five-year-old Margaret Theresa of Spain. In Botero's Menina, her face is chubbier, and her shape fuller. In Fornarina, after Raphael (2009), he does the same, transforming Raphael's La Fornarina (Portrait of a Young Woman) (1518-19), a depiction of a mostly nude woman wearing a thin veil to cover her lower abdomen, into a large smiling figure.

Yet, Botero himself explicitly rejected the term "fat", telling the Spanish newspaper El Mundo in 2014: "I don't paint fat women… No one believes me, but it's true. If I paint a woman, a man, a dog or a horse, I do it with volume [in mind]."

Another influence was The Battle of San Romano – a set of three paintings by the Florentine artist Paolo Uccello illustrating a clash between Florentine and Sienese forces in 1432. Botero Zea points out a rotund white horse in a vibrant blue harness at the centre of one of the pieces. The animal stands out among a sea of men in dark armour, which Botero Zea says is like "a Botero".

Similar horses can be found across Botero's oeuvre, including in El Arrastre (The Drag) (1984), a scene where three horses pull the body of a dead bull out of a traditional bullfighting ring.

But a Colombian artist being so enamoured by European artists invites questions about visibility – and whose art is deemed significant. Growing up, Botero Zea recalls his father taking him to many of the biggest art institutions in the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, the National Gallery in London and the Uffizi in Florence. He says Botero was often drawn to the most notable pieces by the world's most well-known artists.

Yet, Gómez Echeverri says that Botero's work is not simply about praising Western art – in fact, his art explores Colombia's relationship to it. He explains that the Mona Lisa, for example, can be found printed across the country. "There's a restaurant nearby called Mona Lisa, and it's a pizza restaurant," he says. A bar in a popular part of the city also has Dalí depicted across its walls. "I believe these kinds of works by Botero, such as his Mona Lisa, are reaffirming how those images come from another context across the ocean and become part of our Latin American visual culture."

More like this:

• Why critics scorned Beryl Cook's 'saucy' paintings

• The trailblazing erotic art of Lavinia Fortuna

• Why Mary Magdalene is a divisive biblical figure

Knowing Botero was influenced by pre-Colombian art, which often featured large, rounded forms, also recontextualises his practice. "He always felt very Colombian and always strove to represent this country well on the international stage," Botero Zea says.

For Gómez Echeverri, Botero was breaking down the boundary between high art and low art. "He's saying that it doesn't exist – they can be a part of the same references," he says, adding that while some might understand "high art to be European, the classicists and white," Botero is turning that idea on its head.

Fernando Botero: in Praise of an Amplified World is at Opera Gallery, London, until 22 November.

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Russell Brand accusers 'haunted' for years by alleged crimes, court hears

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx4g1ve5ylg7o, 3 days ago

Some of the women in Russell Brand's rape and sexual assault case have been "haunted" for years by what they allege he did to them, jurors have been told.

In her closing speech at London's Southwark Crown Court on Friday, prosecutor Reil Karmy-Jones KC said the women had "nothing to gain" from coming forward apart from "some closure".

Speaking for the defence, Polly Dyer told jurors Brand had pleaded guilty and been fined over possession of cannabis in 1995, but had no other "convictions, cautions, reprimands or warnings".

Brand, 51, is on trial facing seven charges; three counts of rape, three charges of sexual assault and one allegation of attempted indecent assault. He denies the charges.

Karmy-Jones KC told the court that this case brings together six different women, none of whom knows each other.

She said that while all the alleged victims have since moved on with their lives, due to this trial they have been forced to "relive what has happened to them".

None of the women involved has "sought the limelight" or "any kind of publicity", she said, adding there was "no benefit to them from perhaps some closure."

Referring to Brand's accusers' evidence the prosecutor said "how many said he was nice and then there was a like a personality change…

"His eyes changed, he snapped, from charming to frightening to nasty," Karmy-Jones KC said.

She added that the complainant's evidence had been that "he didn't listen when I said no, he didn't stop, he didn't care, pulling pushing… thrusting".

"In the rape cases, he kept on going until he achieved his ultimate aim."

The prosecutor also dismissed the idea that a documentary had caused the women to "re-invent" what actually happened.

"There is no magic force in this documentary", she added.

"What in fact happened was these women have realised they are not alone and have bravely come before you to tell the truth."

She added: "Truth they have lived with, which in some cases has haunted them for years."

She told the jury: "The experience of people raped may be something that looms a little bit larger in your mind rather than the intricacies of the outfit.

"The defendant couldn't really remember anything when he was interviewed, in stark contrast to now when he suddenly seems to remember all sorts of details about the week."

Addressing Brand's presented change in character, Karmy-Jones KC told the court "He may now be a completely different person to the man he was between 1999 and 2009."

She added: "He may well look back and not find some of his jokes funny".

"He may now treat women with kindness and consent".

Brand's wife Laura gave evidence yesterday, when she told the court her husband was a "kind and a wonderful father".

Karmy-Jones KC called her Russell Brand's "undoubtedly lovely wife", who "bravely" gave evidence.

However, she also noted that she was not with him at the time many of the alleged acts are said to have taken place.

"The reality is she wasn't there then, for the first five counts, she wasn't with him, nor was she with him for the final two counts."

"Any contact was, I believe, sparse."

In the final set of agreed facts in his trial, the court heard from Dyer about Brand's fine after he "pleaded guilty to one charge of possessing cannabis on 20 April 1995".

"He received a fine. He has no other convictions, cautions, reprimands or warnings", she said.

The trial continues.

Sir Patrick Stewart: A life in pictures

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj1dw9dynn2xo, 3 days ago

Legendary actor Sir Patrick Stewart rose from humble beginnings in his native Yorkshire to become a global superstar whose work became immortalised portraying characters on some of the most popular sci-fi franchises in history.

The star, who won acclaim on both stages and screens, died at his home in Los Angeles on Thursday after a career that spanned more than seven decades. He was 86.

Born in 1940, his mother was a textile worker and his father was a former military officer whose experience during the wartime evacuation of Dunkirk had a profound impact on his mental health.

He grew up poor, and later spoke to journalists about witnessing his mother being abused by his father.

Young Patrick's love of drama came at school when one of his teachers introduced him to Shakespeare and encouraged him to perform.

He threw himself enthusiastically into the flourishing local theatre. "I used to recite Shakespeare from memory," he said. "I just learned all these big speeches."

He went on to star in countless Shakespeare plays. One of his earliest breakout roles was in 1970's Two Gentlemen of Verona, which also featured his rescue dog, Blackie, playing the role of the dog Crab.

His expertise in Shakespeare led to play a major role in the 1976 BBC television series I, Claudius.

In 1981, he was featured in 1981 fantasy film Excalibur, bringing him one step closer to his future sci-fi career.

Sir Patrick has won numerous awards, including a Grammy and two Laurence Olivier Awards. He was also nominated for a Tony, along with multiple Golden Globes and Emmys over the years.

His iconic voice and facial expressions saw him star in both the Star Trek and X-Men franchises, helping to spawn a generation of global sci-fi fans.

In 1987, he took on the role of Jean-Luc Picard on popular TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Tapping into Star Trek fandom earned him millions of adoring fans around the world.

His scores of sci-fi fans reached new heights with his starring role as Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men film series, which began in 2000.

He reprised the role multiple times over decades through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including in 2026 in Avengers: Doomsday.

Party Rock Anthem singer struggled with mental health before death

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqp8gpw15e8yo, 2 days ago

A British singer who was a member of the girl group G.R.L took her own life, an inquest has found.

Lauren Bennett, 36, who also featured on LMFAO's 2011 hit Party Rock Anthem, was found dead in Kent on 29 May.

In a statement read out by an assistant coroner on Friday, her husband Kenny Wormald said she had been struggling with severe mental health issues before her death.

The court heard she told him she was going out for a walk on the morning of her death while he remained in bed half asleep.

When she did not return for a few hours and did not answer calls or texts from him and multiple other family members, Wormald and her father went looking for her.

He went to a rural location using Find My iPhone for Bennett's device where he found her body.

The professional dancer said the pair talked about everything and there was no indication she was going to end her life.

Her father, Richard Bennett, said his daughter had lived an "amazing life" in a statement read out by assistant coroner Jyoti Gill.

He said she signed a record deal at just 17 and moved to the US on her own.

Pages of farewell notes were later found at her home, Kent and Medway Coroners' Court heard.

Bennett had previously been diagnosed with Fragile X syndrome, a genetic disorder that can cause anxiety, mood instability and depression, it was also told.

In the January before her death, the musician did not sleep for a number of days and was admitted to hospital under a mental health section.

She had experienced "substantial psychological suffering" since this point, Gill noted.

Bennett was in the care of "special mental health services" at the time of her death.

She had reacted poorly to medication and did not think she was going to get better, the court was told.

No alcohol or illicit drugs were found in Bennett's system when she died.

Bennett's former musical group G.R.L. shared the news of her death on its Instagram account in July.

"Our hearts are broken, and we cannot begin to express how much she meant to us," they said.

Party Rock Anthem has been named the fifth most successful song of all time by Billboard after spending six weeks as the number one song on its Hot 100 in 2011.

Bennett also featured alongside LMFAO members in the song's music video, which has more than 2.5bn views on YouTube.

Aria Crescendo, who Bennett performed with in the band Paradiso Girls prior to G.R.L., told the BBC: "She was super talented, super beautiful and super funny.

"We're so in shock that this happened, honestly."

Additional reporting by Press Association.

Follow BBC Kent on Facebook, on X, and on Instagram and listen to BBC Radio Kent on Sounds. Send your story ideas to southeasttoday@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp us on 08081 002250.

King visits Guyanese slave rebellion site on Caribbean tour

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c693zxw11x1wo, 2 days ago

The King has made a poignant visit to the site where a Guyanese slave rebellion was violently resisted by British authorities, making the stop during his tour of the Caribbean.

He visited Independence Park in Georgetown to remember the Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823, which saw an uprising by thousands of enslaved people.

Accompanied by Guyana's Culture Minister, Steven Jacobs, he was told how hundreds of slaves were killed by colonial leaders during the rebellion and many of those who survived were executed close to where the King stood.

Above the King was a sign that he took time to read.

"This ground was used as a public execution site," it said, "where enslaved persons...were condemned to death and hung."

The moment of reflection was what Buckingham Palace had described as the King "not shying away from the UK's colonial legacy" and described today as a chance for the King to reflect on Guyana's history of slavery and resistance.

In 2022, Charles described how he was on a personal journey of discovery and was continuing to "deepen my own understanding of slavery's enduring impact", in a speech at the opening of a Commonwealth summit hosted by Rwanda.

Independence Park, which is now a sports ground, drew a crowd of dozens of schoolchildren. The King stopped to talk to many of them asking them about their homework, their holidays and if they'd had a day off school.

Outside one of the King's engagements later in the day, a small but noisy group of protesters gathered.

Many held placards saying "no apology will return what was stolen, reparations now" and "justice must not depend on wealth status and connections".

"This great wealth was built on the backs of slavery," said protester, Guyanese politician, Terrence Campbell.

"I do not want the British public to think that by me saying reparations can take various forms, it means that they do not have responsibility for reparations. They do, because the United Kingdom benefited tremendously from slavery."

The King will not be apologising for the UK involvement in the slave trade during the visit, nor will he offer reparations - compensation from those countries who benefited from the slave trade - in line with the position of the UK government.

This tour has seen a number of demonstrations so far but none have seriously disrupted the King's programme.

Royal tours often include cultural exchanges and the King's trip to Guyana saw an unusual mix up of musical styles.

On the bandstand of Promenade Gardens in Georgetown, the bagpipes of the National Piping Centre could be heard alongside traditional Guyanese drummers in a collaboration of musical styles.

Seven pipers from the National Piping Centre have been touring Guyana over the past week to learn more about the Guyanese musical traditions.

As part of his visit on Friday, the King also shared a moment with a veterans from Guyana who fought for Britain in the Second World War during an event at the Commonwealth War Graves in the capital Georgetown.

King Charles met Donald Grant, 99, who will celebrate his 100th birthday next week on November 3.

He also spoke to James Samuel, 100, who is in a wheelchair, with the the King hearing how aged 19 he enlisted in the British Guiana Volunteer Force in 1943.

"What a great pleasure it is to see you on this occasion," the King told him.

The King was waved off at the end of his state visit by Britain's High Commissioner to Guyana, Joseph Fisher, Guyana's Prime Minister Mark Phillips and a number of other dignitaries.

His departure had a small ceremonial element with the Guyana Defence Force providing a guard of honour at Cheddi Jagan International Airport.

Who are the real winners of Celebrity Traitors?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmx2qg0nezrgo, yesterday

Spoiler warning: This article reveals details from The Celebrity Traitors final

In some ways, all the players on The Celebrity Traitors can be seen as winners.

They all got to appear on a hugely popular TV show, rubbing shoulders with other stars and gaining new fans along the way.

But there are certain celebrities, such as Miranda Hart, King Kenny, Maya Jama and Joanne McNally, who have been tipped by industry experts as getting the biggest career boost after the show.

Sebastian "Bash" Croft - who won the game, alongside Romesh Ranganathan - could also now be in line for greater roles.

We've taken a look at the breakout stars of the series and what might lie ahead for them.

Miranda Hart

After a spell of ill-health, the show has done wonders for bringing Miranda Hart back into the public eye.

There was that incredible “Little Mix Big Mix” viral dance moment, but Hart also displayed a level of vulnerability which stood out in a show where the stars don't really talk about their personal lives.

When her friend Joe Lycett was banished, her tearful reaction to his exit provided a rare poignant moment.

"Connection and laughter and joy are bigger than this game - and to meet someone and just play and laugh, it's all us humans need, you know?" she said.

When she was murdered, she also demonstrated genuine emotion in her response. "Ultimately, in my little personal story, this has been quite extraordinary," she said.

For culture journalist Natalie Jamieson, Hart's openness and relatability made her the "standout" star from this year's series.

And it could also lead to us seeing more of Hart on the small screen. According to The Sun, the BBC is looking to bring back her self-titled sitcom after her stint on Celebrity Traitors led to fresh interest in the show.

The BBC declined to comment on the possible return of Hart’s show.

But she’s not the only one who won hearts by showing real warmth.

The same could be said for Romesh Ranganathan - who, in a departure from his usual cynical, deadpan stand-up persona, seemed really to care about his fellow cast members. Jerry Hall also won viewers over with her charming eccentricity.

And then there’s James Acaster, who showed genuine vulnerability as he struggled to come to terms with being a traitor.

Social media users seemed split after his bombshell confession to being a traitor, with some totally exasperated and others saying they respected him for going out on his own terms.

Either way, he's definitely got the nation talking.

King Kenny

When it comes to celebrities who are most likely to see the biggest career boost, most experts say Kenny is King.

Going into the castle, the 29-year-old was best known to younger fans as a member of the popular British YouTube collective Beta Squad.

But Kenny will have been "the least familiar name to a mainstream audience," says showbiz journalist Nikki Onafuye.

That all changed as he was recruited as a traitor, bringing much-needed energy to the turret - and he made it all the way through to Friday night’s tense final.

Having shown he can hold his own alongside established broadcasters, actors and comedians, big things could now be in store for Kenny.

"He 100% has just been minted as a mainstream star now," said Marina Hyde, on The Rest is Entertainment podcast.

“The next steps could be panel shows, presenting roles, reality competitions or entertainment formats,” adds TV reporter Siobhan Synnot.

Maya Jama

Fellow traitor Maya Jama also sailed all the way to the final with her cool-as-a-cucumber persona making her a traitor to be reckoned with.

Despite being banished in dramatic fashion, she could now be in line to receive £1m per deal, according to a report in The Times earlier this week.

What Celebrity Traitors has done for Jama is allow her to reveal more of her personality than on Love Island, says Onafuye.

But TV reporter Synnot thinks between the two, Kenny has more to gain because he has introduced himself to millions of new viewers - whereas Jama was already one of Britain's best-known TV presenters before Celebrity Traitors.

"Maya's gain is subtler: she can emerge looking less like the presenter of Love Island and more like a genuinely versatile television star," she says.

Joanne McNally

Of all the comedians in the castle, Joanne McNally was initially the least well known, says Caroline Frost, TV editor at Radio Times.

But she flourished on the show, lasting right up to Thursday's semi-final.

"And she's taken her own path, ignoring the herd and making her own voting decisions, sometimes chaotically, but always with charm, wit and good humour,” says Frost.

The Irish comedian's podcast was already popular before the show.

But after her stint as the joker of the pack, bigger things could now lie in store for her.

Just a few days ago, it was announced that her stand-up tour has been extended into 2027, "due to phenomenal demand".

And her agents will be "fielding calls" for her to bring her star power to other shows, adds Frost.

Culture journalist Jamieson says some of the other female contestants - such as Sharon Rooney, Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Myha'la - also stood out for showing their wit and wisdom, which could serve them well in the outside world.

Things got a bit awkward in one of the episodes, when Sharon disagreed with some of the cast on a challenge, with some social media users saying she was acting in a "childish" way.

But others argued it was a classic case of women being drowned out by men.

"There's been a subtlety in the smartness of women on display here, alongside the frustration of not always being listened to in the game," says Jamieson.

Sebastian 'Bash' Croft

In the end, it was faithful duo Romesh Ranganathan and Sebastian ‘Bash’ Croft who emerged victorious.

Comedian Ranganathan was already a huge star, but the show has introduced Croft, 24, to a much wider audience.

He’s had previous acting roles in Game of Thrones and Heartstopper, but Traitors allowed him to show his own personality, "which as we've seen has endeared him both to other players and the huge watching audience", says Frost.

He is also building his career as a pop star, and he's had a strong presence on social media during the series, posting videos of his tracks.

His debut EP comes out later in November, perfect timing to capitalise on his Traitors win.

And what's in store for the others...

What's clear is that the true victors aren't necessarily the ones who get their hands on the prize pot.

Arguably, what matters most is the amount of screen time you get - and what you do with it.

On that note, spare a thought for those who left the show early, such as Amol Rajan, Julie Hesmondhalgh and Hannah Fry.

But all made an impact in their own way and, as Synnot points out, they get "a nice anecdote" for future interviews.

And what of James Blunt, who stole hearts with his military approach to the challenges and eccentric Top Gun-style outfits - and who came so close to winning the whole show?

Maybe he's the mystery man in contention for the new James B(ond) - although his hapless theories could mean he'll be in line to be the new Johnny English instead.

Sir Ian McKellen leads tributes to 'beloved actor' Sir Patrick Stewart after his death at 86

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm20v3029p5xo, 3 days ago

Sir Ian McKellen has led tributes to Sir Patrick Stewart following his death at the age of 86, calling him "the most respected and beloved actor of his generation".

Tributes to the renowned British actor have poured in since his death at his Los Angeles home after "a brief and poignant journey" with Alzheimer's disease and Lewy Body Dementia was announced on Thursday.

"He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and, in my case, love," Sir Ian, Sir Patrick's X-Men co-star, said.

Famous for his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek, Sir Patrick was a versatile actor who won multiple awards, balancing Hollywood roles and a career in classical theatre.

William Shatner, who also helmed the USS Enterprise in Star Trek, said Sir Patrick brought "intelligence, grace and a deep sense of humanity to everything he did".

"Captain Picard stood for the best of us and so did the man who played him. I was filled with affection and admiration for him and his work," Shatner added.

Stewart depicted Picard in more than 170 episodes of the hit sci-fi TV series between 1987 and 1994, as well as in four feature films. He returned to the role for Star Trek: Picard in 2020.

Dame Judi Dench said she was "shocked" and "very sad" to hear of Sir Patrick's death, adding: "He's never been one of those actors who never felt like it that night, he was always very, very committed... He'll be much missed and he was much admired."

George Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek, said the actor "inspired a whole next generation of star-gazers who looked longingly ahead to a brighter future for all humanity".

Sir Patrick would later be celebrated for his portrayal of Professor Charles Xavier - most commonly known as Professor X - in the X-Men film franchise.

Hugh Jackman, who starred alongside him in the franchise, called him a "tremendous friend and man", saying: "We lost one of the greats of stage and screen today."

Sir Ian, a longtime friend of his X-Men co-star, who officiated his wedding in 2013, said Sir Patrick was "defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire".

"You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues."

Sir Ian recalled first meeting Sir Patrick as young actors in the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and how he had expressed caution over him taking on the Star Trek role.

"He took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did," said Sir Ian, who appeared with Sir Patrick in a 2009 theatre production of Waiting for Godot.

He added that while the US had become Sir Patrick's "adopted home", he "never forsook his origins" growing up in Yorkshire, and said "the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as chancellor of Huddersfield University".

Sir Ian noted that Sir Patrick's final film appearance will be as Professor X in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday film. Marvel Studios described him as "a singular talent, a generous collaborator and a true gentleman".

The Academy dubbed his voice "unmistakable", adding: "Whether commanding the bridge of the Enterprise or guiding a generation of young mutants, Sir Patrick Stewart brought a tenderness to his characters that made us feel we knew them."

Sir Patrick died on Wednesday "in the loving care of his wife", a statement from his family said. "We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace," it added.

The veteran actor is survived by his wife, Sunny Ozell, as well as by his two adult children from his first marriage, Daniel and Sophie Stewart.

'One of greatest stage actors ever seen'

Born in the town of Mirfield in 1940, Sir Patrick's love of drama began at school where he was introduced to Shakespeare and his first public performance was in a local church production of Cinderella.

He threw himself enthusiastically into the flourishing local theatre. "I used to recite Shakespeare from memory," he said. "I just learned all these big speeches."

When Sir Patrick was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010, he said he owed "literally everything" to his former English teacher who first encouraged him to perform.

His first foray into professional acting was when he joined the RSC in 1966, going on to play King John, Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Henry IV.

The RSC described him as a "colossus of both stage and screen", remembering him as "one of the finest classical Shakespearean actors of his generation" whose contribution to the company was "beyond measure".

Dame Harriet Walter, who first met Sir Patrick in his theatre days more than 40 years ago, said his passing was like a "huge giant tree has fallen in the forest".

"He had fire in his eyes and you were absolutely in the room with him," the Succession actress told BBC Newsnight. "I've never heard a bad word against him. And I think the world's going to be very poor without him."

Theatres in London's West End will dim their lights for two minutes on 3 November in his honour.

Hannah Essex, co-chief of the Society of London Theatre and UK Theatre, called him "one of the greatest stage actors this country has ever seen".

As well as having roles in films such as Safe House, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and the original Dune, Sir Patrick continued to appear on TV throughout his career, making guest appearances on Frasier, Futurama and the Simpsons.

US actor and animator Seth MacFarlane, who grew up as a fan of Sir Patrick, said he was "gifted the privilege of becoming a colleague and friend" as they worked together on Family Guy, American Dad! and Ted.

MacFarlane described him as a "rare actor who could take any bit of dialogue and elevate it, making a good writer sound great and a great writer sound masterful".

Comedian Ricky Gervais, whose BBC programme Extras Sir Patrick guest starred in, described him as a "legend".

Sharing a video of the pair giggling in a set of bloopers for the series, Gervais said: "I still can't believe he agreed to do this scene. And he didn't even mind when I ruined every take."

Sir Patrick was a lifelong supporter of English Football League club Huddersfield Town, which called him a "titan of his craft".

"Fiercely proud of his Yorkshire roots, Sir Patrick was a Terrier in every sense, and we're proud to have counted him as one of our own," the club added.

Alzheimer's is the most common type of dementia, while Lewy Body Dementia is another common form caused by abnormal protein deposits, which cause a loss of cognitive function.

The Alzheimer's Society CEO Michelle Dyson said Sir Patrick was an "extraordinarily talented and much-loved actor, admired by millions around the world", adding: "His death is a heartbreaking reminder of the devastating impact dementia has on people and families across the globe."

The actor became a campaigner on domestic violence in later life, including becoming an ambassador for domestic abuse charity Refuge in 2007, after witnessing his mother suffer violence at the hands of his father.

Hetti Barkworth-Nanton, Refuge's board chair, said it had been a privilege to "watch his endless devotion" to the cause, adding that he "broke down barriers and taboos on the subject".

Andy Burnham considered Sir Patrick to be "one of the very best" who "never forgot his working-class Yorkshire roots".

"He brought joy to millions," the prime minister's spokesman said on his behalf. "He always stood up for what he believed in, including through his campaigning to help those affected by domestic violence.

The Greatest to Blade Runner 2099: 12 of the best TV shows to watch this November

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20261026-12-of-the-best-tv-shows-to-watch-this-november, 6 days ago

From a drama about Muhammad Ali's early years to Amy Poehler's latest sitcom and a Blade Runner small-screen spin-off – these are the best series to watch and stream.

1. The Gilded Age

The fourth season of Julian Fellowes' addictive period drama picks up soon after the previous season ended and answers some burning, melodramatic questions. Will the nouveau riche George Russell (Morgan Spector), having moved out of their ostentatious mansion, go home to his manipulative social-climbing wife, Bertha (Carrie Coon)? Will the pedigreed Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) topple Bertha from the top of the social ladder? She's certainly going to try. Subplots swirl around them as Peggy (Denée Benton) tries to maintain her career as a writer while dealing with her intrusive mother-in-law-to-be (Phylicia Rashad), while Marian (Louisa Jacobson) and Larry's (Harry Richardson) on-and-off romance gets especially thorny. Last season's ratings were among the show's highest, so there may even be an appetite for the upcoming Voices of the Gilded Age: The Christmas Album, featuring songs from the Broadway-veteran cast. If you've ever wanted to hear Baranski sing We Need a Little Christmas or Brian Stokes Mitchell do It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, here you go.

The Gilded Age premieres 1 November on HBO in the US and 2 November on Sky Atlantic in the UK

2. The Greatest

Muhammad Ali was one of the greatest boxers of all time and has also been one of the most often depicted on screen, from Will Smith in the 2001 film Ali to documentaries by Antoine Fuqua and Ken Burns. This dramatic series sets itself apart by focusing on his childhood and the early years of his career, when he was still known as Cassius Clay, in a story that moves from his boyhood in the Jim Crow South to the 1960 Olympics, through to the 1964 fight that made him the world champion. Newcomer Jaalen Best plays Ali in the show, which has the cooperation of the Ali family and counts his widow, Lonnie Ali, and Michael B Jordan as executive producers. "The Greatest is [about] his pathway to growth, at home with his brother and his parents. It's a granular deep dive into Muhammad's life," Lonnie Ali told Esquire. Meanwhile the series' creator, Ben Watkins (showrunner of the Alex Cross series), teased that despite its family ties, the details on screen "aren't always flattering".

The Greatest premieres 4 November on Prime Video internationally

3. Stick

For some reason, middle-aged former golf champions trying to make a comeback are a mini-trend in sitcoms. Will Ferrell's character set out to do it as the title character in the tongue-in-cheek Netflix series Hawk. And in the second season of Apple TV's Stick, a comedy that leans toward the heartwarming, Owen Wilson's character – Pryce Cahill, known as Stick – attempts to come out of retirement too. The cast has always been this show's biggest draw, and that is enhanced this season with Rhea Seehorn of Pluribus and Better Call Saul in a supporting role as Stick's new coach. Timothy Olyphant returns as his former rival, who nudges him to try to become the oldest player ever to win the US Open tournament, with Judy Greer as Stick's ex-wife and Marc Maron as his friend and caddie, Mitts. Apparently the burgeoning television golf world requires cringe-making nicknames.

Stick premieres 4 November on Apple TV internationally

4. Black Doves

Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw return in the second season of this thoroughly improbable but always entertaining action-espionage series. Knightley plays Helen Webb, whose husband (Andrew Buchan) is about to become the UK's prime minister – a situation that is not great for him because she has been leaking information for a decade to the shadowy Black Doves organisation, set on undermining governments around the world. Whishaw plays her best friend, Sam, a hitman who helps her get out of the scrapes while getting into some himself. In the new season, Helen's Black Doves handler, Mrs Reed, played by Sarah Lancashire, seems to go missing, although Lancashire herself remains a major part of the show. Marital drama plays out in the background of the shootouts and power plays. The new PM might not be fit to govern since he hasn't noticed his wife spying right under his nose. Or maybe she's just that clever. The series creator, Joe Barton, captured its droll tone when calling the characters "our murderous little spy family".

Black Doves premieres 5 November on Netflix internationally

5. It Gets Worse

Leo Reich, who broke through with his HBO stand-up comedy special Literally Who Cares? in 2023, created and stars in this acerbic series about three Gen Z university friends struggling through their early 20s, characters Reich has described as "self-involved and quite objectionable". He plays the self-absorbed Ethan, supported by his parents. His best friends are by-the-rules Abi (Emily Fairn) and would-be writer Sam (Olivia Gray). It's a sign of Reich's rising star that he has enticed some big names to join in. Andrew Scott appears in an episode, Lena Dunham has a cameo as Abi's boss and the series' unlikely narrator is the novelist Zadie Smith. The show is not just another Friends knockoff. It was a hit at the recent London Film Festival, with the Financial Times calling it "a witty Gen Z sex comedy" and the Guardian describing the series as "profound and properly funny" and Reich as "the future of TV comedy".

It Gets Worse is currently on Channel 4 in the UK and premieres 6 November on Paramount+ in the US

6. Rivals

It has been months since the first half of this scathingly funny show's second season dropped, but finally we're back in the fictional Cotswold county of Rutshire, beloved from Jilly Cooper's bonkbuster novels. It's a place where cheating, in business and relationships, is just a way of life for its mix of mischievous, mean-spirited and occasionally good-hearted characters. Tony Baddingham, the tycoon played with devilish glee by David Tennant, is more sinister than ever, and unlikely to soften in the aftermath of a tragedy. His rival, Declan O'Hara (Aidan Turner), is ever more desperate to keep his career and marriage intact, which his wife is making more difficult on both counts. And their daughter Taggie (Bella Maclean) must decide whether to give into her love for the playboy Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell) or do the sensible thing and run for the hills. In the new episodes, Lady Monica Baddingham's glamorous younger sister turns up. So does a legendary Argentinian polo player. They should fit right in.

Rivals premieres 11 November on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in the UK

7. The Good Daughter

Rose Byrne and Meghann Fahy – either one could be the good daughter in this thriller about murder, justice and family dynamics. They play sisters from the fictional smalltown of Pikeville, Georgia, who survived a violent home invasion when they were girls. Byrne is Samantha, a patent lawyer who moved to New York. Fahy is Charlotte, who stayed in town and became a defence lawyer like their father (Brendan Gleeson). The sisters have been estranged for a decade, but when Charlotte witnesses a murder that recalls the attack in their childhood, the tension and mysteries ramp up and Samantha is called home. The Good Daughter – not to be confused with those other recent suspense series The Better Sister and The Girlfriend – is written by Karin Slaughter, based on her 2017 bestselling novel, and explores the traumatic effects of violence. "We're all exposed to trauma all the time," Fahy told Vanity Fair, adding, "It's really important to show people navigating their trauma and coming out on the other side."

The Good Daughter premieres 12 November on Peacock in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK

8. 12 12 12

Two commanding, high-profile actors star in this heist series. Jamie Dornan plays Paul Galvin, a criminal who tries to leave his old life but is forced back in as part of an $800m (£599m) theft from a Zurich bank. Anthony Mackie is Jack Strickland, a disgraced FBI agent on his trail, whose character handily explains the series' title in the trailer. "FBI principles of crime say a high asset robbery is 12 months in planning, 12 hours in execution. A bank robber who's not caught within 12 days is not caught at all," he says. The show mingles those three timelines as the cat-and-mouse game takes the men across Europe – with spectacular settings on dark streets, at sea and against snowy landscapes – en route to their inevitable face-to-face.

12 12 12 premieres 13 November on Apple TV internationally

9. Blue Lights

This fourth season of the exhilarating police series set in Belfast keeps things fresh by returning to a much-loved character from the past. Mo McIntyre, whose mother, Tina, runs the family crime ring, finally goes on trial for orchestrating the attack that killed Gerry Cliff (Richard Dornan), devastating his police colleagues, in season one. That storyline becomes a touching opportunity to look back at Gerry's romance with his wife, Sandra (beautifully played by Andi Osho), a sergeant who worked alongside him in Blackthorn Station. Apart from the trial, the team of regular characters grapples with anti-immigrant protests that turn violent. And all the while, higher-ups are threatening to shut down Blackthorn for inefficiency. As always, the show deftly puts crime-fighting against the backdrop of lingering political divisions going back to the Troubles, while mixing in personal stories. The Guardian, in its review of this season, rightly called it "TV's most thrilling cop show".

Blue Lights is currently on BBC iPlayer in the UK and premieres 12 November on Britbox in the US

10. The Altruists

Another day, another drama about a tech-adjacent mogul. This time it's the saga of Sam Bankman-Fried, coming in the wake of those about Mark Zuckerberg (The Social Reckoning), Elizabeth Holmes (You Can See Everything) or Sam Altman (Artificial). Anthony Boyle (House of Guinness) plays Bankman-Fried, who founded the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which fell apart in 2022. Convicted of fraud, conspiracy and money-laundering, he is currently in prison. (He is appealing his conviction and has formally requested a presidential pardon.) Julia Garner, who played a different fraudster in Inventing Anna, is Bankman-Fried's colleague and sometime girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud. The series was created by Graham Moore, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of The Imitation Game, and who has an unusual, to say the least, take on the convicted criminals. In his view, Moore has said, Bankman-Fried and Ellison started as "deeply committed altruists," out to change the financial world for everyone's benefit, then "with the very best of intentions talked each other and themselves into committing a number of terrible crimes".

The Altruists premieres 19 November on Netflix internationally

11. Dig

Amy Poehler and Hugh Laurie play archaeologists on a dig in Greece, a setting Poehler has said is ideal for comedy. "A dig is a really funny place," she told TV Insider. "It's part summer camp, part mysterious uncovering of relics." Laurie goes back to his wry comic roots as professor Neville Wycombe, who runs the archaeological program, and Poehler is Elise, the dedicated, serious head of a team of women. They arrive for the summer only to find themselves in an international muddle when they discover a priceless artifact. Geraldine Viswanathan and Antonia Thomas are members of Elise's team, with Fina Strazza as Wycombe's guileless in-over-her-head assistant. Poehler created the show with Mike Schur, a creator of her previous series, Parks and Recreation, one of television's best sitcoms. Schur is a master of smart, low-key character-driven comedies including The Good Place, so whatever madcap adventures the archaeologists land in, the show promises to be slyly funny.

Dig premieres 23 November on Peacock in the US

12. Blade Runner 2099

Michelle Yeoh stars in this series that takes the Blade Runner franchise racing toward everyone's worst fears about artificial intelligence. In Ridley Scott's classic film Blade Runner and Denis Villeneuve's sequel, Blade Runner 2049, humans hunted down replicants. Now the robots have taken over and replicants are hunting down humans. Yeoh plays Olwen, a replicant on the Los Angeles police force. Hunter Schafer is Cora, who is actually a human masquerading as a replicant, so she can worm her way into the LA police as a way of protecting her brother. The series' showrunner, Silka Luisa, told Empire magazine, "Everyone, globally, has been very aware of this palpable fear of the end of our species. Climate change, pandemics." The series, she said, considers: "What would the world look like when it's no longer ours?" Well, Cora is partnered with Olwen, who happens to be days from reaching the end of her lifespan, so while the world may be different, the old trope of an about-to-retire-cop paired with a rookie obviously lives on.

Blade Runner 2099 premieres 25 November on Prime Video internationally

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Elsinore to The Hunger Games: 12 of the best films to watch in November

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20261020-12-of-the-best-films-to-watch-in-november, 12 days ago

From an awards-tipped role for Andrew Scott to another Hunger Games prequel, here are the films to watch at the cinema and stream at home this month.

1. The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth

Cliff Booth was the laidback stuntman played by Brad Pitt in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). Pitt won a best supporting actor Oscar for his performance, and Tarantino liked the character so much that he has written him a spin-off comedy-thriller. That's surprising enough, given that Tarantino isn't known for sequels – but a bigger surprise is that The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth is directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network). That makes this the first film to be scripted by Tarantino and directed by someone else since From Dusk Till Dawn back in 1996. It's set in 1977, a time when Cliff Booth is employed to clean up Hollywood's messes. His latest clients include a talent agent (Elizabeth Debicki) and a TV actor (Scott Caan) who are mixed up with gangsters. "What was once a fairytale is now a crime story," says the film's official synopsis, "a cocktail of violence, ambition, and desire that could only happen in LA."

Released on 25 November in the UK, the US and Canada

2. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping

It's been more than a decade since Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen triumphed in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, but audiences are still hungry for more. The first Hunger Games prequel, subtitled The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, was a hit in 2023. And now there's a sequel to that prequel, which is set 40 years after Songbirds and Snakes and 24 years before Katniss's adventures. Confused? Us too, but it'll all make sense to anyone who is already a fan of Suzanne Collins's bestselling dystopian novels. Sunrise on the Reaping stars Joseph Zada as a younger version of Woody Harrelson's character from the original films, and Ralph Fiennes as President Snow, who was played by Donald Sutherland. Other younger incarnations include Jesse Plemons as Philip Seymour Hoffman's character, Kieran Culkin as Stanley Tucci's, and Elle Fanning as Elizabeth Banks's.

Released on 19 and 20 November internationally

3. Elsinore

In 1989, Daniel Day-Lewis was playing Hamlet at London's National Theatre when the pressure got too much for him, and he walked off the stage. It was his last ever theatre performance. His replacement was Ian Charleson, who had starred in the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire a few years earlier. Charleson had Aids, a condition that was fatal at the time, but he was determined to take on the greatest and most demanding stage role of all before he died. In Elsinore, Charleson is played by Andrew Scott, with Olivia Colman as his doctor and Billie Piper as his best friend. Directed by Simon Stone (The Dig) and written by Stephen Beresford (Pride), the film is heart-rending yet joyous – and Scott is sure to be Oscar-nominated. "I wept like a baby," says Nick Howells in The Standard. "This is a performance of a lifetime, and one the Academy voters would need a collective bout of insanity to ignore."

Released on 20 November in the US, 25 November in France and 29 January in the UK and Ireland

4. Club Kid

Jordan Firstman, the comedian and actor best known as Charlie in HBO's I Love LA, has made one of the most acclaimed films of the year, a festival favourite with a 100% score on the Rotten Tomatoes reviews aggregator site. As well as writing and directing Club Kid, Firstman stars as Peter, a gay club promoter who organises New York's wildest parties with his business partner Sophie (Cara Delevingne). But after a decade of this drug-fuelled lifestyle, Peter is feeling old and jaded. It's then that he meets Arlo (Reggie Absolom), the 10-year-old British son he never knew he had. Wendy Ide in Screen Daily says that Firstman's "joyous, raw comedy drama" is "a crowd-pleasing triumph – an acidic, spikily funny portrait of New York's hedonistic gay scene which celebrates empathy, community and the unconditional love between a father and his son".

Released on 4 November in France, 6 November in the US and 13 November in Canada

5. Hexed

Disney's most recent animated films have been sequels and prequels – Moana 2, Mufasa: The Lion King, Zootopia 2 (aka Zootropolis 2) – but the studio is having another crack at new material with Hexed. Its typically plucky heroine is Billie (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld), a suburban teenager who discovers that she was born with magical powers. She then learns the art of sorcery after she is zapped through a portal to Hogwarts – sorry, Hexe – a mysterious realm of witches and enchanted creatures voiced by Jodie Foster, Tracey Ullman, Stephen Fry and Dan Stevens. Hexed isn't the only cartoon to explore magical worlds this month, either: an animated adaptation of Dr Seuss's The Cat in the Hat is in cinemas on 5 November.

Released on 25, 26 and 27 November internationally

6. Focker-in-Law

The Devil Wears Prada 2 was a box-office hit earlier this year. Will another legacy sequel to a 2000s comedy classic have the same appeal? Sixteen years after the third instalment of the Meet the Parents franchise, and 26 years after the first, Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro are back as the neurotic Greg Focker and his disapproving father-in-law, Jack. Three more of the usual suspects are back, too: Owen Wilson, Blythe Danner and Teri Polo as Greg's wife Pam. (Alas, there's no sign of Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman, who played Greg's parents in the last two films.) New cast-members include Beanie Feldstein as Greg and Pam's daughter, Skyler Gisondo as their son, and, most importantly, Ariana Grande as their son's fiancée. The twist this time is that Jack welcomes the newcomer into his "circle of trust", while Greg is the one who has his doubts.

Released on 25, 26 and 27 November internationally

7. I Play Rocky

When Sylvester Stallone was an aspiring actor in the 1970s, he decided to write himself his dream role, so he bashed out the screenplay for Rocky in three-and-a-half days. Studio executives loved it, but they saw it as a vehicle for Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson, rather than some unknown wannabe with a mumbly voice. But Stallone wouldn't sell out – which explains the title of this behind-the-scenes drama: I Play Rocky. Anthony Ippolito stars as the young Sly, alongside Matt Dillon as his father, AnnaSophia Robb as his first wife, and Stephan James as Carl Weathers (Apollo Creed in Rocky). Directed by Peter Farrelly (Green Book / Dumb and Dumber), the true-life underdog story is "stirring, inspiring, surprisingly hilarious and easy to love", says Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. "And refreshingly, it's not reverential or museumish, but created in the off-beat, tenacious, can-do spirit of Rocky."

Released on 6 November in the UK, the US and Canada

8. Wild Horse Nine

Martin McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin was nominated for eight Oscars (including four different acting awards). His new film is tipped to do similarly well, with its star, John Malkovich, being an almost-certain best actor nominee. He and Sam Rockwell play a pair of buffoonish CIA agents having a short holiday on Easter Island. Like the bickering best friends in The Banshees of Inisherin and In Bruges, they share some wonderfully eccentric dialogue and some scenes of explosive violence, but Wild Horse Nine is distinguished by its hard-edged political commentary and by Malkovich's character's regrets. McDonagh's "latest could be the best yet", says Phil de Semlyen in Time Out, "a bittersweet hangout film about lonely, crumpled men facing up to mortality, dealing with the consequences of violence and chewing the fat to outlandishly funny effect."

Released on 4, 5 and 6 November internationally

9. Being Heumann

Siân Heder is the writer-director of Coda, which won the Oscar for best picture in 2022. Her follow-up, Being Heumann, is another inspiring drama featuring disabled actors. It's drawn from the autobiography of Judith Heumann, a US disability rights activist. In 1977, she and a group of protesters occupied the San Francisco Federal Building because equal rights regulations were being ignored. Mark Ruffalo plays the government official who wants to kick her out, and Ruth Madeley, a wheelchair user herself, stars as Heumann. "The remarkable thing about the British actress's performance is that she makes us embrace a character so fiery and flawed and exasperatingly unrelenting," says Steve Pond in The Wrap. "There's no question that [Heder has] pulled off another crowd-pleasing film, but the key to Being Heumann is that its importance goes beyond those audience smiles."

Released on 6 November in cinemas in the UK, the US and Canada, and on 13 November on Apple TV+

10. Josephine

Kate Erbland in IndieWire calls Josephine a "stunning film… [that I will] heartily recommend and never, ever watch again". That's fair enough: Beth de Araújo's drama is gripping, intelligent, groundbreaking and important, but it's not exactly a pleasure to watch. It's the story of an eight-year-old girl (Mason Reeves) who is in a San Francisco park one Sunday morning with her father (a career-best Channing Tatum). They lose sight of each other for a few minutes – and during that time the girl witnesses a brutal sexual assault. The questions now are: How will this horrific experience affect her? How can her father and mother (Gemma Chan) help her? And does she have a responsibility to testify in court? Erbland says that "De Araújo's masterful ability to interrogate tension on every level keeps the film clipping along, each turn both a surprise and an inevitability".

Released on 20 November in the UK, the US and Ireland, and on 27 November in Canada

11. All of a Sudden

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car was one of the sensations of the 2022 Academy Awards: it didn't just win the best international feature prize, but was nominated for best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay, too. His quirky follow-up, Evil Does Not Exist, made less of an impression, but his deeply humane new film, All of a Sudden, is another awards contender. Virginie Efira plays the manager of a care home for the elderly in Paris. Tao Okamoto plays a Japanese theatre director who is visiting the city. The women's friendship deepens over the course of a three-hour drama which is "a gentle and infinitely tender exercise on life and death, full of immersive, philosophical musings that wash over our souls", says Tomris Laffly in Elle. "Patient and tranquil, All of a Sudden feels like a meditation that transforms a viewer into a better version of themselves."

Released on 25 November in the US

12. Paper Tiger

Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver and Miles Teller are on top form in Paper Tiger, another gritty, New York-based crime drama from James Gray (Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night). Echoing events from the writer-director's own childhood, it's set in the borough of Queens in 1986. Johansson and Teller play Hester and Irwin, a happily married, successful-enough couple with two sons. Driver plays Irwin's brother Gary, a flashy ex-cop with political connections and charisma to burn. He brings his brother in on a scheme to clean up a polluted canal for a group of Russian immigrants. What with Irwin's engineering know-how and his own street-smart confidence, Gary reasons, the deal can't go wrong. But, of course, it can go very wrong indeed, what with the Russians being ruthless gangsters. "As with his finest work, Gray strikes a beautiful balance between fraught interpersonal drama and nail-biting thrills," says Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. "Paper Tiger pulsates with heart, rancour, and terror."

Released on 13 November in the US and Canada

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'It speaks to us about being human': Why Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's chilling 1818 horror story is so misunderstood

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180611-why-frankenstein-is-the-story-that-defined-our-fears, 3 days ago

A groundbreaking classic of the horror genre that has inspired generations, why is the message of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel still overshadowed by its success, more than two centuries on?

"It's alive! It's alive!! It's alive!!!" – Frankenstein (dir: James Whale, 1931)

One night during the strangely cool and wet European summer of 1816, a group of friends gathered at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. "We will each write a ghost story," Lord Byron announced to the assembled party, which included Byron's doctor John Polidori, the poet Percy Shelley and the 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley).

"I busied myself to think of a story," she wrote. "One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror." Her tale became a novel, published two years later as Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. It told the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young natural philosophy student, who, burning with crazed ambition, brings a body to life but rejects his horrifying "creature" in fear and disgust.

Frankenstein is simultaneously the first science-fiction novel, a Gothic horror, a tragic romance and a parable all sewn into one towering body. Its central tragedies – the dangers of "playing God" on one hand; parental abandonment and societal rejection on the other – are as relevant today as ever.

And are there any other fictional characters more powerfully cemented in the popular imagination? The two central archetypes Mary Shelley brought to life, the "creature" and the overambitious "mad scientist", lurched and ranted their way off the page and on to stage and screen, electrifying theatre and filmgoers as two of the most enduring icons not just in the horror genre – but in cinematic history.

Frankenstein spawned interpretations and parodies that reach from the very origins of the moving image in Thomas Edison's horrifying 1910 short film, through Hollywood's Universal Pictures and Britain's Hammer series, to The Rocky Horror Picture Show – and it foreshadowed others, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are Italian and Japanese Frankensteins and a Blaxploitation film, Blackenstein; Mel Brooks, Kenneth Branagh and Tim Burton all have their own takes.

The characters or themes appear in or have inspired comic books, video games, spin-off novels, TV series and songs by artists as diverse as Ice Cube, Metallica and T'Pau's China in Your Hand: "It was a flight on the wings of a young girl's dreams/ That flew too far away… And we could make the monster live again". In 2025, sci-fi/horror director Guillermo del Toro finally realised his childhood dream of bringing Frankenstein to the screen, a true labour-of-love project that was more than 30 years in the making.

As a parable, the novel has been used as an argument both for and against slavery and revolution, vivisection and empire, and as a dialogue between history and progress, religion and atheism. The prefix "Franken-" thrives in the modern lexicon as a byword for any anxiety about science, scientists and the human body, and has been used to shape worries about the atomic bomb, GM crops, strange foods, stem-cell research and both to characterise and assuage fears about AI. In the more-than-two centuries since she wrote it, Mary Shelley's tale, in the words of Bobby Pickett's 1962 novelty song, Monster Mash (itself inspired by Boris Karloff's performance), has truly been "a graveyard smash" that "caught on in a flash".

'Mysterious fears of our nature'

"All them scientists – they're all alike. They say they're working for us but what they really want is to rule the world!" – Young Frankenstein (dir: Mel Brooks, 1974).

But why was Mary Shelley's vision of "science gone wrong" so resonant at the time? She certainly captured the zeitgeist: the early 19th Century teetered on the brink of the modern age, and although the term "science" existed, the concept of a "scientist" didn't. Great societal change often brings fear that is played out through culture. "With modernity comes a sense of anxiety about what humans can do and particularly an anxiety about science and technology, " says Fiona Sampson, author of In Search of Mary Shelley.

Frankenstein fused these contemporary concerns about the possibilities of science with fiction for the very first time – with electrifying results. Far from a completely outrageous fantasy, the novel imagined what might conceivably happen if people – and in particular overreaching or out-of-control scientists – went too far.

Several points of popular 19th-Century intellectual discourse appeared in the novel. Mary Shelley's writings reveal that in that 1816 Villa Diodati tableau, Shelley and Byron discussed the "principle of life". Contemporary debates raged on the nature of humanity and whether it was possible to raise the dead. In the book's 1831 preface, Mary Shelley noted "galvanism" as an influence, referring to Luigi Galvani's experiments using electric currents to make frogs' legs twitch. Galvani's nephew Giovanni Aldini would go further in 1803, using a newly dead murderer as his subject. Many of the doctors and thinkers at the heart of these debates – such as the chemist Sir Humphry Davy – were connected to Mary Shelley's father, the pre-eminent intellectual William Godwin, who had developed principles warning of the dangers and moral implications of "overreaching".

Despite these nuggets of contemporary thought, though, there's little in the way of tangible theory, method, or scientific detail in Frankenstein. The climactic moment of creation is described simply: "With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet." The "science" of the novel is rooted in its time and yet timeless. It is so vague, therefore, as to provide a malleable reference point for the following two centuries' greatest moments of change and fear.

Monster mash-up

But surely the reason Frankenstein became a shorthand for anxieties about science is down to the impression the "monster" and "mad scientist" have had on its audience. How did this happen? Just as the science is vague in the book, so is the description of the creature as he comes to life. The moment is distilled into a single, bloodcurdling image:

"It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."

With his "yellow skin", "watery eyes" and "shrivelled complexion", the creature is far from the beautiful ideal Victor Frankenstein had imagined. This spare but resonant prose proved irresistible to theatre, and later film-makers and their audiences, as Christopher Frayling notes in his book, Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years. The shocking novel became a scandalous play and a huge hit, first in Britain and then abroad. These early plays, Frayling writes, "set the tone for future dramatisations". They condensed the story into basic archetypes, adding many of the most memorable elements that audiences would recognise today, including the comical lab assistant, the line "It lives!" and a monster who barely speaks.

It's perhaps a double-edged sword that the monstrous success of Hollywood's incarnations (notably James Whale's 1931 film starring Boris Karloff as the creature) in many ways secured the story's longevity but somewhat obscured Shelley's version of it. "Frankenstein [the film] created the definitive movie image of the mad scientist, and in the process launched a thousand imitations," Frayling writes. "It fused a domesticated form of Expressionism, overacting, an irreverent adaptation of an acknowledged classic, European actors and visualisers – and the American carnival tradition – to create an American genre. It began to look as though Hollywood had actually invented Frankenstein." And so, a movie legend was born.

And just as Hollywood cherry-picked from Mary Shelley to cement its version, she had borrowed from historical and Biblical stories to create her own message and mythology. The subtitle of the novel, "The Modern Prometheus", recalls the figure of ancient Greek and Latin myth who variously steals fire from the gods and gives it to man, and represents the dangers of overreaching. The novel's other great allusion is to God and Adam, and a quote from Paradise Lost appears in the book's epigraph: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?". It is arguably the creature's humanity – and his tragedy – that in his cinematic transformations into a mute but terrifying monster, has often been forgotten.

Shelley gave the creature a voice and a literary education in order to express his thoughts and desires (he is one of three narrators in the book). Like The Tempest's Caliban, to whom Shakespeare gives a poetic and poignant speech, the creature's lament is haunting: "Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."

If the creature is perceived as a misshapen human rather than a monster, his tragedy deepens. He is first rejected by his creator, which Christopher Frayling called "that post-partum moment", and is often identified as a parental abandonment. Considering that Mary Shelley had lost her own mother Mary Wollstonecraft at birth, had just buried her own baby girl, and was looking after her pregnant step-sister as she was writing the book – which took exactly nine months to complete – birth (and death) is pertinent.

The newborn creature is alienated further as society recoils from him; he is made good, but it is the rejection that creates his murderous revenge. It's a robust allegory for a responsibility to children, outsiders or those who don't conform to conventional ideals of beauty. "The way that we sometimes identify with Frankenstein – as we've all taken risks, we've all had hubristic moments – and partly with the creature, they are both aspects of ourselves – all our selves" Fiona Sampson says. "They both speak to us about being human. And that's incredibly powerful."

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The empathy and humanity that has often been lost at the heart of Shelley's novel is reinstated in the most recent adaptation, however. Before its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2025, director Guillermo Del Toro told Variety that his version, which stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the creature, was less a horror than about "the lineage of familial pain", with Isaac the abusive father abandoning his son, the creature.

"He was an outsider. He didn't fit into the world. He was out of place in the same way that I felt as a kid," Del Toro said of the creature, going on to describe Shelley's story as being central to his own life and work. "Frankenstein is a song of the human experience… There's so much of my own biography in the DNA of the novel." When he was collecting a Bafta in 2018 for a different monster fable, The Shape of Water, Del Toro thanked Shelley for inspiring him. "She picked up the plight of Caliban and she gave weight to the burden of Prometheus, and she gave voice to the voiceless and presence to the invisible, and she showed me that sometimes to talk about monsters, we need to fabricate monsters of our own, and parables do that for us".

Surely it would seem unfathomable that when the then-Mary Godwin first thought up her chilling monster parable in that summer of 1816, she could have imagined that it would go so far to shape culture and society, science and fear, continuing to inspire debate – and art – well into the 21st Century.

"And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper," she wrote in the preface to the 1831 edition. The creator and creature, parent and child, the writer and her story – they went forth, and did they prosper? More than 200 years since its publication, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is no longer a tale of "thrilling horror" but its own myth, sent out into the world.

This is an updated version of an article that was originally published in 2018.

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Why 'stunning' assisted-dying novel Switzy caused a Booker Prize controversy

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20261028-why-stunning-assisted-dying-novel-switzy-caused-a-booker-prize-controversy, 4 days ago

Despite tough subject matter, Emma Cline's novel about a man with dementia choosing to end his life has been one of 2026's hits – and its exclusion from the Booker has caused outrage.

The story of a man with dementia making his way to an assisted dying clinic in Switzerland might not sound like a book that should immediately go to the top of your to-be-read pile. But, as bleak as its premise sounds, Emma Cline's Switzy is one of the most championed books of the year.

In some ways its success shouldn't be surprising. The US author's two previous novels were both big literary success stories. Her 2016 debut The Girls, loosely inspired by the Manson family cult, sparked an 11-way bidding war and a reported $2m (£1.7m) advance. Follow-up The Guest, about a young woman grifting her way through the Hamptons, was the It-book of summer 2023 (and is mooted to be turned into a movie starring Sadie Sink).

Warning: This article contains references to assisted dying that some readers may find distressing.

A new Emma Cline title was always going to be one of the most anticipated releases of the year. But while those other books' juicy subject matters made them prime cultural currency (who does't love a scammer story?), her most recent is a tougher sell. Even her agent wasn't immediately convinced. When the author sent the first draft to her agent, Cline told the Financial Times, his reply was: "Are you OK?"

Yet since its September release, Switzy has captivated readers and critics alike, proving that even its existential bleakness can't dampen the online enthusiasm that surrounds Cline's work.

Awards controversy

Such is the internet love for Switzy, that when it was omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist – it had been one of 13 books on the long list – corners of bookish social media (politely) rioted with cries of "Justice for Switzy". Literary influencer Jack Edwards – known as "the internet's resident librarian" – joined in, commenting "We ride at dawn for Switzy" on a post on the Booker Prize's Instagram page.

Of course, lots of worthy books miss out on literary prizes. But Switzy does seem to have connected with readers in a profound way, with thousands of TikTok and Instagram posts proclaiming its greatness, and fellow writers declaring their admiration. Best-selling author Matt Haig calls Switzy "very impressive", while previous Booker winner Samantha Harvey has described it as "a miracle of a novel".

Asked about the novel missing the shortlist, Booker Prize judge Patricia Lockwood said the panel had to ignore "hype cycles". So is Switzy simply the latest literary fad, or was the outrage over its omission justified?

What's it about?

The novel follows the final days of David Hastings, a retired business executive with Alzheimer's. As it begins, he is travelling to Zurich by private jet – lent to him as a parting gift from a business associate – to end his life at an assisted dying facility, rather than face "a forced march through the next brutal decade".

David is accompanied by his assistant Cody, who doles out medication and organises the itinerary for his final days. This includes a stop-off in London to have dinner with his daughter Rebecca. David has been an absent father to her, though he does not tell her just how unavailable he is about to become.

Cline's close third-person narrative style puts us in David's head – a confusing place to be – where: "his brain shook information like dice in a little leather cup and then let the dice loose in a jumble on the green felt". He keeps a small leather notebook in his pocket to remind him of things he should know: what city he is in, the name of his grandson, how many days before he dies.

The timing of the trip is important. He has already been through a rigorous assessment by the clinic and on arrival in Zurich a woman, who he dubs Ghoul, meets him in a cafe to judge if he is still lucid enough to consent. As David explains: "you had to be crazy to do this but not so crazy".

As he edges closer to his end, fragments of David's past come back to him. It is not big events he remembers, but little things: listening to The Sound of Music soundtrack with his parents, the cowboy wallpaper in his childhood bedroom, the fabric of the first suit he ever had made for himself. Meanwhile his work, which he had done "so frantically" and which provided "the assurance that he, too, was real, that his life was something to believe in", barely registers. He is also haunted by an act of teenage cruelty involving an old boarding-school roommate, and adamant about visiting him – he conveniently lives near Zurich – before he goes.

Cline has said she was interested in how you navigate your days when you know they are your last. "How can anyone take in the enormity of that?" she told the New Yorker. "We have a lot of systems to keep our eventual end out of our awareness – and thank God, because the awareness would be paralysing. But David has to look into that void, if only in brief flares."

A unique reading experience

While Switzy's themes may be heavy, its prose is not. To convincingly portray the deteriorating consciousness of a man with dementia – while still keeping the reader invested in his journey – is some ask, and Cline pulls it off impressively.

Her fragmented narrative mirrors David's unravelling mind, jumping from past to present, from mundane observations to philosophical musings. Half-remembered songs and phrases sit alongside lucid moments of reflection. If the reader feels disorientated, it's because Cline wants us to.

We only see what David sees, or what he imagines he does. Stuck with his perspective, we also experience the growing isolation he feels as the world slowly drifts out of reach.

Assisted dying is a divisive and emotive issue – the UK recently narrowly rejected proposals to legalise it – but Cline steers clear of taking any moral stance in the book. David has made his own decision long before the novel begins. It is up to us to decide what we think of it.

Cline asks us to do what she has said is so difficult – to look death directly in the face, and consider what the end might look like. We see the things that do and don't matter to David in his last moments, the memories that stick and those that drop away, the missed chances and the mistaken priorities. "All the tools he has used to keep himself busy and prop up his idea of who David Hastings is have fallen away, and he's left blinking and looking around at what remains," says Cline. To confront death so starkly is uncomfortable, but strangely invigorating.

The book is often funny too. At one point David looks out the car window to see a sign, "ausfahrt", for an off-road ramp in Switzerland. "Assfart. Thanks a lot – assfart, very good," thinks David, taking it as some sort of message that this world is no longer for him.

The divided reaction

Critics have largely praised Switzy, with The Sunday Times calling it "a stunning achievement", The Guardian describing it as "profoundly moving" and The Atlantic "gut-twisting".

Not everyone has been bowled over. A viral Substack post by Devon Halliday titled "Literary Fiction Has Lost The Plot" pulls apart the book's "slow, vague, broody opening" line by line.

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A review in the Los Angeles Review of Books admires Cline's prose and ambition but wonders how much people will connect with David. "Cline sets a challenge for herself of convincing readers they should expend time and energy on a story about an unpleasant one-percenter's final days," writes Nick Roberts.

Whether or not you think Cline pulls it off, it's difficult to deny that Switzy is anything less than a daring, unique reading experience. In this unsettling age, perhaps we're craving stories that explore the very core of what it means to be human – and dying is the most human experience of all.

"As life gets smaller and starts to fall away, what is left?," Cline reflected to the New Yorker. "What remains of our living? What of ourselves stays with us? These are questions that I struggle with as a mortal person, that I think all of us have to contend with in some way."

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'Condemned as unnatural': 10 images of 19th-Century Parisian women who lived and dressed as men

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20261027-10-images-of-19th-century-parisian-women-who-rebelled-against-the-trouser-ban, 5 days ago

In 1800, women in Paris were banned from wearing trousers. Throughout the 19th and early 20th Century, many flouted or found a way around the law, rebelling against the stifling restrictions in order to dress – or in some cases live – as men. Here are 10 images capturing their distinctive style and their bravery.

During the French Revolution (1789-1799) many of the women of Paris had donned trousers to join male protestors on the barricades. Their hopes for liberty and equality on a par with men were expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Women. Yet its author Olympe DeGouge went on to be guillotined in 1793, condemned as an "unnatural" woman.

In 1800 the wearing of trousers for women was banned in Paris "to put an end to the period when women were demanding rights and wishing to participate in the political life of their society," says Marine Kisiel, curator of new exhibition, A Wardrobe of One's Own: Dissident Femininities in the 19th Century, at the Palais Galliera in Paris.

French women in the 19th Century were expected to be content in the role of wife and mother. They were to be admired by painters and poets and defined by their feminine attire. But a great many French women rebelled against these strictures, particularly at the end of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, when the first wave of feminism coincided with a burgeoning lesbian subculture in Paris.

The fight for the right to wear male clothing is an overlooked chapter in the history of women's rights, perhaps no more so than in France. Masculine clothing gave women a sense of agency as they broke down barriers to enter universities and professions that had previously been excluded to them, or as they sought to freely express their sexuality. The press mocked them, the authorities cracked down, and the medical establishment condemned them as "inverts", but women continued to push for sartorial freedom. Here, we explore this history in 10 images.

Amazon on horseback (1799)

Masculine fashion for women in France first appeared in the late 18th Century in the form of the riding habit, a style imported from England. Both the jacket and the women who wore them were known as Amazons, after the female warriors of Greek legend, suggesting that these agile, sporty women were viewed with both fascination and fear. As the century progressed, tailored jackets and coats became an increasingly important part of women's wardrobes.

George Sand dressed as a man by Eugène Delacroix (1834)

While feminised versions of male styles were socially acceptable, wearing male clothing was not. This famously did not stop George Sand, the groundbreaking author and journalist who shunned gender conventions, living and loving as she chose. For Sand, wearing male clothing wasn't intended as a provocation, it was simply more practical. She wore it "to gain access to spaces reserved for men, such as the theatre stalls, because men's clothing was more economical than women's attire, and because she wished to enjoy freedom of movement and action," Kisiel tells the BBC.

Marie-Antoinette Lix, lieutenant (1870/71)

Given the patriarchal nature of French 19th-Century society, it may come as a surprise to learn that a number of women took up arms. "Numerous accounts and photographic series exist, and we know it was a significant phenomenon," says Kisiel. They were excluded from joining the army proper but they were able to join the irregular volunteer corps. During the Franco-Prussian War, Marie-Antoinette Lix did just that, taking part in the defence of the Vosges department, and distinguishing herself during the Battle of Nompatelize.

Jane Dieulafoy (c 1890s)

Jane – or Jeanne – Dieulafoy also fought, alongside her husband Marcel, during the war. She took up masculine attire once again when the couple embarked on a series of archaeological excursions in Persia (now Iran). Thereafter Dieulafoy chose to dress in dapper men's suits, for which she managed to obtain a permit, although on what grounds remains unclear. This seems to have done nothing to prevent her becoming a major society figure. The couple hosted an exclusive salon and regularly socialised with both the French prime minister and president.

Caricature (late 19th Century)

With concerns around women in male clothing growing towards the end of the century, masculinised lesbians bore the brunt of much of this hostility. "Through both their gender presentation and their sexuality, they doubly eluded heteropatriarchal male control," the art historian Lola Charnay tells the BBC. They were frequently caricatured by the press who "created a scapegoat for a collective imagination that oscillated between fascination with those who broke free from social norms, and a need to tame that defiance in order to maintain a degree of social control," says Charnay.

The Cycle Chalet in the Bois de Boulogne by Jean Béraud (c1900)

Although the rules against women wearing trousers were vigorously enforced at the time, cycling was the one activity where it was permitted (it was later extended to horse riding). However, not even this activity had escaped the male establishment's desire to intervene in every aspect of women's lives. Doctors had initially voiced concern, before concluding that it was good for women's health and would produce the vigorous mothers that France needed. Women, in contrast, simply saw it as a route to freedom and the bicycle became a powerful symbol of female emancipation in the Belle Époque.

Rosa Bonheur (1899)

The artist Rosa Bonheur, pictured here on the right, is one of the few women known to have been granted a permit to wear trousers for other reasons. Initially given one for health reasons when she accompanied her partner on a trip to the Pyrenees, she was later granted another for the abattoir visits which enabled her to conduct research for her animal paintings. Eventually "it became a part of her public profile, and she started to play up to it a little bit," says her biographer, Catherine Hewitt.

Mathilde de Morny (1890s)

Despite the attitudes of society at large, Paris was home to a thriving lesbian subculture in the late 19th Century, and Mathilde de Morny, better known as Missy, was one of its leading lights. The daughter of the Duke of Morny, Missy had entered into a marriage of convenience with the Marquis de Belbeuf, who was himself homosexual, although the pair divorced in 1903. Openly lesbian, Missy adapted flamboyant masculine style and had an affair with the writer Colette who included a fictional version of her in the novel The Pure and the Impure.

Romaine Brooks self-portrait (1923)

The daughter of wealthy parents from the US, the artist Romaine Brooks spent much of her life in Paris where her long-term partner Nathalie Clifford Barney also lived. Sporting a short hairstyle and elegantly tailored masculine clothing, Brooks frequented a circle of equally wealthy, unconventional Europeans and Americans, many of whom were also creatively minded and lesbian. This 1920s self-portrait epitomises her refined, androgynous style.

Female couple (c1910)

However, the vast majority of lesbians who adopted male clothing were neither rich nor famous. They were simply ordinary women who wanted to assert their identity. Where and how they were able to dress as they chose "depended on their strategies, their 'passing,' and their social context. For a great many ordinary individuals, nothing is known due to a lack of archival records, yet photographs reveal that they constituted a multitude," says Kisiel.

The ban remained on the statute books for more than 200 years, and was formally repealed in 2013 – though it had been largely ignored for decades. Every Parisian woman who today thinks nothing of pulling on a pair of trousers owes these uncompromising women a debt of gratitude.

A Wardrobe of One's Own: Dissident Femininities in the 19th Century is at the Palais Galliera in Paris until 14 February 2027.

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'He was desperate to escape': Why the real Christopher Robin resented being linked to Winnie-the-Pooh

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20261023-why-the-real-christopher-robin-resented-winnie-the-pooh, 7 days ago

AA Milne's first Pooh book was published a century ago in October 1926. Generations of children loved it, but its inspiration, the author's own son, told the BBC that he took to "running away when people bring up the subject".

"Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred." This is the plaintive cry made by Christopher Robin to his teddy bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, in the final chapter of The House in Pooh Corner.

British novelist and playwright AA Milne needn't have worried. The first Winnie-the-Book was published 100 years ago in October 1926, and introduced a cast of characters modelled on the author's son and the soft toys he played with: lovably dim Pooh Bear, nervy Piglet, hyperactive Tigger, pessimistic Eeyore. Far from being forgotten, in the century since then the characters have taken on a life far beyond the parameters of their idyllic home, the Hundred Acre Wood.

From 1966, they became the subject of animated and live-action Disney films, in what is now one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time. Pooh Bear has even courted controversy in Poland for being "inappropriate", sparked memes mocking the Chinese president Xi Jinping, and prompted tongue-in-cheek pop-culture theories in which the residents of the Hundred Acre Wood have been "diagnosed" with different psychological conditions.

Yet the reality of Pooh's inception and following success was not easy for Milne's son, who appeared in the books as Christopher Robin. On the BBC's Desert Island Discs in 1976, he said that he was "excited and proud" when the books were first published, but that the thrill of being linked to Winnie-the-Pooh "began to pall when I grew a bit older".

He then came to resent his father's literary use of the childhood games he played in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England, the inspiration for the Hundred Acre Wood. "It seemed to me almost that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son," Christopher wrote in his 1974 memoir The Enchanted Places.

As portrayed in the 2017 film Goodbye Christopher Robin, his was not quite the carefree childhood of Milne's books. "People like myself were in those days brought up by nanny. And really all my childhood up to the age of 10 was nanny-dominated," he told the BBC in 1971.

He revealed that he didn't know his parents in his early years. "Both my parents were fairly remote up to the age of about nine… I only saw them at particular periods during the day." He also claimed that the books weren't intended for him. "[My father] wasn't concerned with me. He was writing for himself."

Shyness and jealousy

In his memoir, Christopher recalled how, when a journalist told his father that his books "seemed to show a great understanding and love of children", his response was that "I am not inordinately fond of them… and I've certainly never felt in the least sentimental about them".

In the same interview, when asked how being a household name had affected his son, AA Milne replied, more slowly, that he hoped "it had done him no harm".

That hope wasn't quite realised. In Christopher's memoir, he explained: "Unfortunately the fictional Christopher Robin refused to die, and he and his real-life namesake were not always on the best of terms." As a schoolboy, his association with the character had been "a sore place that looked as if it would never heal up", due to his crippling shyness.

Then, once he became an adult and was struggling to find work, jealousy caused more problems. Although his father had appeared to have succeeded by his own efforts, Christopher asked, "Were they entirely his own efforts? Hadn't I come into it somewhere?"

He was desperate to escape from forever being known as Christopher Robin. The owner of his childhood home, where the Pooh stories were set, told the BBC in 2002 that he had invited Christopher to visit a few decades earlier. "He wrote back a rather unpleasant letter saying nothing would induce him to cross the threshold of this house ever again."

Christopher did return to Ashdown Forest in 1979 to throw his own Pooh Sticks (a game he'd played that was made famous in the books). But eight years later, after he'd helped the local council buy the woods in order to preserve them, he still acknowledged that being known as the boy with the bear had been a burden – saying he dealt with it "mainly by avoiding it and running away when people bring up the subject".

Yet by the end of his life, Christopher had reconciled himself to his father's work, if not to the discomfort of his unwanted fame. "He came to accept that his father, in fact, had been devoted to him and that he had had no idea of what was going to happen," AA Milne's biographer Ann Thwaite told the BBC in 2002.

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Christopher was able to see that the Pooh books might have been a way for his father to bridge the gap between them in his early years, allowing him to express the things he couldn't say otherwise. "My father's heart remained buttoned up all through his life," Christopher wrote in his memoir. "He felt deeply, but he kept his feelings to himself – or rather, being a writer, he let them escape in his writing. But even here he disguised them… and so, such sadnesses as there were put on cap and bells and emerged as Eeyore."

Christopher agreed that he'd come to see Winnie-the-Pooh as a way for his father to find a connection with him. "People sometimes say to me today, 'How lucky you were to have had such a wonderful father,' imagining that, because he wrote about me with much affection and understanding, he must have played with me with equal affection and understanding."

Yet, Christopher wrote, "My father was a creative writer, and so it was precisely because he was not able to play with his small son that his longing sought and found satisfaction in another direction – he wrote about him instead."

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'They handled it exactly the right way': How the Kennedys averted the 1962 Cuban missile crisis

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20261015-the-men-who-averted-the-1962-cuban-missile-crisis, 14 days ago

Between 14 and 28 October 1962, the world came to the brink of nuclear war. According to insiders who spoke to the BBC, the expertise of US President John F Kennedy and his brother Robert saved the day.

It was, said a BBC Panorama presenter on 29 October 1962, "the most dangerous week in the whole history of mankind".

On 14 October, US aerial photographs had shown that the Soviets had secretly been installing nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba, 90 miles (150km) from the US coast. Over the following 14 days, a confrontation between the two superpowers threatened to boil over – and the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war.

The crisis was ultimately averted when the Soviets agreed to remove their weapons. In the years since then, insiders have spoken to the BBC, revealing surprising insights into the tactics behind the scenes during 14 days that shook the world. The Soviets' climb-down, it turned out, was influenced by US President John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy's expert statesmanship – and a chance conversation overheard in a Washington bar.

Throughout the summer of 1962, more than 40,000 Soviet soldiers, engineers and technicians arrived in the Cuban port of Havana, posing as tourists and agricultural specialists, and covertly installing nuclear missiles on the island.

On 14 October, a US spy plane spotted evidence of the missiles, sparking the crisis. Arthur Lundahl, then the CIA's head of photo intelligence, told the BBC's Timewatch in 1992 about the moment when they realised exactly what they were seeing. "I put my head over the eyepiece and adjusted the viewfinders and took one long look at that. And I looked up at them and I said, 'I know what you're thinking. And I'm thinking the same thing… We're looking at Soviet-type medium-range ballistic missile sites, right?'"

In fact, Soviet activity in Cuba had sparked concerns in the US for weeks beforehand, prompting President Kennedy to request more detailed intelligence. According to the US Secretary of Defense at that time, Robert McNamara, the spy plane revelation came after multiple previous warnings.

"I think the [US military] received 5,000 reports of missiles being introduced into Cuba, and they investigated them and finally concluded they were erroneous," he told Timewatch. "They couldn't believe that wise political authorities… would run the risk of introducing those missiles into Cuba because there was very little advantage to be gained by it and very heavy risks associated with it."

A high-stakes poker game

The discovery of Soviet missiles on Cuba was kept secret from the world by order of the US president, until he announced it in a speech on 22 October. In the meantime, Kennedy had a pre-arranged meeting with the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, on 18 October.

What happened next was relayed to the BBC in 2002 by Gromyko's translator that day, the British-educated Viktor Sukhodrev. "We went, as usual, to the Oval Office. Kennedy was sitting in his customary rocking chair and Gromyko was sort of next to him and there were two couches opposite each other and a little table in between with a drawer," he told the BBC's former Moscow correspondent Allan Little. "It was civilised, if not the friendliest of discussions. I somehow felt that Kennedy was rather tense."

As Little summed it up, "Gromyko knew about the missiles. Kennedy knew about the missiles. But neither man revealed his hand. What passed between them was a dialogue of illusion and insinuation, a poker game in which the stakes were the lives of all of us."

Kennedy had the aerial photographs at arm's length – but chose not to confront Gromyko with the images. "They were in the drawer of that table," said Sukhodrev. "Kennedy never once mentioned the word missile, and he never touched that drawer. And I don't know, and no one ever will know, what Gromyko would have said had Kennedy shown him those photographs… But the plain fact is that Gromyko did not have to lie. The question was not put to him."

Instead, Kennedy repeated a public statement he'd given on 4 September, warning that the introduction of offensive weapons into Cuba would bring the "gravest consequences" – and Gromyko read out his own statement, asserting that Soviet aid to Cuba was purely defensive and did not pose a threat to the US.

Yet Kennedy had already convened a war cabinet, known as Excomm, and within days would declare the existence of the photos to the world. Secret recordings of the cabinet revealed the guessing games being played by the US during those tense days.

"He's initiated the danger, really, hasn't he? He's the one playing God, not us," said Kennedy, with a member of Excomm replying: "We've never really believed that Khrushchev would take on a general nuclear war over Cuba… I must say I don't really see the rationality of the Soviets pushing it this far."

The fateful barroom conversation

The cabinet was divided over what action to take, with further U-2 flights revealing that the missile bases were nearing completion. The Joint Chiefs of Staff preferred a course that involved military action. "There had to be a final decision made… as to what our reaction was going to be," Dean Rusk, the then US Secretary of State, told Timewatch. "We were sitting around the cabinet table, and the president was the last one to come in, and we rose as he entered the room. And he looked around the table and said, 'Well, gentlemen, today we're going to earn our pay.'"

Kennedy ruled out an immediate airstrike followed by invasion, fearing the dangers of escalation. Instead he announced a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba, demanding that the missile sites be dismantled.

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Khrushchev's subsequent decision to withdraw was also influenced by an incident that only came to light after the Soviet Union collapsed. On 25 October, "Khrushchev, eyeball-to-eyeball with the West for three days, blinked," reported Allan Little in 2002. "The story of why he blinked is extraordinary and chilling."

An undercover KGB agent in Washington, posing as the Washington correspondent for the Soviet news agency Tass, had called in at the National Press Club for a drink just as the bar was closing the night before. Anatoly Gorsky got chatting to the bartender, a Russian emigre called Johnny Prokoff – who told him about a private conversation he'd overheard a couple of hours earlier between two journalists from the New York Herald Tribune, Warren Rogers and Robert Donovan.

According to Prokoff, Donovan was planning to fly to Miami that night as one of a small group of correspondents joining a US invasion force due to attack Cuba the next day. Gorsky rushed back to the Soviet embassy and messaged Moscow that an invasion was imminent.

Soviet intelligence gathering was not as advanced as Cold War paranoia might have led the US to believe, however. It turned out that the journalists had only been discussing contingency plans for covering a US invasion of Cuba, rather than confirming that an invasion was planned. Prokoff, who is not believed to have been a KGB agent, had misheard.

The terrors of a world war

Yet news of the chance encounter was sent straight to Khrushchev's desk. A close aide to the Soviet Premier, Oleg Troyanovsky, recalled that he had been extremely alarmed by the message. "By that time, I think, he realised that this is a pretty dirty business which he got himself into."

Some believed Kennedy was playing for time all along. "People were thinking in terms of this is a situation that unless it is handled with great skill and delicacy, could certainly finish up with nuclear war," Lord Harlech, the British ambassador to the US, told the BBC in 1969. Harlech also happened to be a personal friend of Kennedy's – and his brother Robert, JFK's most trusted adviser.

"The president and Bobby entirely accepted that Khrushchev had some very, very difficult decisions to take. He had committed himself to this course of action. If he was to withdraw from it, he would need a lot of time in order to reorganise his position in the Kremlin, reorganise the Soviet position vis-à-vis its allies, vis-à-vis Cuba. And every few hours extra that they would give him would help."

Harold Macmillan, who was the British prime minister at the time of the crisis, told the BBC that the US president and his brother had precisely the right qualities that were needed during the crisis. "First, a statesman – and both Kennedys had that statesmanship – must try and see the other man's point of view. How he's got himself into that position and how to help him to get out of it... And that was the policy they pursued."

The second quality they needed was a full appreciation of "the horror… the terrible destruction" of a nuclear war. "And yet they mustn't be overwhelmed by this horror… There's a point at which we've got to stand and make it clear to the other man we are going to stand. We mustn't therefore be frightened out of a firm and honourable position by the terrors of a world war."

In Macmillan's view, the Kennedys combined that "understanding for their opponent" with an "absolute firmness for the position which they would ultimately defend". The resolution of the crisis showed that "the men who handled it, handled it exactly the right way".

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'Successful year' as museum visitor numbers rise

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmeweq8rlqxxo, today

Visitor numbers to museums in Guernsey have risen year-on-year, official figures have shown.

The States of Guernsey said sites operated by Guernsey Museums had almost 66,000 visitors by the end of August, which it said represented a 3% increase compared to the same period in 2025.

It said events like the Castle Nights series and Twilight Cinema held at Castle Cornet over the summer also boosted figures with thousands of people attending.

Helen Glencross, head of culture and heritage services at the States, said the visitor numbers - which had since gone up to about 75,000 - showed the "strong appeal" of Guernsey's history.

"It has been fantastic to see such strong support for our events programme, alongside the many exhibitions and family activities offered throughout the season," Glencross said.

Fort Grey and the German Signals Headquarters closed on Sunday while Castle Cornet was shut on 6 September to enable restoration work to take place at the bridge next to the site.

The Guernsey Museum at Candie will remain open until 31 December, the States added.

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Song urges builders to talk about mental health

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmrlyp06016yo, today

A construction company manager is using music as a way of getting more men in the industry talking about their mental health following the loss of his uncle.

Ben Francis, from Bruton, Somerset, has written a song as a way of raising awareness and money for mental health charities after his uncle, Jonathan Carpenter, took his own life in December 2023.

Jonathan was a "meticulous carpenter" and Francis hopes his uncle's story and his song will strike a cord with fellow construction workers and encourage them to open up about their mental health.

"I want natural construction voices to come and be heard and help me share the message that we should be talking about mental health in construction."

"It takes a little bit of strength to say how you're feeling, so think of it as a good thing," he said.

"In the industry we haven't done it and mental health awareness has been around for while now and what I want to do is take a bit more action."

Francis has worked in the industry since 15 and now runs his family business.

Construction sites are well known for their banter and camaraderie but Francis believes that sometimes things might not be all as they seem.

"[It was] a terrible moment because [my uncle] felt like he couldn't reach out and talk about how he was feeling," he said.

"Even for the guys who might have had an inkling, no one really knew how to deal with what was going on.

"I think he was struggling personally, he was going through what a lot of guys go through, he was 50 and sort of in a mid-life crisis moment and unsure of what he was doing.

"He had lost a lot of confidence in what he was doing and I think all these things snowballed."

Studies have shown that talking and being part of an active community can help improve overall mental health and Francis hopes that introducing this to construction could go a long way.

"If you ask guys on site how they're doing, the common phrase is 'living the dream' and we all know that's sarcasm," he said.

"I think that each day the pulling pranks and joking is just a way of dealing with issues in their own way but actually they're not speaking to anybody.

"We should be talking on site and just being able to open up about our feelings."

'Smile in the Dirt'

Jonathan was a keen musician and started creating music at a very young age.

He passed this love of music on to his nephew and helped him write his first song at just 10 years old.

Francis has now released a new single called Smile in the Dirt, that highlights the pressures of working in the industry and calls on people to talk about how they are feeling.

The song was recorded at Abbey Road Studios and all proceeds will go to four mental health charities.

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Performing arts school marks 75 years in showbiz

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqrmypddvnzno, today

A performing arts and dance school is marking its 75th year with a special show recreating some its much-loved routines from decades past.

YSD Theatre School in Crewe, Cheshire, which used to be known as the Yvonne School of Dance, has taught generations of families, including some who have gone on to perform on the West End and around the world.

It was founded by the late Yvonne Chesters who died a year ago, and is now run by her sister Gail Montague.

"They key to it is, Yvonne always said she wanted the school to be a family school," Montague explained.

Rather than "Miss", pupils address their teachers only by their first names.

She added that Yvonne had told her she would like the school to reach its centenary, and her aim was to ensure that was the case.

Montague was just two years old when she started at the school, and has been involved for 73 of its 75 years – but arguably her involvement goes even further than that.

"I was something like 12 months old, when I sat on my mother's knee – my mother used to play the piano for the school and my father used to do the stage managing for the shows – so I've always been at the school from a baby."

Montague is keeping the family tradition alive as her son Joel has also been through the school and has starred in the West End productions of Hamilton, Waitress and Elf The Musical.

Seeing him on stage still brought a lump to her throat, she told BBC Radio Stoke.

"Every time I see him on stage I get upset," she said.

"Yvonne taught him to tap, I taught him to do modern [dance] and ballet, but he's got where he's got on his own."

And he is not the only one - others from the school have gone on to careers in the West End and on television.

The celebration show will be hosted at Crewe's Lyceum Theatre on 14 November, with a matinee on 15 November, and will include a compilation of Montague's sister's memories, marking a year since she died and 75 years of the school.

"It's her favourite routines that she liked, and we've actually chosen routines back from 1977 and recreated them," she said.

The event will also be raising money for an Alzeheimer's charity, a cause that was close to Yvonne's heart as her husband currently lives with the disease.

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How one musician turned disability and isolation into a song

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx5yngj43v56o, today

When people talk about disability, the conversation often focuses on symptoms, treatment and physical barriers.

Less often discussed is the loneliness that can accompany chronic illness and disability.

For singer-songwriter Nikki Rous, a wheelchair user, that experience became the inspiration for a new song exploring the isolation that can accompany disability and chronic illness.

"I think as a disabled person, and [with] many other people that suffer from chronic illness, chronic pain and disability, there's a certain amount of isolation," she said.

"It's a very different lifestyle to when I was able-bodied.

"I just wanted to get that point across really about the loneliness and isolation and hopefully make some people feel not so alone."

Her latest song, No Space Left, draws on personal experience, but touches on feelings that many people living with long-term health conditions may recognise.

For Rous, songwriting has become a way of processing experiences that can be difficult to explain.

"It's quite cathartic for me," she said.

"If I'm having a tough time, I'll generally write it all out, produce a song and then I've kind of moved on from that place."

The song is informed in part by her experience of living with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), a group of rare inherited conditions that affect the body's connective tissues.

Connective tissue supports the skin, joints, blood vessels and organs, and symptoms can include chronic pain, fatigue and mobility problems.

Rous said EDS was the condition she was born with, although she also lives with other related conditions.

"It's a genetic connective tissue disorder that affects your collagen production and the connective tissue throughout your whole body, so it causes multisystemic problems," she said.

Although disability is rarely a subject heard in chart music, she believes there is value in writing openly about experiences that are often overlooked.

Asked whether that was part of her motivation, she replied: "Yes, I think so.

"Maybe part of that reason is because we're too ill to get to that level. The touring, the recording and everything that goes with it."

Her songs have long explored difficult subjects, including mental health and heartache, and she said audience members frequently tell her they recognise their own experiences in her lyrics.

"I did get a lot of people coming up to me after gigs and saying that they felt really seen and heard," she said.

"They've not really spoken openly about things that were affecting them, and they can see that someone else is able to do that."

Music has been at the centre of her life since childhood. Originally hailing from Tamworth, but now based in Shropshire, Rous has supported acts including Level 42 and Jamiroquai during her career, while continuing to write and perform original material.

Away from the stage, she has also spent the past eight years helping other artists find an audience through a songwriter showcase she runs at Albert's Shed in Shrewsbury.

But since undergoing spinal surgery in 2019, she said both her mobility and pain levels have worsened, making some aspects of performing increasingly difficult.

"It might be getting to the point where I will no longer be able to play music," she said.

"It's getting harder to play guitar. My voice, obviously, that's full of connective tissue, your vocal cords, so it's not what it used to be."

Despite that uncertainty, she remains determined to continue writing and performing for as long as possible.

"It's really just to get all these ideas out that I never recorded," she said.

"I will continue gigging [for] as long as I can."

For Rous, No Space Left is an attempt to shine a light on an experience that often goes unspoken. Through her music, she hopes people living with disability, chronic illness and isolation will feel, as she puts it, "not so alone".

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Museum wing reopens after four-year project

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crgj9wjzl9zwo, today

A museum has reopened its main wing after a four-year "major refurbishment project".

The Wilson Museum in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, will be regularly changing what is on display as they have over 250,000 items, many on local history, and cannot display them all at once.

The museum, founded in 1899, invited members of the public to suggest what items they should display and received almost 60,000 responses.

Jessica Brewster, the museum's CEO, said: "This marks the beginning of a new chapter exploring our local history through the museum's exhibition spaces."

Brewster said the online response, which was part of the BIG Museum Project, told them that people were keen to see themes being represented rather than just a set timeline.

"We've got an origins theme and how Cheltenham began, all the way through to the regency period," she said.

Brewster said that the opening weekend was a "roaring success" that attracted thousands of visitors.

This project was funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and cost around £600,000.

Stuart McLeod, director of England at the National Lottery Heritage Fund, said it showed how "heritage can be reimagined to feel relevant and inclusive".

The museum also plans to change one gallery every six months to represent a different community group from across Cheltenham.

"It was very important for us that this museum reflects the community and is about them- this is their stories, so it was very very important for us to have a space that was continually co-created with people from the community," Brewster said.

The first group to be featured is a traditional Chinese dance group, led by dance teacher Juju.

"We're very very excited," said Juju, who also played the clarinet as part of a band at the official opening event.

"We use our dance to bring the objects we chose to life and to reflect our community," she said.

"The Wilson has always been an important part of our town's cultural life, and this transformation gives residents and visitors the opportunity to see Cheltenham's story through fresh eyes," said Izaac Tailford, from Cheltenham Borough Council.

"What makes this project particularly special is that it has been shaped by the voices of our communities," he added.

"Thousands of people have shared their ideas about the stories that matter to them, helping to create a museum that reflects not only our history but the people, experiences and communities that continue to shape Cheltenham today".

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Gavin and Stacey actor hopes his band will be 'the next Stereophonics'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmkgq0v87z8zo, today

Gavin and Stacey fans will likely remember Oscar Hartland, or Neil the Baby, for his heart-warming performance of The Beatle's Blackbird in the sitcom's 2024 finale.

The episode was watched by about 12.3m people on Christmas day and saw Hartland's character serenade the crowd at the wedding of his on-screen dad Smithy, played by James Cordon.

But that was just the start for Hartland, now 17, who says his band is aiming to be "the next 'Phonics, or something like that".

He has recently released a new single and he and his fellow band members are on a "mission to create a new modern sound for Wales".

Hartland, from Machen, Caerphilly county, said his latest release, Wild Bull, was rooted in "being a bit crazy" and the challenges of growing up in the south Wales valleys.

The actor and singer went on his first tour in 2025 and said the past few months had been about "figuring out the earth behind the sound" with his bandmates Cayden Hughes on bass, Aiden Williams on drums, and Deacon Ball on electric guitar.

"We've had lots of people say it's rocky, but it's Welsh and it's got lots of stuff behind it," he told Lucy Owen on BBC Radio Wales.

"Growing up, I was just a wild bull, I was just mental, you know, in school, just out and about, playing rugby, being wild, being crazy. I know loads of my friends who are just the same.

"It's very hard as a young lad, especially Wales in the valleys, to keep yourself contained, because there is so much trouble to get up to."

Hartland said he surrounded himself with music growing up and described himself as a bit of a "black sheep".

"I was playing the piano while everyone else was watching rugby," he said.

But he added the new single was all about "letting go and saying, 'this is me I'm a wild bull'."

Hartland said the response to the song, which was released on Friday, had been brilliant.

"People are loving it, the interaction is nuts... it's really nice.

"The biggest thing is trying to create a movement, that people can feel a part of."

At 14 years old, Hartland took part in The Voice Kids in the hopes of kickstarting his rock career.

His performance of Foo Fighters' My Hero impressed the judges and was also seen by Gavin and Stacey writers James Cordon and Ruth Jones, who approached him with the idea of performing in the series finale.

The Christmas day finale episode became one of the most watched scripted TV shows of the century, seen by 19.11 million people after seven days of catch-up viewing and beating the show's previous record of 17.92m for the 2019 Christmas special.

Nearly two years on, Hartland said it "blows his mind" that people are still talking about it.

"It's ageing well to be fair," he said.

Hartland added support was "always there" from his fellow Gavin and Stacey cast members, which was "lush".

"A lot of people don't really know what it would be like to be in our boots, I suppose, sort of, with the size of it," he said.

He said it was nice to see cast members pursuing "other adventures" too, such as Melanie Walters, who played Gwen, recently taking part in Strictly Come Dancing.

Hartland has been recording at Rockfield studios in Monmouth, which has also played host to the likes of Oasis, Iggy Pop and Queen.

"I want to record there all the time, because I just love what the place is about and I want that to be behind me as well," said Hartland.

"It's spectaular, you feel all of the presence of the past bands there looking at you like 'is he going to make a good song?'"

Despite his developing music career, Hartland said he would not rule out more acting in the future, as he is "just trying things out".

While he has not yet had a chance to cover the iconic Gavin and Stacey theme song, Run by Stephen Fretwell, he said he would love to in the future.

"It's iconic," he said, adding "that would be brilliant".

Artists hiding painted pebbles around the world

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c674pvkkp2eyo, yesterday

A craft group has hit 8,000 members six years after they began hiding painted pebbles around the world.

Stephanie Winter and her aunt Victoria Morris set up Consett Rocks in 2020 to help people stay creative during the coronavirus pandemic.

Since then, Winter has painted hundreds of stones and the group has amassed thousands of members on social media, all posting painted pebbles they have hidden or found.

Winter said she had been "amazed" to see how large the group had become and to know how many strangers they had made smile.

"We created the group to help people in and around the Consett area get creative and active again during lockdown," Winter said.

"Everyone who has found a rock and shared it on the group has always said its made them happy."

She said some people who found the painted rocks left them where they were, others took them home for their gardens and some hid them in different locations.

Winter once hid a Consett Rock in Iceland and remarkably it made its way back to the UK.

Leanne Harris and her family first started painting rocks after discovering a Consett Rock while on a day out.

She said some of their creations had popped back up in entirely different countries months after being placed.

"My husband hid a rock in Durham in July 2025 and it was not seen again until it turned up in October in Australia," Harris said.

"We hid a little crab rock in Bowlees Visitor Centre [in Teesdale] and it was found by a family having a holiday before the mum's maternity leave ended, and they took it home and put it in their baby's memory box."

Harris recommended people give pebble painting a go because all you needed was "a simple little rock and a bit of paint which ends up making someone's day".

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'My cattle don't care I'm in Clarkson's choir'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx8dzlzeggq3o, yesterday

Richard Heady has been involved in farm life ever since he could "lift a barrel".

His day job is tending hundreds of cows on his family's Buckinghamshire farm, a role he has undertaken full-time since he was 22.

But in May, the 39-year-old's life changed when the group he is part of, Hawkstone Farmers' Choir – put together by Jeremy Clarkson to support farmers with their mental health – won Britain's Got Talent.

"It's such a great feeling, and then you come back to the everyday life and the cattle couldn't care less what I've been up to," he said.

His family runs the WF Heady and Sons farm in Newton Longville, near Milton Keynes.

"We have beef cattle, we grow all of our own food for the cattle, our silage, beans and barley; then we also have arable crops: wheat for bread, oats for porridge and muesli," he said.

Heady said there had been times when the pressures of farm life had "gotten tough" for him.

"I've had a really good support network around me – I've changed things on the farm to make it slightly easier," he said.

"I do a lot of running, which helps clear my head. The key is just talking; opening up.

"It's so nice to have these breaks off the farm, catching up with friends, singing in unison – but then you come back to earth with a bump."

After the win, the choir announced it was donating £50,000 of its £250,000 prize money to five charities supporting farming, mental health, and rural communities.

"It's a community of farmers trying to do their best for the whole farming industry and we're so lucky that we can do that in a fun and kind of buoyant way," said Heady.

"It's a really hard message to get across but if we can do it by singing and just having a good time and spreading the message I just feel so honoured and lucky that we can do that."

Heady said the choir was made possible by its director, Lizzie Dean, from Milton Keynes, who was its "heart and soul".

"She completely took a bunch of farmers who were probably in their shells a bit, scared to show vulnerability, and she just pulled that out of us and just got us acting silly and sharing our stories and opening up," he said.

He does not think they would have made it past the first round without her.

Since the win the choir has released a song and announced a tour, which needs to be juggled with working life.

"I'm going to be working on the farm, evenings, mornings, and shooting off to try and do the shows and then shooting back as soon as I can to get back and finish doing the work," said Heady.

He said he was only able to do it with "fantastic family support".

"They've all had to step up and my wife's doing far more of the children's ferrying around.

"My dad and uncle are doing more than they should be doing because I should be the younger generation, taking on most of the work.

"I just owe them so much for helping me along this journey."

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'It's been killing me!' Celebrity Traitors winners relieved the secret is out

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm4g18l8l4wgo, yesterday

* Spoiler warning: This story reveals details of The Celebrity Traitors final

The winners of Celebrity Traitors have said they are relieved that they no longer need to keep the biggest secret in British TV, as they reunited to celebrate their victory.

Actor Sebastian Croft and comedian Romesh Ranganathan were the last ones standing, with the two faithfuls splitting the £83,000 prize pot between their chosen charities.

"I am feeling good, it's so nice to finally be able to talk about it properly," Croft, known to pals as Bash, told BBC Newsbeat.

The second series of the hit BBC One show finished on Friday, after the original 21 celebs were whittled down to seven finalists.

Reuniting with Ranganathan on the comedian's BBC Radio 2 show on Saturday morning, Croft said they had been worried about being seen together in public before the final.

"We were having dinner and we're not exactly a likely duo and the whole restaurant was like, 'we like you on Traitors and hope you win'," he said.

Croft added that he had woken up on Saturday "with a light sense that I don't have to keep the secret anymore. It's been killing me".

Ranganathan, 48, started his show by saying: "Last night, I don't know if you're aware, was the finale of The Celebrity Traitors and I won."

He said he was "delighted to win" but admitted he probably wouldn't have done so without Croft convincing him to banish the last remaining traitor, King Kenny.

"It's taken the gloss off it slightly that everybody's saying, 'you better thank [Croft] every day for the rest of your life'," he added, with his typical deadpan-humour.

But 24-year-old Croft said he thought Ranganathan had played the game in a "lovely" way.

"People are seeing how smart you are and how you're actually so on it, and you're such a good judge of character," he praised.

The finale drew an average audience of 11.2 million live viewers, and that number will rise when fans catch up on iPlayer. Other recent episodes have been watched by more than 15 million, including catch-up.

"It's been a wild thing to be part of. To be on Uncloaked and sat with Romesh talking about winning was so surreal," Croft said, referencing the BBC's spin-off chat show.

"It's an out of body experience," he added.

Croft said he "really wanted to be a traitor", but he turned out to be one of the strongest faithfuls after voting out Kenny - a tactical decision on how to play the show's famous endgame.

"The truth is, I didn't know for sure, but what you're trying to do isn't find a traitor, it's trying to get rid of everyone who isn't the most faithful," he explained.

"I think for both Maya [Jama] and Kenny there was no big thing where I was like 'they're obviously a traitor', but when you boil it down they haven't done anything that's really stuck out enough to make them obviously faithful."

Croft told Newsbeat that he gets why "people are obsessed with the show" and even his family had their own theories about how the game would go.

"So many people get so invested and it's lovely because it becomes so much bigger."

The final saw the celebs successfully banish the remaining traitors - Love Island host Maya Jama and YouTuber King Kenny.

But Kenny shocked viewers when he turned on his fellow traitor Jama at the final round table.

Asked if he's spoken to her since then, Kenny joked that "she's blocked me on everything", and then admitted that he had pre-warned her.

"I already told her that I was going to vote for her and she knew potentially that could be coming," he said.

"It was just too obvious, if I didn't go for her at that point, I think my time would've been coming even quicker than when I went out."

Kenny said he "experienced everything possible in the game" after starting out as a faithful, getting a shield to protect him from murder and then being recruited as a traitor.

But he said he "should have had a better plan for the final" and wasn't prepared for how hard it would be.

"There were so many times when I felt bad pinning stuff on people," he said. "It's a very draining thing to do as a traitor.

"There's moments when there is fun but lying to people for that long is insane, you build friendships as well and feel bad."

On his show, Ranganathan also asked fellow finalist, Little Mix singer Leigh-Anne Pinnock, about taking part in challenges while pregnant.

In the final episode, Pinnock was seen hanging off the side of a helicopter and lowering herself to the ground with a rope.

"I'm just super proud of myself," she said. "It's kind of just shown me that I really can do anything I put my mind to."

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Rare Sir Grayson Perry work joins centenary exhibition

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqrmypy1vnego, yesterday

Rare early work by Sir Grayson Perry will go on display as part of an exhibition celebrating Portsmouth's centenary.

The Extremes of English Mediocrity, was created by Perry in 1986, four years after he graduated from Portsmouth Polytechnic with a degree in fine art.

It will be on show at the Hampshire city's museum as part of the Portsmouth 100 exhibition.

The city council said it was an important acquisition, bringing the artist's work into its collection of studio ceramics for the first time and reflecting his connection to the city.

Council leader Steve Pitt said: "It's great that we've been able to secure this important early work by Sir Grayson Perry, who has a strong connection with the city, having studied here.

"We're grateful to our museums team for securing the funding, and to Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and Art Fund for their support.

We're pleased to add this work to the city's collection as part of our Portsmouth100 exhibition for people to enjoy."

The free exhibition at Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery opened on 26 October.

It spans three galleries and 20 themed sections, covering football, music, transport, art and the dockyard.

It includes a painting gifted by Portsmouth-born artist Sir Christopher Le Brun, who has had one of the galleries named after him.

Events have been running throughout 2026 to mark the centenary, including live music performances, fireworks displays and a sculpture trail.

Filmmaker performs live soundtrack to new movie

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c64g1j4vkrdlo, yesterday

Film director Mark Jenkin has been performing a live soundtrack to his new film to "heighten the emotion" felt by the audience as the drama unfolds.

Jenkin's third film is the story of missing fishing trawler Rose of Nevada, which mysteriously returns to a Cornish harbour. Two young men, played by Callum Turner and George MacKay, join its crew unaware how their fates will change.

Jenkin has been performing the score live at theatre screenings with his musical partner Dion Star. They use improvised and composed pieces including tape machines, synths, guitars and field recordings.

He said the soundtrack could change at each showing. "We react to the film live with the audience," Jenkin said.

Jenkin's "creativity" has been praised by music critic Mark Kermode who saw one of the performances.

"Seeing the film with a live music performance is fantastic because they are creating the music right there in front of you.

"It's brilliant, it really adds another dimension to the movie," he said.

Jenkin, who performs with Star under the banner The Cornish Sound Unit, said they "reimagined" the soundtrack each time it was played so it was never exactly the same as it is the film.

"The music in the film is made by me in an idiosyncratic kind of way with lots of tape machines and stuff.

"We reimagine the score live, so it is bigger, because when you are on stage in front of a screen you don't want to not be doing things for large proportions of time," said Jenkin.

He said the music "played along with the audience's reactions".

"We are reacting to the audience - you can feel what direction they are going in, which bits they are finding funny and which bits are feeling emotional - we can heighten that and play with it.

"Sometimes I look to Dion and say we have done something special there. It's transcended what was there before.

"We are very much in the moment when we're doing it."

He said the instruments and techniques used to create the soundtrack had a direction of their own.

"Some is made using tape-to-tape machines. It's like a wild animal, you have no control over it, the only thing you can do is turn it off and we don't do that. It never sounds the same twice."

Jenkin said he liked adding a live element to the film-watching experience.

"The rooms we watch films in we call a cinema. Americans call them movie theatres. I prefer that, I like the idea of it being theatre, with a live element."

But Jenkin said what they were doing was "nothing new" and harped back to the days when a live pianist would play during silent movies.

"From the beginning of cinema to when talkies came in, every film had a live score.

"We are going back to the roots of what the cinematic experience was."

Kermode said he was not the only person who had been absorbed when watching the film with the live soundtrack as musician and radio presenter Jarvis Cocker shared his enthusiasm.

"I was at a showing when Mark was doing a live soundtrack and the really lovely thing was it was packed and at some point Jarvis Cocker came in and was overwhelmed by it. So next time he was on 6 music he played one of the tracks."

Next James Bond?

Rose of Nevada, released in 2025, was filmed in Hayle and Mullion in Cornwall and Jenkin has spoken about the challenges that tide and time presented him with.

Newlyn-born Jenkin won a Bafta for his debut Bait in 2020, a film documenting tensions between longstanding and new residents of a Cornish fishing village.

Jenkin said after filming Bait and the 2023 folk horror film Enys Men, which centred on a woman living on a Cornish island, he had said he "didn't want to do anything with boats again".

He had a change of heart however and decided to go ahead with Rose of Nevada, which was all filmed in west Cornwall and premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival.

Since appearing in the film, Turner has been named as one of the favourites to be cast as the next James Bond.

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How city became home of drum and bass and jungle

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmly09y5l0r0o, 2 days ago

It has been more than 30 years since Bristol with a "rebel" mentality ventured into the unknown, giving birth to the global phenomenon that is jungle and drum and bass music.

The city is still a heavyweight on the scene, inspiring generations of artists to continue pushing boundaries in dance music.

Jungle continues to be developed by artists across London and Bristol, but in its beginnings the sound from Bristol was more expansive and experimental.

It all started in the early 90s, with a DJ collective called Full Cycle. They were influenced by Jamaican sound systems, acid house and hip hop, which led to a new sound explosion in the city.

DJ Krust - who was part of the collective - said the music was about "finding expression through our artform which was DJing and producing".

"Rave culture was a huge factor in speeding the tempo up. Once it got to 160bpm and now it's 170bpm, that felt like home for us," he said.

The jungle music they had a hand in creating is still to this day characterised by its speed, syncopated rhythms, breakbeats and ragga, funk and reggae samples.

The Full Cycle collective showcased their new music on the streets at St Paul's Carnival and when they saw people liked it, they made more.

Krust said the beginnings of jungle and drum and bass were a partnership between the open mindedness of the city, the creativity of these DJs and their proximity to rave culture at free parties in the West Country countryside.

"We had to explore and dig deep to hear and see how this experiment can work in real time - that was huge to see," he said.

"When we finally figured out jungle we found our voice," he added.

The collective was made up of DJ Krust, DJ Die, producer Roni Size and DJ Suv - from Krust's original band Fresh Four, best-known for the top 10 hit Wishing on a Star.

By this time, Full Cycle had a show on commercial radio station Galaxy Radio - something Krust said became a really "pivotal moment" for the collective.

"It was like the calling for the youth - here you go, here's your new soundtrack, it's British and it's the sound of the streets," Krust said.

"You could feel it in the air that we'd got something and it was travelling through word of mouth - something was brewing and we could all feel it.

"This was the movement, this was the shift," he added.

In 1997, Full Cycle formed the live act Reprazent and released the album 'New Forms' which included the hit track Brown Paper Bag.

Later that year they made history by becoming the first drum and bass group to win the Mercury Prize - firmly putting Bristol, jungle and drum and bass on the musical map.

Jungle went on to become the precursor to drum and bass music which is also fast, but has a signature simple kick and snare pattern that sits over rolling basslines.

The two genres are sometimes used interchangeably, but both still have a distinct sound.

DJ Die, who was also a member of Full Cycle, said Bristol was at the heart of the movement because of its "rebel" and "do it yourself mentality".

"It hasn't seemed to have died yet, it's more healthy than ever. A lot of people move to Bristol for the music scene," he said.

"There's so many great producers here, there always have been - it's a hotbed for production," he added.

DJ Die attributed the longevity of the city's jungle scene to sound systems that have been passed down through generations and new talent inspired by Bristol's artists.

"You've got these grassroots soundsystems handed down from old ravers like Spiral Tribe," he said.

"You've also got to shout out St Paul's because that's had such a big influence and the Jamaican community there."

The scene is thriving now more than ever as new artists such as Nia Archives - who was discovered by DJ Die - make waves in the industry.

Nia's second album was shortlisted for the Mercury Awards, she headlined Bristol festival Love Saves the Day in 2025 and had also played a number of the biggest festivals in the UK, including Glastonbury.

'Rich cultural undertones'

Another artist continuing the city's legacy is Sherelle.

She said DJ Die and DJ Krust were direct influences on her high-tempo music, which includes a blend of footwork, jungle and drum and bass.

"If you were to separate Die, Krust and Roni from everyone, they have their own individual sound and when they come together, it also builds on another sound," she said.

"Bristol is such an off-kilter place. It's a place whereby exploration is so expansive.

"The city is rich in cultural undertones and you can tell that they're making music from the heart.

"There needs to be a lot of focus and emphasis about actually how special and important Bristol is to the current music, culture and climate that we've got now," she said.

Roni Size and Reprazent will perform their seminal album New Forms live across the UK next year to celebrate 30 years since its release.

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Tourism tax backlash: 'Rothbury is not Edinburgh'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3vgxlgn1rnlo, 2 days ago

Hotels and music venues have hit out at a mayor's plans to introduce a tourism tax.

In September, the government confirmed plans to allow local leaders to introduce a levy targeted at tourists staying in hotels, bed and breakfasts and other types of accommodation in their regions.

North East Mayor Kim McGuinness has said she will bring in the fee and it would boost jobs, while Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen has said he will not. Local authorities within McGuinness's jurisdiction have also attacked plans for the levy.

Newcastle music venue owner Kate Hodgkinson said McGuinness's tax plans were ill-thought out, while Rothbury landlord Debbie Noble said they would put visitors off.

Variations of the tourism tax already exist in parts of the UK.

In Scotland local authorities can charge a visitor levy on overnight accommodation.

For example, in Edinburgh the rate is 5% for those staying overnight in hotels, bed and breakfasts and self-catering facilities - capped at five nights.

Whereas in Liverpool, visitors to some hotels must pay a £2-per room overnight charge as part of a business-led scheme.

In March it was revealed the levy had so far raised about £10m.

The body behind the scheme pointed to the fund's success in helping to bring events such as the Labour Party Conference and the World Chess Championships to the city.

Hodgkinson, who owns Cobalt Studios in Ouseburn, said Newcastle was too quiet in the summer without its students and more needed to be done to encourage people to visit at the height of the tourist season.

She said the tax plans were "counterintuitive" and instead called for the mayor to put up taxes on empty buildings in the city to fund a boost of local tourism.

Noble, who runs the The Turks Head Inn in Rothbury, said she hated McGuinness's plans.

"Edinburgh is not Rothbury," she said. Noble said the village often had few tourists during the week and charging those customers more would just mean they headed elsewhere.

She said if McGuinness wanted to boost tourism to cities like Newcastle and Sunderland, then it should be tourists to those cities that paid the tax rather than rural visitors.

Andrew Golding, who runs the venue the Point in Sunderland, said tourists needed to be given more of a reason to visit the region before they were charged extra.

He said he welcomed plans to attract more large events to the area but that alone was not enough.

"A major event attracting thousands of people doesn't automatically mean those visitors spend money in local pubs, restaurants or grassroots music venues," he said.

Meanwhile Sam Booth, from the music venue Lubber Fiend in Newcastle, said they did not necessarily have an issue with taxing tourists if the money raised was spent properly.

"A fraction of the money they [the mayor and local authorities] spent on the Mercury Prize would guarantee our survival for 10 years," he said.

"And I would argue that we would have a much more tangible impact on local music and the local economy over that time."

'Jobs guarantee'

In September four Reform UK-led councils in north-east England – Durham, Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland – wrote to McGuinness arguing against her plans to introduce the tax.

They said: "Making the North East more expensive at the checkout risks driving visitors, spending and jobs to neighbouring regions."

Earlier this month, Durham County Council's deputy leader Darren Grimes called McGuinness a "megalomaniac" after she detailed the council pushback she had faced in a regional mayor's meeting with Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

In response McGuinness said the fee would be used to "fund major events" in the region.

"I guarantee this will create jobs and bring in thousands of tourists," she said.

She also said several other parts of the country were planning to bring in the levy which would mean they would have more money to promote tourism.

"I am not prepared to let the North East slip behind while others take our visitors," she said.

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First acts revealed for folk festival's 30th event

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cknv0p75v2jpo, 2 days ago

Folk legend Richard Thompson, shanty group Fisherman's Friends and African-Afro Cuban pioneers Orchestra Baobab are among the first acts announced for the 30th edition of Shrewsbury Folk Festival.

The four-day event, which began in Bridgnorth in 1997 with 700 festival-goers, will also celebrate 20 years at its current home at the West Mid Showground.

More than a dozen other performers were also unveiled, with organisers promising a mix of folk favourites, new discoveries and exclusive performances.

Created by husband-and-wife team Alan Surtees and Sandra Surtees, the festival outgrew its original Bridgnorth site before moving to Shrewsbury in 2006 and settling at the showground the next year.

What started as a small event has since grown into one of the UK's best-loved folk festivals, according to organisers.

Among the headline acts announced for next year's event is Richard Thompson, who organisers said will perform with a select line-up of musical friends in an exclusive show for the festival.

Also appearing are The Young'uns, Grace Petrie, Fanny Lumsden, Edward II, Hayde Bluegrass Orchestra, Morgan Toney, Grainne Duffy and David Eagle, who will bring his one-man comedy show to the event.

Festival director Sandra Surtees said: "Celebrating 30 years of the festival and 20 years at our showground home is going to be an amazing party.

"The line-up will include some of our favourite artists, some incredible talents never seen before at the festival and some special shows just for Shrewsbury.

"I never imagined in my wildest dreams 30 years ago that the festival would grow into one of the country's most loved folk events."

The festival features four music stages as well as dance events, workshops, craft and music fairs, food stalls and on-site camping and glamping.

Next year's takes place over the August Bank Holiday weekend, from 27-30 August, with more acts due to be announced in the coming months. Tickets are now on sale.

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The childhood promise that brought professional ballet to a post-industrial town

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6x2vp7xg29ko, 2 days ago

Darius James remembers sitting before Gwent County Council at 10 years old and being asked the question: "Why should we give you money?"

He had earned a place at the Royal Ballet School, but his parents could not afford the school fees.

In response, he told the council he would go away and develop his skills and use them to help his community in Newport.

As James' Newport-based dance company Ballet Cymru marks its 40th anniversary, he hopes he has fulfilled that promise.

Growing up in Newport in the 1970s, James said it was "really, really unusual" for a boy to be doing ballet and that he was grateful for the support of his parents.

He said his father, a keen footballer who spent his life working at the Alcan aluminium factory in Newport, particularly embraced something that was so new to him.

"He didn't really understand at the beginning, but he loved it. And we work with a lot of young people now whose parents are not quite as understanding, even 40 years later, which is a bit depressing."

After years of training at the Royal Ballet School and dancing professionally, James returned to Newport and founded Ballet Cymru, originally called Gwent Ballet Theatre, in 1986.

He said the idea to start a ballet company in a post-industrial town was "totally crazy, but totally needed and logical".

"There is so much talent in Newport, so many brilliant, brilliant young people, and there's not the outlets you have in London or Cardiff."

After some initial backing from the Arts Council of Wales, he said Ballet Cymru went 13 years without any funding at all and 28 years without its own dedicated studio.

To help finance the company, James toured with other ballet troupes including Northern Ballet.

Amy Doughty, the company's co-artistic director and James' wife, joined Ballet Cymru as a dancer in 1996, and said they would rehearse wherever they could find space.

"We'd have to carry in all the ballet bars, all the equipment that we use, all the dance floors," she said.

However, with National Lottery funding in 2014, the company was able to renovate a warehouse into its current studio.

It sits on the same industrial estate James' father walked through to work each day.

In the early years, James said he would cover the word "ballet" on the van they took to do community workshops because he feared it would put people off before trying.

Doughty believes attitudes have changed since then, adding: "I think we've worked really hard in Newport to go into schools, to do shows here, to really develop people who understand what we're about."

However, James believes some barriers to participation in dance remain.

The directors identified seven boys through the company's Duets scheme who they believed showed talent, only to face reluctance from some parents.

"The dads will come in and say my son doesn't dance, he doesn't want to do ballet," Doughty said.

But the pair said the children had "absolutely loved it".

Established in 2012, the scheme runs workshops in Welsh schools where the company identifies children it believes have natural ability in dance but are not in any formal training.

Ballet Cymru then provides them with two years of free tuition. For Doughty, the financial aspect is particularly important.

She grew up in Australia as one of four children and said without scholarships, she would not have enjoyed the same career in dance.

Doughty feels that not being familiar with ballet can stop people from engaging with the art form.

"The reality is, we've got to take it to them. They're not going to seek us out, why would they?"

She said one way they try to do this is by giving free show tickets to children participating in the Duets programme and their families.

For some, she said, it can be their first time seeing live ballet.

Ballet Cymru marked its anniversary with shows at the Riverfront theatre in Newport on Thursday and Friday, before a tour to Leeds and Bangor.

Doughty said her hope was that she and James had built something that would last and grow beyond them.

Looking back at the council's decision to support him, James said: "They believed in me.

"If in the last 40 years we've reached one kid and inspired them to be better than they would have been otherwise, then surely that's worth it.

"I'm sure it's more, but just one would be worth it."

'People will be counting': What a German expert wants you to know about buying drinks in Germany

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20261030-people-will-be-counting-what-a-german-expert-wants-you-to-know-about-buying-drinks-in-germany, yesterday

From Berlin bars to Bavarian beer gardens, who pays for what is taken seriously in Germany. Here's why splitting the bill can actually be a sign of friendship.

Picture the scene: you're travelling through Germany and have gone out to dinner with a new group of local friends. Everyone has eaten, had a drink or two and shared plenty of laughs.

Then the bill arrives.

There is no "let's just split it". Instead, the first person tells the waiter exactly what they ordered – spaghetti and two beers – and pays precisely that amount. The next pays for their pizza and glass of wine. And so it goes, right around the table.

Welcome to Germany, a country that celebrates precision, even among friends enjoying an evening out. Splitting the bill evenly is not an idea that has taken off here. Nor is buying each other rounds the same generous gesture it is in other countries.

For visitors accustomed to everyone paying an equal share – or taking tuns at the bar – this item-by-item accounting can feel strangely formal. And in a country with such a celebrated beer culture, it raises an obvious question: why don't Germans buy each other drinks?

This unspoken rule applies even in the most casual situations. In carefree Berlin, summer evenings often see younger people skipping a night of bar hopping in favour of gathering outside a Späti (late-night convenience store). Even when one person heads inside to buy the next round of drinks, don't assume generosity has replaced arithmetic.

"People will be counting who has paid how many rounds, most definitely," says Julian Berger, bartender at Orania Berlin, a luxury hotel in the city's edgy Kreuzberg district.

Dr Harald Pitters, an Austrian trend researcher who is married to a German, says the instinct is rooted in fairness and a desire to keep control of the situation. He has also seen how uncertainty can make buying rounds uncomfortable. "Two of my best friends are German, and this was always a point of contention when we went out together," he says.

"They didn't like the idea of rounds when there was no certainty around how long we would stay and how many rounds we would have. If everyone pays their way there is no room for disappointment."

"Germans have a very strong sense of justice," Berger adds. "They feel more comfortable if everyone pays for themselves. They don't like it when there is an imbalance."

In other words, keeping the bill clear is not necessarily seen as ungenerous. It can be a way of protecting the friendship. There is even a German saying that sums up this mentality: "Klare Rechnung, gute Freunde" (clear accounts, good friends).

As with any practice, however, there are exceptions to the rule. In the Biergärten (beer gardens) in southern Germany, where the standard drink is a one-litre mug of beer, rounds are more common. In fact, it is in the country's more traditional areas, including Bavaria, that you are more likely to see friends buying drinks for each other.

This is particularly true at traditional community festivals, which Pittars says are enjoying a revival among young people.

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"At an Erntedankfest [harvest festival, where beer is the standard drink], it is very usual to buy rounds. You would out yourself as very uptight if you just bought a drink for you and your partner," he says. "That also applies at Karneval [Carnival] in Cologne or Hafengeburtstag [Port Anniversary] in Hamburg – any communal event involving drinking and dancing."

So what should visitors do? Berger advises assuming that everyone will pay their own way – unless someone makes it clear otherwise.

"If you are out with someone and they say, "Ich lade dich ein" [I am inviting you], that means they are paying," he says.

And there is no need to feel awkward about asking the waiter to split the bill, either. Most will automatically ask, "Getrennt oder zusammen?" (separately or together).

For many Germans, the natural answer remains: "Getrennt, bitte" (separately, please).

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The new trail leading to Ireland's mythical 'Gate to Hell'

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20261029-the-new-trail-leading-to-irelands-mythical-gate-to-hell, 3 days ago

Rathcroghan is one of Europe's oldest unexcavated royal sites. Now, a brand-new walking path is giving travellers access to ancient landmarks – including the cave that inspired Halloween.

From the top of Rathcroghan Mound in Ireland's County Roscommon, the view stretches across grassy fields, stone walls and grazing cattle and sheep. While this may appear as unassuming farmland, a closer look reveals dozens of large, circular earthworks and ancient burial mounds.

That's because Rathcroghan (meaning "the fort of Cruachan" in Irish) is one of the oldest and largest unexcavated royal sites in Europe. This was the ancient capital of Ireland's Connacht province and 266 archaeological relics are spread across the 6.5sq-km site – including Iron Age ringforts, Ogham stones carved with ancient Irish script and holy wells.

But one of Rathcroghan's most mysterious features is a passageway that extends deep into the earth and crosses the mythological veil into the Celtic Otherworld. Known as Ireland's "Gate to Hell", it is considered to be the birthplace of ancient traditions that evolved into Halloween.

"It's a fascinating place – not many sites can claim an entrance to the Otherworld," says John Waddell, emeritus professor of archaeology at the University of Galway.

Since many of Rathcroghan's monuments are located on private farmland, visitors have historically only been able to access some of its sites by car. But a brand-new 13km (8-mile) Rathcroghan Archaeological Walking Trail now links the complex's main highlights on a looped walking path, giving travellers new access to the land and a different perspective on how these ancient monuments were connected.

A sacred, supernatural past

Rathcroghan's history stretches back 5,500 years. It was an important hub for ceremonial assemblies, as well asfeasts, seasonal celebrations and royal inaugurations.

The site has inspired a wealth of folklore. This is where Ireland's national epic, The Táin – Táin Bó Cúailnge ("The Cattle Raid of Cooley") begins and ends. Considered Ireland's version of The Iliad, it recalls a great raid started by Queen Medb of Connacht, an Iron Age warrior who ruled from her nearby palace.

"[Rathcroghan is] an ancient royal site, we're not talking about a palace being stuck out on the landscape; we're talking about a site where people came to gather for various reasons – to mark a celebration, the cross-quarter festivals, a marriage, a contract, a death, a funeral, crowning a king," says Rathcroghan tour guide and research assistant Elaine Conroy.

It's also sacred ground. The complex is considered one of the three chief burial places in ancient Ireland where the nation's early kings and chiefs were laid to rest, and today it's home to 40 identified burial mounds.

Roughly 1km south-west of the main Rathcroghan mound lies Oweynagat cave – believed to have been the home of the Mórrígan, the supernatural goddess associated with the birth of Halloween. The deity appears as a shape-shifter in The Táin and is associated with the festival of Samhain, which marked the coming of winter. This period – which started on 31 October – was a time when the veil between this world and the Otherworld was thinnest, and the Mórrígan and her malevolent creatures ventured from the cave. As a result, people began dressing in disguise so the spirits did not take them.

It typically takes three hours to walk the full trail. I started my day at the Rathcroghan Visitor Centre in the village of Tulsk, before then making the 4km drive to the trailhead at Rathcroghan Mound, where the new walking trail starts and ends, and set out towards the "Gate to Hell".

A new way to experience Rathcroghan

Rathcroghan Mound is the site's largest and most accessible landmark, an 88m-wide-by 5.5m-high (289ft-by-18ft) earthwork that has never been excavated. Yet, foundations discovered during geophysical surveys suggest that it may have been used for various ceremonies, such as the inauguration of kings.

"This was the centre of Connacht," says Mike McCarthy, an archaeologist and researcher at the Rathcroghan Visitor and Heritage Centre, as we stand at the new trailhead beside Rathcroghan Mound. "We are walking through a landscape of assembly, ceremony and inauguration, and we're in the middle of a very high-status prehistoric graveyard – burial place of the Kings of Connacht. So there is not only archaeology and history, but there's folklore and mythology and literature associated with the site."

Waddell, who conducted field research at Rathcroghan, says one of the reasons the landscape is so interesting is that it is saturated with ancient meaning.

"The geophysical surveys of [Rathcroghan Mound] have demonstrated that it had a very complicated history, with all sorts of circular structures buried in it and sometimes erected on top of it. It was a great ceremonial site, probably a great circular timber hall," he says. "That's what makes it so special – the myth and legend as well as archaeology, all embraced in the tales to tell."

From the mound, I walk with McCarthy towards one of many new stiles whose steps lead over a stone wall to connect the new trail to previously off-limits farmland. After passing an unnamed burial mound, we soon come to Relignaree, a massive 110m (361ft) circular enclosure known as "The Graveyard of Kings". A newly installed sign reveals that this wasn't just a royal cemetery – it may have also been an "elite residence", complete with ringforts and underground passages.

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Cattle have grazed this land for thousands of years, and continue to do so today. On our walk, we meet a group of cattle with calves, and McCarthy says hikers might meet livestock and curious sheep along the trail.

As McCarthy points out, the animals keep the area grazed. "The monuments are here because of farming," he says. "Otherwise nature would have taken them back." Farmers have even installed large scratching brushes for the cows so they don't use the archaeological monuments instead.

The 'Gate to Hell'

We soon come to a row of trees and scrub, and here, at the base of the trees, is an ordinary-looking ditch leading to the mythical Gate to Hell. Located 7m (23ft) underground and stretching 37m (121ft) long, this limestone shaft was referenced as early as the 9th Century by Celtic monks and has long been regarded as one of the chief portals to the Otherworld – a dimension to which the living could travel.

Though the cave is currently closed to visitors for health and safety reasons because of its elevated carbon dioxide levels, I get down on my hands and knees to look inside the entrance to the passage, which is framed by an Ogham stone dating back to the 4th-8th Centuries. From here, the 10.5m-long (34ft) narrow stone passageway leads down to the natural cave. An image on the new information panel at the cave's entrance shows what it looks like underground and explains how this "infamous" cavern was "regarded as one of the chief entrances or portals to the Irish Otherworld" – a mythical place "where pre-Christian societies believed the Sun went at night.”

As we continue walking along the trail, we come to the 115m-wide (377ft) circular enclosure of Rathnadarve, where the two bulls meet in mortal combat at the end of The Táin, the Irish national epic. Further on, we cross a narrow country road and see a sign hidden pointing to a grassy mound. It reads "Cruachan Connacht, ancient royal site". This is Rathbeg, where a new information board reveals it was a "Cemetery for Kings". Though it hasn't been excavated, we learn that members of the Iron Age Aos Dána, a high-status warrior caste, could be buried here.

I grew up in Ireland hearing about Queen Medb, and even seeing images of her on old Irish banknotes. Walking through this landscape brings those stories to life, and I can almost hear the hooves of The Táin’s two bulls, the wheels of Medb’s chariot or the eerie screams of the Mórrígan. Unlike a mere monument, Rathcroghan allows visitors to immerse themselves in this landscape and understand how our ancestors used it 5,500 years ago.

"People are used to the fact that monuments of certain types were places of ceremony and ritual," says Wadell. "Rathcroghan offers the notion that whole landscapes could be places of this sort of ritual memory and activity."

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Why are so many Thai restaurants hidden inside London pubs?

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20261028-why-are-so-many-thai-restaurants-hidden-inside-london-pubs, 4 days ago

Pints and pad Thai may seem like an unlikely pairing. But tucked away in London's backstreets is a culinary tradition with a surprising history.

Three pints into a crisp evening in west London, I'm standing outside The Churchill Arms pub with some British friends, and I'm getting hungry.

"We can just eat here. I've booked us a table at the Thai restaurant in the back," a friend says.

Maybe it's the ale talking, or the jet lag from my New York flight, but I'm confused. "There's a Thai restaurant here?" I ask. "In the back of the pub?"

My friends whisk me past the bar, where model British war planes, flags and World War Two-era military photographs fill the walls. But as we approach the backroom, Union Jacks turn into Trairong – the tricolour Thai flag – and woven rattan baskets, small boat oars and old kanok metal lanterns dangle from the ceiling.

We pass a busy kitchen filled with the clang of pots and woks, and a Thai waiter leads us to a table in what feels like a tropical greenhouse. Lush ferns dangle from the ceiling, while bright red and yellow flowers sprout from planters and pictures of exotic butterflies cover the walls. Looking back towards the dark, wood-panelled British pub in the next room, I feel as though I've been transported somewhere else.

In reality, I've just stepped into one of London's most unique dining experiences: a Thai restaurant tucked into a traditional British or Irish bar, cheekily known as a "Thai-rish" pub.

Though well-known among London barflies, many visitors may be surprised to learn that roughly 30 Thai restaurants operate out of the hidden backrooms and upstairs lofts of traditional English or Irish-run pubs. At first glance, these portmanteau pubs may seem like a rather unlikely pairing, but over the decades, these fusion businesses have become a distinctive feature of the city's pub culture – and as I'd soon learn, the idea was born right here at The Churchill Arms.

The origin of Thai-rish pubs

According to BBC Radio London's restaurant contributor, Stephanie Brookes, Thai cuisine wasn't on most Londoners' radars back in the 1980s, but the city's tastes were changing.

At most pubs, "food was once an afterthought", Brookes says, remembering the ham-and-cheese toasties and packets of crisps served in her youth. At the time, there weren't many Thai restaurants in London, but as Thailand became a popular backpacking destination for young Brits in the late 1980s and '90s, more travellers returned with a taste for Thai food.

"[People who wanted to] try new cuisines and experience different flavours had that opportunity – it's inevitable that tastes [back home in Britain] would start to change as a result," Brookes says. "This was partly a backlash against the bland food and austerity that came before."

The Churchill Arms' current manager James Keogh, remembers how the unlikely idea of serving pints alongside pad Thai was born. As he recalls, an Irishman named Gerry O'Brien moved to London in 1985, taking up ownership of the Kensington establishment. At the time, the bar just served fish and chips, jacket potatoes and other classic British pub grub. O'Brien was searching for a way to liven up the menu when Thai chef Songkot Boonyasarayon asked him if he could cook in the pub's kitchen.

O'Brien was initially hesitant, but once he tried Boonyasarayon's cooking, he agreed to a month-long trial in the summer of 1988. Within a few weeks, London food and restaurant writer Nick Lander recalls that there were lines around the block.

"[O'Brien] just thought it would be something that would work for a few months and that would be it," says Lander, who met O'Brien in 2009. "I don't think he had any idea of it being so popular."

By the early 2000s, the Thai government had launched the Global Thai Campaign, an early example of "gastrodiplomacy" aimed at promoting Thai cuisine around the world. As part of it, the government provided loans to Thai citizens to relocate and share their culture abroad, and within the next decade, the number of Thai restaurants around the world nearly doubled.

In the UK, many Thai chefs were hired in bar kitchens, with some chefs fully taking over day-to-day culinary operations or converting backrooms into a restaurant inside the pubs. Soon, Thai-rish pubs began to take off elsewhere in London.

"Many [Thai-rish] pubs rival top restaurants in terms of quality and provenance of ingredients," says Brookes.

A perfect pairing

As I scan the menu at The Churchill Arms, I spot dishes like pad kee mao (stir-fried "drunken noodles") and a special duck curry made with red chilli and coconut milk. I opt for the pad ped (red curry stir-fry), whose rich braise, bold spices and sharp acidity balance well with the malty sweetness of traditional English and Irish beers.

"Its model is perfect, if you think about it," Brookes says. "Delicious ingredients that are easy to prepare in a relatively small kitchen space, and the aromatic flavours work incredibly well with a crisp, light beer."

Kate, a London foodie who posts about Thai food in pubs on TikTok, agrees: "Thai food and pubs are two of the world's greatest things that only become stronger when in tandem with each other," she tells me. "Thai food mixes the sweet, spicy, sour and salty, and pubs mix drinking, danger and questionable decisions. What more of a powerful combination could you ask for?"

Ryan McElhinney, owner of The King's Arms near London Bridge, moved from Ireland in 2001 to help his father run the pub and remembers how they started serving Thai food. "[At the time] if my friends ever came to visit, I wouldn't recommend them to have food at our pub, because I knew it was just average… [things like] sausage and mash," he says.

Shortly after, McElhinney's brother met and married a Thai woman. She soon took over the kitchen, and by 2002, the pub was serving Thai food. "Our Thai food got better and better. We had Thai chefs making the food, and the food they have is amazing," says McElhinney, comparing the daily stream of curries such massaman and panang to the anticipation of "Christmas morning".

Today, McElhinney co-owns multiple pubs across London, and they all serve Thai food. He maintains that pad Thai and spice bags (its chips tossed with spices, stir-fried vegetables and chicken) remain their most popular dishes: "You gotta give the customers what they want… but alcohol and spicy food and a bit of salt, it lends itself."

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In Nunhead, south-east London, Irish pub Skehans serves Thai food from a kitchen managed by Thai chef Charlene "Chai" Skehan. She moved to London from Thailand age 13, learning English and training in various pub kitchens. Twenty-five years ago, she and her husband Bill took over the pub and opened Chai's Garden Restaurant at the back.

"Thai food paired naturally with beer, particularly Singha and Tiger, although I'm surprised by how well the beef dishes went with Guinness," she says.

Chai's kitchen has provided a pathway for numerous Thai chefs in London. All her chefs come from Thailand, recruited through connections she has built throughout her time in London. Two of them have worked alongside her for more than 20 years and can still be found cooking at Skehans. Others have been trained up in her kitchen and gone on to work in nearby pubs, contributing to the presence of Thai kitchens across London.

As we finish our fragrant curries, stir fries and ales in the backroom of The Churchill Arms, I think about something Chai said.

"Thai food belongs in the pub."

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No cars, no phone signal: Canada's ghost island where guests still check in

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20261015-battle-harbour-canadas-ghost-island-where-guests-still-check-in, 12 days ago

Once the thriving heart of Labrador's fishing industry, Battle Harbour has found new life as an island retreat with barely a trace of modern life.

Several livyers have gathered on the wharf. Sleeves rolled up, four fishermen who "live here" on this remote Labrador island are splitting cod. Behind them, suit-clad merchants and more fishers, some in waterproof oilskins, have arranged themselves for a group photo against a white clapboard building with ochre-red trim.

But our ferry approaches the wharf, something seems off. Everyone's as grey as the sky and nobody is moving.

I give my head a shake and remember that I'm arriving at a place that proudly describes itself as "nine miles from normal". So, while these fellows were alive in around 1900, when this was the saltfish capital of the world, they've since been plucked from archival photos and turned into life-sized cardboard cutouts.

"Welcome to Battle Harbour," says Peter Bull, the executive director of the Battle Harbour Historic Trust, as we scramble off the ferry on a wooden plank.

Bull quickly runs through the practicalities. Lunch is in half an hour at 12:30. A tour starts at 13:30. An Arctic fox family lives in the old cemetery. Two historic wireless radio towers need to be saved. There's no mobile phone service and just one communal Wi-Fi spot. Sunrise comes at 06:19. Wanda Fifield will walk me to my room.

"This [is the] emergency system – you just turn this button on," Fifield says, stopping at a walkie talkie in the hallway near my room. "If there's a problem in the nighttime, if you're sick or hurt or anything, just press this square button. You tell them your problem. You tell them that you're staying at the Merchant Building because they'll need to know what cottage to go to."

With restored wooden houses, weathered fishing stages where catches were once processed and 16 private summer residences, Battle Harbour looks remarkably well preserved. But it has been more than half a century since anyone lived here year-round, and even longer since it was the unofficial capital of Labrador.

I've got two nights to step back in time.

Getting to Battle Harbour is an adventure in itself. First, you fly to the delightfully named Happy Valley-Goose Bay in mainland Labrador, then drive for five hours along the forest-flanked Expedition 51° highway, hoping to spot a moose and yearning for an outhouse. There are no services for most of the journey.

From the wharf in Mary's Harbour, you then catch the daily passenger "ferry" for guests – a lofty name for a boat so small your luggage may be stacked in the bathroom.

For 14.5km (9 miles), the boat winds past craggy coastline and near-shore islands, which look otherworldly if it's foggy and desolate if it's grey. Gulls, kittiwakes and gannets may soar alongside the boat and sometimes you'll spot icebergs, humpback whales and minkes.

When Battle Island's buildings finally come into view, it's hard to believe that this tiny, half-mile long island was once teeming with fishermen and merchants.

In the 1770s, English merchant John Slade established a trading operation on this tiny island that became a gateway to Labrador's rich fishing grounds. Salt cod was processed here and exported to Europe, the Caribbean and beyond. At its peak, there was a hospital, school, church and wireless station, and a permanent population of around 300. Thousands more seasonal fishermen passed through, including floaters who lived on schooners and stationers who built temporary shacks on land.

But Battle Harbour's fortunes eventually faded. A devastating fire in 1930, declining fish stocks and a provincial resettlement programme in the 1960s gradually emptied the island. By the 1970s, its last year-round residents had gone.

The final blow to the island came on 2 July 1992, when the federal government's cod moratorium closed the fishery and instantly threw 30,000 people across Newfoundland and Labrador out of work.

Today, Battle Harbour feels like a ghost island, its restored buildings preserving a world that has all but vanished. Run by a trust, the car-free historic site is only open to guests for around three months each summer, but for those that know it best, the island is anything but forgotten.

Bull's connection to Battle Harbour stretches back more than a century, to when his grandfather fished along the Labrador coast. He has worked here since 2013, living on the island for most of the summer and returning to his home in St John's each September with enough cod, squid, mackerel and berries like bakeapple and partridgeberry to get him through winter.

"When I die, my ashes are going to spread out where I pick partridgeberries," he confides, "and I'm going to come back as a partridgeberry."

Nelson Smith has his own life-long connection to Battle Harbour. He helped restore its historic buildings and has been leading tours here for nearly three decades.

"Every building is going to smell different because of the different stuff stored in them," Smith promises in his thick Labradorian accent. "If you hears me say a word you don't understand, stop me and I'll try to explain it to you."

In Newfoundland English, this cluster of musty buildings is called "the rooms", with individual "stores" named for what they once held. The Pork Store smells faintly of molasses, while the Salt Store contains the mineral still used to preserve cod.

The tour continues past more life-like cutouts: a dapper merchant, a young fisherman standing in a wooden boat, an older fisherman sitting by a cod trap.

"The best way I likes my saltfish is two years old," Smith offers, explaining how cod was cleaned, salted and dried on raised, open-air wooden platforms known as flakes.

In the Salt Store's loft, I stand where American polar explorer Robert E Peary presided over two 1909 press conferences and claimed he had reached the North Pole. He transmitted his first expedition account from the nearby Marconi station to the New York Times.

Visitors can even stay overnight in some of these historic structures. I'm staying in the Merchant Building's Harry Smith Room, named after an employee of the island's former general store. There are also five restored cottages and 12 other ensuite rooms.

A quilt covers my wooden bed and a space heater fights the chill that lingers in the old building, despite its restoration. There's no television, and the only sound is the quiet. Settling into a swivel armchair, I face the sea as I leaf through the guestbook.

"Best view on the island. The iceberg was framed by our window."

"Something you have to experience rather than explain."

"So much serenity."

At dinner – Labrador char, pan-fried cod and moose pot pie, served at communal dining tables – there's talk of Northern Lights, so I spend a restless first night peering out the window and stepping out onto the wrap-around deck. I have better luck at sunrise when I follow a dirt path to the old cemetery to see foxes emerge from their den on a rocky hillside.

From the cemetery, I take the Battle Harbour Footpath for a 1.9km (1.2-mile) stroll past a newer cemetery and a memorial for three men killed in a 1976 seaplane crash. Two local boys stumbled upon the wreckage, some of which is still here. One of them was Smith.

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Towards the end of the footpath, I see the Marconi towers, the last surviving pair of their kind in North America. Built in 1906 and rebuilt in 1931 using a radio wave-based wireless telegraph system created by Italy's Guglielmo Marconi, they once guided mariners and transmitted messages.

"They're pretty special and they're an important part of the skyline here," says Bull. The trust is trying to raise C$200,000 (£106,000/$140,000) to repair them.

Strong winds scupper my plans to go cod fishing, but I manage a short boat trip to Cape St Charles to stand at the most easterly point in continental North America. Then I zip across the tickle (channel) to hike Great Caribou Island, where I find Tanya Russell, a local postmistress and amateur photographer, in a blueberry patch.

Russell tells me that she loves "the quiet, the water, the saltwater air, the birds, the foxes – just everything at Battle Harbour. And you gets to meet a lot of wonderful people."

At my final breakfast, it's time to say goodbye to fellow guests and life-size cutouts alike. I'm eating near a cutout made from an iconic black-and-white photograph shot at Battle Harbour more than a century ago: a sombre boy flanked by two enormous cod. This boy, Victor Croucher, is buried on the island, but here in the dining hall he's another ghostly presence in a place that stubbornly refuses to die.

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Calls for 'severe' deterrents after airport drone disruption

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjy56v70z7l1o, today

People have called for deterrents to be "severe" to prevent drones being flown illegally at Jersey Airport, which has led to disrupted and diverted flights.

Flights were affected on Friday and Saturday evenings after unauthorised drone activity was reported, leading to services being cancelled or diverted to other airports, including Paris.

Islanders said the disruption caused had been ridiculous and were worried it could happen again unless the perpetrators were "frightened" from doing so.

The island's government said the situation was being treated extremely seriously and anyone with information about the drones or their pilots should contact States of Jersey Police.

A police spokesperson said the drone activity was reported in active flight paths at the airport.

Flying drones within Jersey Airport's restricted airspace zone without prior permission from Air Traffic Control is illegal.

Under the Air Navigation (Jersey) Law 2014, anyone who is deemed to have endangered the safety of an aircraft could be fined or imprisoned for five years.

Islander Stuart Abraham said he hoped the incident would not be copied by others and he hoped authorities were "very serious" about preventing it happening again.

"Something needs to be written into the law which really frightens drone pilots off to prevent them doing it in the first place," Abraham said.

"It's got to be quite severe.

"I'm not talking about bringing back the birch, but certainly if they were threatened with automatic imprisonment or something like that, it might work."

Another resident, Jonathan Hudson, said the whole situation had been quite concerning.

He added: "I don't understand why they're doing it, it's all unnecessary.

"Because of the last two nights with all the cancellations and disturbance, something's got to be done.

"I don't understand why these people aren't getting caught."

Sue Dawes, who said her son lived near the airport, said she was worried a similar incident could lead to a "terrible accident".

"What are they [the drone pilots] thinking?" Dawes said.

"They know it's going to cause a lot of havoc and distress for a lot of people, especially those trying to get away for medical reasons or trying to come home."

Senator Lyndon Farnham, Jersey's chief minister, said people should be "under no illusion" about the seriousness of the incidents.

"Operating a drone close to an airport is not a prank or a harmless hobby," he said.

"It puts public safety at risk, disrupts critical transport infrastructure and can have significant consequences for hundreds of travellers and businesses.

"To those responsible, the message is clear - if you are identified, you should expect to face the full consequences of the law."

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Laxey Wheel's 1980s ticket office to be demolished

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm3wv24n3v22o, today

For more than 170 years, the Great Laxey Wheel has stood above the village that once depended on it, a giant red waterwheel built to drain one of the Isle of Man's busiest mines.

Now work is under way to preserve and improve the attraction for future visitors.

As part of the latest phase, the cylindrical ticket office, which has welcomed more than a million visitors since it was built in the 1980s, will be removed and the information displays across the site will be refreshed over the winter.

Manx National Heritage said the work would help ensure that this "remarkable heritage is preserved and celebrated for generations to come".

The wheel was designed by engineer Robert Casement and built in 1854 to pump water out of the Great Laxey Mines, which produced lead and zinc.

At 72ft 6in (22.1m) across, it is the largest surviving original working waterwheel in the world.

Water power was used because the Island has no coal of its own, so running a steam pump would have meant shipping fuel in.

The wheel was named Lady Isabella after the wife of Charles Hope, the Lieutenant Governor of the Isle of Man at the time.

At its peak the mine employed more than 600 men, but it closed in 1929.

The Manx government bought the wheel and the surrounding site in 1965, and it has been cared for by Manx National Heritage since 1989.

Today it is one of the Island's best-known landmarks, and even appears on the back of the Isle of Man's £20 note.

The ticket office is being removed after the recent opening of a new Visitor Welcome Hub and Shop on the site.

John-Paul Walker, historic buildings architect for Manx National Heritage, said the organisation was "delighted to continue our investment in the Great Laxey Wheel".

He said the new hub, further restoration and refreshed displays would create "an even better experience for visitors".

In recent years, conservation work has included repointing and repainting the wheel's rod duct.

Over the winter, Manx National Heritage will also update the information displays across the site to tell more of the story of its history, engineering and role in the Island's mining past.

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Second night of drone disruption at Jersey Airport

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqkgl4nmp8lyo, today

People at Jersey Airport have said they are frustrated and angry that "unauthorised drone" activity caused more flight cancellations on Saturday, the second night in a row.

Jersey Airport said at 20:05 GMT on Saturday that it had experienced disruption "affecting inbound flights as a result of further drone activity in the vicinity of the airfield".

States of Jersey Police are investigating the incidents and appealed to anyone with information about who was responsible to come forward.

The Government of Jersey said it had been working on arrangements to reduce the risk of further disruption and to minimise passenger impact. There were no reports of disruption to Sunday evening's flights.

Jersey RFC said their team's flight home from Southampton on Saturday evening had been cancelled and it would cost the club "thousands and thousands of pounds", including unforeseen hotel costs.

Also caught in the chaos was Iselin Jones, director of Jersey's The Moorings Hotel, whose flight home from Madeira was diverted to Paris.

Pacific Basirwe was waiting for his wife and young son to fly in from London Heathrow when he heard the news.

He said: "It's annoying, this should be regulated, and the people doing those things should be prosecuted.

"It's been two days in a row now… If there is no further action, they will keep doing it, which is not good."

Insp Rob McCallum said it was believed "two or three" drones had entered the restricted airspace on Saturday evening, but they were not thought to be linked to terrorism.

Chief Minister of Jersey Senator Lyndon Farnham said operating a drone close to an airport was "not a prank or a harmless hobby".

"To those responsible, the message is clear: if you are identified, you should expect to face the full consequences of the law."

'Utmost seriousness'

He added: "The government and our operational partners are treating these incidents with the utmost seriousness.

"We are also working closely with UK authorities and specialist agencies to explore additional operational support, enhanced detection capability and counter-drone technology."

He continued: "The public can be assured that all relevant agencies are working together at pace and that lessons from these incidents will be acted upon swiftly.

"Our airport is a vital lifeline for the island. We will not tolerate behaviour that jeopardises its safe operation or undermines public confidence in our transport infrastructure."

Airline Loganair, whose Southampton to Jersey flights on Friday and Saturday evening were cancelled, said it had provided overnight accommodation to all affected passengers.

It added extra aircraft were flown from Scotland on both days to "protect early morning services from Jersey and minimise disruption".

Jersey RFC said the plane the team was on, operated by another airline, taxied but was returned to the stand and stood there for a few hours before finally being cancelled at about 21:30 GMT on Saturday.

A spokesperson said: "As this was a group booking, there was no scope for rebooking given that it is half-term and sufficient flights were not available today.

"The team have had to rebook from Southampton on Monday morning. As a community club we have to work incredibly hard to fund local rugby and travel.

"Put simply this will cost thousands and thousands of pounds, including unforeseen hotel costs.

"Whilst we'll leave the authorities to investigate, the acts of a few have far impacting consequences both financial and physical. It couldn't be further from a 'bit of fun'."

Iselin Jones was flying home from Madeira on Saturday night when her plane got diverted to Paris after circling over Jersey.

"We were descending ready to land, when we were told that Jersey Airport was closed due to renewed drone activity and we most probably wouldn't be able to land and would be diverting to Paris," she explained.

"After holding for 10 to 15 minutes and circling at Jersey that is indeed what happened."

Jones said she was due to return on a rescheduled flight to Jersey at 20:00 GMT on Sunday but she and other passengers were uneasy there could be more disruption.

"Obviously, I think everybody's a little bit stressed about the fact that it's another nighttime flight," she said.

"Evening seems to be when the drones are active and we would have all preferred to be flying during daylight hours, either in the morning or at lunchtime, so we're all now trying to make the most of having an extra day in Paris.

"If we end up having the same experience that the people coming in from London had the first night of the drones, and then again yesterday, I think obviously you know it starts to feel a little bit different to that."

Richard De La Haye has been a taxi driver for more than 40 years and believes the drone activity is affecting business for drivers like him.

He said: "It's a bit of a nightmare because we're sitting here for a couple of hours really not knowing what's going to happen."

De La Haye added: "If we pull away and the flights come in then people will be stranded waiting for taxis but if they don't come in we're sat here for two hours waiting for passengers.

"It's getting silly and I don't know the answer, but it really needs to be resolved, quite honestly."

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Toulouse to Ho Chi Minh City: Five fast-rising cities that should be on travellers' radars right now

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20261015-the-worlds-top-cities-to-watch-in-2026, 14 days ago

A new global report spotlights the world's emerging urban hotspots. From thriving cultural scenes to changing neighbourhoods, locals reveal what makes them worth exploring now.

New York, London and Paris have once again topped Oxford Economics' annual ranking of the world's leading cities. But beyond these familiar names, its 2026 Global Cities Index has identified 28 "cities to watch" – places whose rapid growth and rising fortunes could see them become increasingly influential in the years ahead.

These cities aren't just growing economically. New neighbourhoods, thriving cultural scenes and improved transport links are already reshaping the visitor experience and making them increasingly interesting places to visit.

We selected five from the list and spoke to people who know them well to find out what's changing – and why they're worth exploring now.

Toulouse, France

With its population forecast to grow by 57,000 over the next four years – more than anywhere else in France – Toulouse is one of Europe's fastest-growing cities and is attracting younger, skilled newcomers with its mild climate, relatively affordable cost of living and high quality of life.

"Here, you don't have to choose between slow life and fast life," said Elodie Paramelle, who recently returned to Toulouse after 10 years in London. "You get the energy of a big city, with an incredible food scene, independent cafes, cocktail bars and a growing cultural offering, alongside a much slower pace of life."

Toulouse has changed significantly in recent years, according to Mélodie Tyler, who moved back here after seven years in Paris. She says the city is much more walkable and bike-friendly, while its food and wine scene has expanded dramatically. And she notes that the buzz is spreading beyond the historic centre. "Ponts-Jumeaux where I live hosts a bunch of festivals, guinguettes [open-air bars] and skateboarding competitions," she said. "The Toulousains love to party and be outside as much as possible!"

Beyond its thriving neighbourhoods, Toulouse is also major aerospace hub, home to hundreds of companies, including Airbus's global headquarters. Visitors can explore that heritage at the Cité de l'Espace space-themed discovery centre or Aeroscopia aviation museum beside the Airbus runways. For something more unusual, La Halle de La Machine brings art and engineering together through giant mechanical creatures created by a local street theatre company.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Vietnam's largest city is on a remarkable trajectory. Oxford Economics predicts Ho Chi Minh City will be among the world's 50 fastest-growing cities over the next five years, with an economy that could rival Berlin's by 2050. Tourism is booming too, with more than eight million international visitors last year, exceeding projections.

"The first metro line only opened at the end of 2024, and it's one of the most tangible symbols of how quickly the city is changing," said Meaghan Yash, a travel specialist at tour operator Timbuktu Travel who frequently designs trips here. The 20km (12.5 mile) line runs from Ben Thanh Market in the city centre to the Suoi Tien theme park, with single fares costing less than £1 ($1.33).

Yet, Ho Chi Minh's appeal lies in how it balances change with continuity. Chris Buchart, commercial director at Vietnamese hotel company Fusion Group, suggests travellers visit the French-colonial Central Post Office and Opera House, and then the War Remnants Museum for context on the country's history, before turning to one of the city's greatest strengths: its food.

Buchart recommends trying bánh mì (Vietnamese baguette sandwich), cơm tấm (broken rice) and bánh xèo (crispy pancakes), while Yash suggests venturing beyond the usual tourist circuit in central District 1 to quieter, more residential neighbourhoods where leafy streets are ideal for wandering and cafe-hopping. He also suggests Chợ Lớn, the city's historic Chinatown, for its markets, temples and medicine shops, while across the river in Thảo Điền, independent boutiques, galleries and home-grown Vietnamese brands make for excellent shopping.

Warsaw, Poland

The Polish capital has made one of the fastest jumps in the Global Cities index, climbing more than 100 places to 61st. Its quality-of-life score now surpasses London, New York and Tokyo, while its economy is projected to expand by around 3% annually – nearly twice the European city average.

For Konrad Warzecha, a Polish-Australian whose family home is in Warsaw's Wola district, the transformation has been remarkable. "From our balcony you can see the skyline, and watching the roads, highways and towers go up over 20 years has made the city almost unrecognisable," said Warzecha, who blogs at House Sitters Guide.

The biggest changes, he says, are on the streets. "As a kid I rode the trams and did not feel safe, and I saw many robberies happen," he said. "Now I have never felt safer. People walk around at night, the streets are clean and trouble gets dealt with quickly."

For first-time visitors, Warzecha recommends a walk that takes in both the old and new city. He starts at the Soviet-era Palace of Culture and Science and follows Nowy Świat boulevard into the Old Town, painstakingly rebuilt after World War Two.

Along the way, he stops for pączki (Polish doughnuts) and a meal at a bar mleczny, one of the city's traditional, no-frills milk bars. "It tastes like home cooking," he said. "A three-course meal with drinks comes to around £13 ($17).

Warzecha once wanted to leave Poland and move back to Australia, but today his feelings have changed. "These days Warsaw is one of the places I recommend most, and not because I am from there. I am proud to have a Polish background."

Medellín, Colombia

Medellín's remarkable transformation is reflected in its economic fortunes. Employment in business and financial services has more than doubled over the past 20 years, and Oxford Economics predicts that the Colombian city's average income will overtake Buenos Aires and São Paulo by the 2040s.

"In the 10 years I've lived here, Medellín has gone from a curiosity for only the most daring to a hub for travel," said Patrick Quinn, who runs the Colombia Writers Retreat in nearby El Peñol. "Once blighted or overlooked places like Comuna 13, Perpetuo Socorro and Ciudad del Río have become cultural and economic centres."

The city's Metrocable, the first urban cable car system designed for mass public transport, carries commuters and visitors up the surrounding hillsides, while emerging creative districts are giving travellers new reasons to explore. "There is enough happening in its food, art and design scenes to warrant several days in its own right," said Joanna Rigby Jones, a travel specialist at Timbuktu Travel who has planned trips here for years. She recommends the creative district, Perpetuo Socorro, for design shops, galleries and speciality coffee.

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• The world's top cities for 2026 - and why they stand out

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• The world's best countries for expats in 2026

Comuna 13, once one of the city's most dangerous districts, now draws some of Medellín's biggest crowds. "Go with a local guide who can provide the context behind the murals, escalators and music rather than treating the neighbourhood simply as an Instagram backdrop," said Rigby Jones.

Quinn also recommends exploring the Poblado and Laureles neighbourhoods, seeking out local creators and curators. "That way, you can go home and tell stories that will dismantle outdated misconceptions about this place," he said.

Abu Dhabi, UAE

Once heavily dependent on oil, Abu Dhabi has transformed its economy through investment in technology, renewable energy, property and finance. The UAE capital now ranks sixth in the Global Cities index for the skills and education of its workforce, ahead of Paris and Boston, while its non-oil economy and job market are projected to grow faster than neighbouring Dubai's.

"Abu Dhabi feels a little slower and more relaxed than Dubai or Sharjah," said Muna Abu-Hijleh, an American who has lived in both Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. "There's more of a sense of space, and you can go from a very modern city to the beach, the mangroves or quieter neighbourhoods quite easily."

That slower pace is part of the appeal for Jeremy Savory, a longtime UAE resident and frequent visitor to Abu Dhabi, "It's a city that's been engineered to be the stable alternative next to Dubai's flash," he said. "In this region right now, boring is a selling point."

Yet, Abu Dhabi is making an enormous cultural statement. On Saadiyat Island, the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi and Zayed National Museum both opened in 2025, while the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is scheduled to open on 11 December 2026.

Abu-Hijleh also suggests at least one day at a slower pace, such as having breakfast at a local cafe or browsing at the mall. "The UAE can look incredibly futuristic from the outside, but everyday life is much more ordinary and human than the skyscrapers and luxury hotels might suggest."

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When is premium economy worth the extra cost? We compare five of the world's best-rated airlines

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20261022-when-is-premium-economy-worth-the-extra-cost-we-compare-five-of-the-worlds-best-rated-airlines, 7 days ago

Skytrax named these the world's five best premium economy airlines. We examine what sets their cabins apart and whether it's worth paying extra for them.

With wider seats, more legroom and upgraded service, premium economy has become one of the most competitive segments of long-haul flying, promising a more comfortable flight without the business class price tag.

But the difference between cabins can vary enormously – and some airlines already offer an excellent economy experience.

In the 2026 World Airline Awards, based on passenger surveys, Skytrax named EVA Air, Emirates, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Virgin Atlantic as the world's five best premium economy airlines.

We look at what each offers compared with its own economy cabin – and which upgrades deliver the most noticeable improvements in comfort and service.

1. EVA Air

EVA Air has a strong claim to premium economy expertise: the Taiwanese carrier was the first airline to introduce the cabin, in 1992. It topped Skytrax's 2026 rating and also won the award for best premium economy amenities.

The biggest differentiator is space. On EVA's Boeing 777-300ERs, premium economy offers 38in (96.5cm) of seat pitch (the distance between rows of seats), compared with 31-33in (78.7-83.8cm) in economy. Selected Boeing 787-9s go further, with 42in (106.7cm) of pitch, just 28 seats arranged 2-3-2 and a cradle-style recline designed to preserve the space for the passenger behind.

For taller travellers, that 42in (106.7cm) pitch is "like having the length of an acoustic guitar before the next seat," says Katy Nastro, travel expert at flight-tracking app Flighty.

But EVA's economy cabin is already relatively generous by industry standards. Gary Leff, founder of the frequent flyer site View from the Wing, points out that some of the airline's Boeing 777s still have nine seats across in economy rather than the tighter 10-abreast configuration common elsewhere.

Even so, Leff says he would still "far prefer premium economy", thanks to its wider seats, extra legroom and footrests. Nastro adds that "the cost to try premium economy is slightly lower than upgrading fare classes on Emirates or Cathay, where the jump can cost nearly $800 per segment".

Worth the upgrade? Particularly appealing for taller travellers on long-haul flights,especially on EVA's newer 787-9s. But its relatively generous economy seats may be sufficient for some.

2. Emirates

Emirates ranked second in Skytrax's 2026 awards, but took the top spot for both premium economy seats and catering.

Its existing premium economy cabin offers a noticeable upgrade from economy, with cream-coloured leather seats, calf and footrests, larger entertainment screens and an upgraded dining service. But whether those extras justify the cost is another matter. Nastro says Emirates' already-strong economy product makes premium economy a harder sell, particularly when the fare can be twice as expensive. While the additional legroom and improved dining are welcome, she questions whether they are enough to justify such a price difference.

That could change with the airline's newest premium economy seat. Unveiled in September 2026 for newly delivered Airbus A350s, it features electric controls, wireless charging, a 13.3in (33.8cm) 4K screen and a full-height adjustable privacy divider between each seat, which Emirates says is an industry first for premium economy. The cabin has just 28 seats in a 2-3-2 configuration.

The A350 is already operating on routes including Dubai to Kuala Lumpur, but the aircraft type alone does not guarantee the new privacy-divider seat. The airline is introducing the design as it takes delivery of additional aircraft, so passengers hoping to experience it should check with Emirates before booking.

Leff is more enthusiastic about the new A350 seat than Emirates' older premium economy product, which he considers "fairly ordinary" by the standards of this group. He says the latest version "could be the best premium economy in the world".

Worth the upgrade? The newest A350 seats promise a compelling improvement in privacy and comfort, making them particularly appealing on long-haul flights. The older premium economy cabin is a more modest upgrade: the extra space and better dining are welcome, but whether they're worth paying for depends on the fare difference.

3. Singapore Airlines

Singapore Airlines ranked third for premium economy in 2026, but it also won Skytrax's award for the world's best economy class – making the case for upgrading less straightforward.

Premium economy offers roughly 38in (96.5cm) of seat pitch, compared with around 32in (81.3cm) in economy, as well as wider seats, 8in (20.3cm) of recline and built-in calf and footrests. On its A380, its 2-4-2 premium economy configuration also means fewer middle seats than economy's 3-4-3 layout.

There are upgrades beyond the seat, too. Passengers can pre-order chef-inspired meals through the airline's Book the Cook service, enjoy Champagne and benefit from priority check in and boarding.

Nastro recommends upgrading on overnight journeys and flights lasting more than eight hours. "Sometimes, flights are simply too long to feel comfortable in economy despite the airline offering a solid economy product," says Nastro. She points to the extra legroom and fewer middle seats as particularly valuable on those lengthy routings.

Leff, meanwhile, notes that Singapore's economy cabin is already among the more comfortable options for long-haul travellers, with touches such as footrests and cup holders on some aircraft, as well as strong food and entertainment, regardless of cabin.

Worth the upgrade? On Singapore Airlines' longest flights, the extra space, recline and leg support could make a difference, particularly overnight. But on shorter journeys, its award-winning economy cabin may be more than comfortable enough.

4. Cathay Pacific

Cathay Pacific came in fourth overall, while its premium economy seat ranked second only to Emirates' in Skytrax's 2026 awards.

On the A350, premium economy offers 40in (101.6cm) of seat pitch, 9in (22.9cm) of recline and full-length leg rests. Passengers also get priority boarding, more baggage and upgraded meals. Meanwhile, Cathay's refurbished Boeing 777-300Ers feature a redesigned premium economy cabin with winged headrests for added privacy, 15.6in (39.6cm) 4K entertainment screens and Bluetooth audio.

For Nastro, the newer seat design is what best distinguishes Cathay's premium economy from competitors such as Singapore Airlines. While she finds the benefits of upgrading from economy relatively similar between the two carriers, Cathay's larger entertainment screens make watching films more immersive, and its winged headrests offer a greater sense of privacy. The latter, she says, is the "biggest differentiator".

Like Singapore, though, Cathay starts from a strong economy offering, so the main case for upgrading is the seat itself rather than a dramatic change in service.

Worth the upgrade? Most persuasive on long overnight flights, when the generous recline and leg support become more valuable. For travellers seeking greater privacy, Cathay's redesigned 777-300ER cabin offers another compelling reason to upgrade, with its winged headrests providing more separation from neighbouring passengers. On shorter journeys, however, the benefits may be less noticeable.

5. Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic rounded out Skytrax's global top five, with a premium economy cabin that combines extra space with a more elaborate onboard experience.

Seats offer up to 38in (96.5cm) of pitch, compared with around 31in (78.7cm) in standard economy, along with greater recline and leg support. The amount of personal space varies by aircraft, however. On Virgin's Boeing 787-9s, premium economy seats measure up to 21in (53.3cm) wide and recline 8in (20.3cm), while those on its newer Airbus A350-1000s and A330neos are narrower at 18.5in (47cm) wide. The A330neo also adds wireless charging and Bluetooth-enabled entertainment screens.

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For Leff, the main attraction of Virgin's premium economy is the extra space, which offers what he describes as a "less claustrophobic experience".

Virgin also distinguishes its premium economy cabin through food and service. "There's sparkling wine on boarding, a menu with three main course choices and meals served on china with proper cutlery," says Leff, who adds that afternoon tea can be another nice touch. On the ground, passengers benefit from dedicated check in and bag drop, priority boarding and baggage delivery, plus two checked bags weighing up to 23kg each.

Worth the upgrade? Virgin's wider 787 seats may be especially appealing, while the upgraded dining and airport benefits offer additional reasons to pay more. However, travellers primarily interested in legroom may find better value in Virgin's Economy Delight seats, which offer up to 34in (86.4cm) of seat pitch without the full Premium fare.

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'There's this spooky presence in Pendle Hill': Trace the footsteps of England's most famous accused witches

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20261023-the-haunting-landscapes-of-englands-accused-witches, 8 days ago

The borough of Pendle has been considered haunted ever since nine suspected witches were sent to their deaths there in 1612. Here's how curious visitors can trace their steps.

According to local legend, visitors to Pendle Hill are supposed to feel inexplicable feelings of anger, panic or dread. But as I reach the top of the 557m-high (1,8270ft) muddy escarpment in England's east Lancashire region, I mostly feel exhausted. And wet.

Yet, surrounded by the thick mist that often envelops the summit, it's impossible to deny a sense of unease. After all, this very area is where 12 Lancastrians were accused of witchcraft in 1612, leading to one of England's deadliest witch trials. Ever since, Pendle Hill's surrounding villages and ancient forests have been considered haunted.

Warning: This article contains details that some readers may find upsetting.

"There are rumours of ghostly and phantom monks, while people have reportedly experienced breathing difficulties there," says Stephen Oldfield, a Lancashire historian and author. According to tour guide Stephen Entwhistle, locals claim that the last piece of snow melting on Pendle Hill takes the shape of a witch.

Such tales have long lured visitors to Pendle Hill, particularly since the 400th anniversary of the trials in 2012. It's an especially popular jaunt around Halloween, when ghost-hunters try to connect with spirits allegedly haunting the borough's villages while enjoying some of the most underrated landscapes in northern England.

England's darkest witch trials

In early 17th-Century England, murder via witchcraft (alleged or otherwise) was already a capital offence. But the deeply superstitious king, James I, raised the stakes even higher with the Witchcraft Act of 1604, which deemed even non-fatal witchcraft – such as conjuring spirits and casting spells – punishable by death. The elderly and the poor were especially at risk of accusations, as were "cunning folk" claiming to be healers. "This was a time of great turmoil," says Oldfield. "People were very, very suspicious of anybody who didn't live what they considered to be a normal life."

The Pendle Hill witch panic began in March 1612 when folk healer Alizon Device encountered peddler John Law, who collapsed (or suffered a stroke) shortly afterward.

Law's son reported Device to local magistrate Roger Nowell, who investigated the incident. Device reputedly confessed to having paralysed Law, implicating her grandmother, Elizabeth Southerns, and Anne Whittle – rival folk healers with alleged supernatural powers – as well as Whittle's daughter, Anne. All four were locked in Lancaster Castle's prison.

A Good Friday gathering held at the Device home, interpreted by Nowell as a coven meeting, resulted in more arrests. Oldfield says the newly accused, including wealthy Alice Nutter of Roughlee, were kept overnight at nearby Ashlar House, then forced to walk through the Forest of Bowland to Lancaster Castle where they were thrown into Well Tower dungeon. The prisoners were collectively accused of various kinds of maleficum (malevolent magical acts), including the murder of 10 locals.

Nine-year-old Jennet Device was a crucial witness, giving testimony so convincing it doomed her mother, brother, sister and grandmother. Southerns died awaiting her verdict, but nine of the 12 accused were found guilty and hanged on Gallows Hill. Only Alice Grey was acquitted; Jennet Preston was hanged in her native Yorkshire.

Witch hunt fever continued for several decades more until the Age of Enlightenment, and witchcraft was eventually decriminalised in England in 1736.

A 'spooky presence'

The Pendle Hill trials remain some of the most famous and well-documented in English history, and the borough has never managed to shake its sinister past.

Oldfield says Pendle Hill's damp, bleak landscape naturally lends itself to stories of hauntings and sightings: "There's always been this atmosphere and spooky presence in Pendle Hill. It's like being in another country, even compared to West Lancashire".

Local author Stacey Halls, whose debut novel was set during the Pendle witch trials, finds being on the hill unnerving. "When you're up there on a cloudy day, which it always is up there, you literally cannot see. It's like being in a cloud… It's a bit unnatural, a bit spooky."

Some local wells, like St Chad's Well near Bull Hole Farm, still have anti-witch protection marks carved into them. Television programmes, including Most Haunted and The Haunted Hunts, explore Pendle to locate spirits, especially on Tynedale Farm, where the Nutter family lived for generations.

For the 400th anniversary of the Pendle witch trials in 2012, local organisations funded the Pendle Witches' Way and the Lancashire Witches' Walk, which trace the imagined routes the accused may have taken to their imprisonment at Lancaster Castle.

Looking to follow in the steps of the twelve, I slip and slide back down Pendle Hill, towards hopefully drier, more solid ground that will give me a deeper sense of the region's history.

Walking alongside witches

I start my homage in Newchurch-In-Pendle, the tiny village where several trial victims lived. Perched steeply on the hillside, it claims only 940 residents, and "when you drive [in], it still feels very much like it would have done when the trials took place," says Oldfield.

Often overlooked in favour of the nearby Lake and Peak Districts, this area of east Lancashire is equally scenic, with dramatic green hills, lush pastures and storybook cottages. "If you are looking for fresh air, stunning views all the way over to Yorkshire, and a nice walk, then the top of Pendle Hill is ideal," says Entwhistle.

As I stroll through the town, I find chilling spectres of its haunted past. Several homes display witch-inspired art, while others have horseshoes on their doors and holly trees planted outside – traditional protection from spells. Signposts depicting a witch on a broomstick guide me to the trailhead of the Pendle Witches' Way, which leads me to St Mary's Church – an imposing English Gothic parish in the shadow of Pendle Hill.

This churchyard is where, during her trial, Nutter was accused of having desecrated graves to rob bones and teeth. It is also the site of the Witches' Tomb, a large stone vault widely believed to belong to Nutter and her ilk.

Though headstone bears the Nutter name and enigmatic carvings of a skull, Oldfield is sceptical – Nutter was a common name in the area, and a convicted witch would "never have been allowed to be buried on consecrated ground".

Walking through the silent churchyard, I spot tombstones going further back in time, their names increasingly harder to read. Being so close to such unsettling history sends a shudder down my spine, so I look up at the church's tower, where I spot the unique, eye-shaped "Eye of God" carving – inscribed into the tower in the years after the trials to protect Newchurch-in-Pendle from evil spirits.

I continue my quest, driving down from Newchurch-in-Pendle through the rolling Lancashire countryside – first, to the picturesque village of Barley, the primary starting point for Pendle Hill hikers, and then to Roughlee, past a life-size outdoor metal sculpture of Nutter. I then park outside Ashlar House – a gabled stone cottage in the village of Fence. "That’s the only building still standing in Pendle that we know the witches went inside," says Oldfield.

Driving next through the Forest of Bowland, I am struck by the forest's dramatic valleys and wild heather fields. But any delight is curtailed as I imagine the accused's dread as they trudged the same stretch I'm now crossing in comfort.

I finally arrive in the medieval city of Lancaster, the official end to both the Lancashire Witches' Walk and the Pendle Witches' Way. The 11th-Century Norman Lancaster Castle looms high on a hilltop in city centre, and I follow a handful of other tourists to the dungeon, where the accused awaited their deaths. The stone cell is damp, cramped and stifling cold – just a few moments inside is enough to make me yearn for daylight.

Sorely in need of a stiff drink after all that gloom, I pop down The Golden Lion pub. According to local myth, it's where the accused had a final drink before execution, says professor Charlotte Baker of Lancaster University.

Between the pub's centuries-old wooden bar and its ancient fireplace, it's easy to understand why rumours have long circulated of ghosts and strange noises emanating from the place. Publican speculation is that the noises still come from the condemned who passed it on the way to their death. Any landlord whose pub has even a passing connection to the Pendle Witch Trials – they're all likely to insist a curse took place nearby – can't wait to speak about how haunted their establishment is, says Halls.

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Entwhistle is unsurprised the area is increasingly inundated with dark tourists. "It's a story that should have been turned into a Hollywood blockbuster, because it has deception, lies, superstition and religion."

While such fodder has helped to keep the victims' memories alive, Oldfield can't help but feel sorry for them, and the terrifying treatment they were subjected to.

"These were just uneducated, poor and pitiful people, who didn't have a hope in life. Healing gave them a sense of importance. Nowadays, you'd just avoid them. But because of the atmosphere of the time, they were killed."

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'It was a fun idea': The Norwegian island that wanted to abolish time

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20261022-the-norwegian-island-that-wanted-to-abolish-time, 9 days ago

Seven years after a bizarre plan to abolish time made headlines, what is life really like on this remote Arctic island?

In 2019, a tiny island community in the Norwegian Arctic made headlines around the world with an extraordinary proposal: it wanted to abolish time.

Residents of Sommarøy, a fishing village 56km west of Tromsø, were supposedly campaigning to become the world's first time-free zone during the 69 days each summer when the Sun never sets. Watches were hung from a nearby bridge and a local hotel owner presented a petition bearing residents' signatures to a member of Norway's parliament. The international media enthusiastically embraced the idea, lauding the town's efforts to live without reference to time.

There was just one problem: the campaign wasn't quite what it seemed.

Many locals were mystified by all the fuss, baffled by the idea that anyone could live entirely beyond time. How could a hotel operate without check-in or check-out times? Was a cafe supposed to remain open forever in case someone wanted lunch at 04:00? What about children attending school?

It turned out that Innovation Norway, the government agency for promoting tourism, had orchestrated the campaign. Although some islanders had participated, others were reportedly unaware of it. When the agency's involvement emerged, its head was forced to issue a public apology. The watches soon disappeared from the bridge, and the campaign sank, seemingly without a trace.

And yet, if you take away the cynicism of a government trying to manufacture a popular movement to attract visitors, there is something appealing about the idea.

High above the Arctic Circle, Sommarøy experiences uninterrupted daylight each summer from 18 May to 26 July, when the Sun never sets and the usual boundaries between day and night start to dissolve. In deep winter, the Sun never rises and lunch can be eaten in deep darkness. Could a place like this really change the way people experience time?

I decided to travel to Sommarøy to find out.

The first vexing issue was that I would have to hurry if I wanted to reach Sommarøy – the bus was leaving at the inconveniently precise time of 11:30. If I missed it, I would have to wait until tomorrow. But this was, after all, I reasoned, Tromsø, not Sommarøy. And no town can be an island.

Once on board, the bus crosses bridges and skirts fjords, passing small villages as the traffic gradually thins. Beyond Eidkjosen, the road climbs away from the water's edge and finally leaves Tromsø's outer orbit.

One hour and 40 minutes later, we arrive in Sommarøy, a village of around 300 people whose population swells in summer and on weekends when Norwegians retreat to their holiday cabins. I am instantly bewitched. Up close, houses on stilts rise above tight harbours while colourful homes dot the islands against a stirring backdrop of mountains still snowcapped well into midsummer. And out beyond this fissured coastline cut through with fjords, ice caps and high-altitude valleys, lie the wild seas of the North Atlantic.

The first person I meet in Sommarøy is Ewa Kaczyński, a Polish tourist who tells me that she was drawn here by the publicity surrounding the ill-fated 2019 campaign. "I always wanted to see the midnight Sun," she tells me. "I lead a very busy life back home, and the idea of not having to worry about time for a few days was really appealing."

I ask her what she thinks now that she's here.

"I'm not sure. The first day I was a little bit disappointed because, of course, time is necessary for the world to function. Restaurants and shops closed when they said they would. And reception at the hotel wasn't open overnight. But then I took a deep breath, turned off my phone and found myself relaxing more. I can do that here. And maybe just having the conversation about time was enough – it does seem to matter less here than it does back home.

Dutch traveller Wouter De Wit has embraced the perpetual daylight. "It's wild," he says. "I went for a midnight swim yesterday. The Sun was out and I wouldn't have been able to guess what time it was if I didn't have a watch. It was a bit cold, though…"

Locals, meanwhile, were more reluctant to speak, at least on the record. The media clamour surrounding the campaign, and the clumsy way that Innovation Norway handled the whole affair left many wary, and not a little tired of the matter.

"Look, it was a fun idea that we used to talk about every now and then," says a hotel worker who asked not to be named, as the 2019 campaign remains a sensitive topic. "In summer, we sort of live outside time anyway. If no-one is around, sometimes a shop will close so that the owner can go fishing. The kids stay up late because there's no school the next day. And lots of people are on holidays, so life is more relaxed. But then it became a thing."

"Has it been good for the town?" I ask.

"Not at the beginning," the hotel employee tells me. "It was all visitors wanted to talk about. But now, a few years later, it's OK. It's kind of back to how it was like before… and it brings people here. Now the world knows about Sommarøy."

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Later, as I fall asleep at the Sommarøy Arctic Hotel, the town is so quiet that it is difficult to tell the difference between the hours – there is no traffic, no general noise, regardless of the hour. Fully aware of the irony, I set my alarm for 03:30 to see if I can learn anything about the fluidity of time from venturing out at what, anywhere else, might be considered an ungodly hour.

I let myself out of the hotel quietly, so as not to wake the other guests, and walk around the deserted streets, then down to the water's edge. Gulls fly overhead and waders from warmer climes step daintily through the shallows. But it's different for humans. The houses are quiet, the streets empty. There's no-one around at all.

And then something happens. In purest silence, a wave of euphoria breaks over me, although whether it is because of the sheer novelty of being here or some revelatory moment of existing outside time, I cannot say. All I know is that the Sun is high in a cloudless sky at a time when – logic and lived experience suggests – it shouldn't be. For a moment, the actual time seems not to matter at all.

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'A bow isn't simply a greeting': The unspoken rules of Japanese body language

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20261022-six-gestures-to-learn-before-travelling-to-japan, 10 days ago

From calling someone over to asking for the bill, learning common Japanese hand gestures can help you navigate social situations in Japan without saying a word.

To outsiders, Japanese body language may seem confusing. We might use different body parts or move our hands in a different direction than other cultures to express disapproval or make a request.

But here in Japan, where manners and etiquette are highly valued, body language is a powerful tool we use to communicate – and a tangible way for visitors to step inside our culture.

For instance, a simple goodbye can look very different depending on whom you're saying it to.

When I say goodbye to a friend my own age, I'll usually wave. But if I'm saying goodbye to someone older, I might bow – even if I know them well. I will never point at them, no matter how well I know them. And if I'm meeting someone for the first time, I won't shake their hand.

Whether you encounter non-verbal cues at a crowded tourist site, in an izakaya (gastropub) or on public transportation, understanding them is ultimately about recognising that any kind of communication in Japan is deeply influenced by our awareness of social relationships. Even someone one year older than you might be considered your senpai (senior). That's why I will bow to someone older than me, bow only slightly to an acquaintance, visitor or serviceperson, but wave to someone my own age, or someone who is my kohai (junior). How deeply I bow shows how deep my respect, gratitude or apology is.

Another concept that plays into Japanese body language is omoiyari. Often translated as "consideration for others", omoiyari is about imagining how someone else might feel and acting thoughtfully as a result. So, to avoid disturbing others, our hand gestures are subtle, not loud or exaggerated, and to respect other people's personal space, we typically maintain distance in our interactions, reserving physical contact for special cases. In crowded places, we discreetly make room for people – there's a hand gesture for that, too.

Of course, Japanese people don't all communicate the same way. And not every gesture you encounter carries a hidden meaning – a thumbs-up, for example, generally conveys the same positive message in Japan as it does in many Western countries. But for visitors, even if you don't speak Japanese, learning to read our body language will help you connect with us – all without saying a single word.

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Giant eagles once ruled the skies. They snatched human children, and shaped our evolution

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261028-predatory-birds-the-size-of-a-small-aircraft-once-flocked-the-skies-some-of-them-ate-humans, 3 days ago

After the dinosaur-killing asteroid hit, giant birds became apex predators for tens of millions of years – and humans were among their prey.

A child of our ancient ancestors, just three years old and still teething, wandered through the swaying grass of the South African savannah 2.8 million years ago. The young Australopithecus africanus was not aware it was being watched from above.

Without warning, an enormous raptor dived. It grabbed the infant and killed it.

Warning: Some readers may find details in this story upsetting.

It's not known for sure what kind of bird ate the early human infant, who has become known as the "Taung child". But puncture marks below his or her eye sockets are consistent with those of eagle talons which hunt their prey in this way, often storing some of their kill in a tree and taking the rest back to its nest.

The Stone Age was a perilous time to be alive. Megafauna came to rule the world. Early humans lived alongside mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, sabre-toothed cats – and huge child-eating birds.

For tens of millions of years, between the fall of the non-avian dinosaurs and the Great Ice Age, the skies were ruled by these giants. Their reign may have shaped the course of human evolution in profound and overlooked ways. Some are thought to have left their mark in legends of child-snatching birds that have lived on in cultures around the world, long after the birds themselves died out.

Where the monstrous birds came from

When the non-avian dinosaurs were wiped off the planet, the sky was blanketed in dust and most plants died out. For the animals, there was little to eat but seeds – but this suited birds just fine.

In the absence of predators, some small surviving ground-dwelling beaked birds were able to evolve into giants.

Some were plant-eaters, such as Australia's Dromornithidae, known as the "demon ducks of doom" – much like modern-day ducks but 100 times bigger and heavier than cows. Some took to the skies to become huge ocean-going predators, such as the largest known flying bird ever to live, the South Carolina Pelagornis sandersi, with its massive 7m (24ft) wingspan.

Others, though, stepped into the roles left vacant by the extinction of top land-based predators like the Tyrannosaurs. Where there's big prey available, even bigger predators evolve.

These were the monstrous birds our ancestors had to contend with.

Modern and ancient clues

"As long as primates have been around, there have been raptors," says Scott McGraw, a primatologist at Ohio State University, US. "And raptors have always been preying on primates – including us and our relatives."

Echoes of the ancient conflict between our ancestors and giant birds can be seen in the wild today. When McGraw examined the remains of more than 600 modern-day primates killed by birds of prey, including African crowned eagles, in Ivory Coast's Taï Forest, he discovered a remarkable similarity with the talon marks left on the Taung child's remains.

In a number of skulls, the monkeys had damage to the orbital floor – a bony surface inside the eye socket – "where the eagle had either pecked out the eyes with its beak, or torn them out with a talon", says McGraw.

"One of our reviewers went down to the fossil vault, pulled out the Taung child, and found that the damage was identical."

McGraw believes raptors would have routinely eaten our human ancestors – and that predation by birds may have been one of the most important selective forces in the evolution of primates, the order to which humans belong.

"If we go back now and examine more closely the [human] fossil assemblages that have been collected over the years," he says, "there is a good chance – now that we know what we're looking for – we will find additional raptor damage. If what we're seeing in Taï is any indication, then this is normal."

How predatory birds shaped our evolution

There's little doubt in the paleoanthropological record that early humans were prey, says James Cole, archaeologist and dean of applied sciences at Brighton University in the UK. "Particularly the earlier hominins, like the baby Australopithecus africanus that was eaten by an eagle."

Cole says our early ancestors were dinner for many predatory species. "We were predated upon for sure."

The need to evade predators – from birds to leopards, hyenas and giant crocodiles – would have been an important evolutionary pressure on our ancestors. Being dinner for giant birds is thought to have shaped both our bodies and minds.

Our ability to stand on two legs, for example, would have made it easier for us to spot predators. Cooperation and altruism, interdependence and mutual protection may also have helped us. Group size became very important, says Cole. "There is safety in numbers."

When it comes to evading predatory birds, the larger the social group, the better, adds McGraw.

Unlike pursuit predators – such as lions or wolves, which actively chase their prey, raptors are often ambush predators. They are stealthy and, in the case of crowned eagles, hide in the trees until the moment is right. This indicates human tendency towards sociality may have been driven by the need to evade predatory birds in particular, so multiple people can keep watch for a surprise attack – known as the "many eyes effect".

Cole adds that larger group sizes may have also contributed to the emergence of language. "[In a big group], you start to specialise roles. When you have some people doing one job while others are doing something else, that requires coordination. And once [a group] starts to fragment like that, coordination can't just rely on line of sight."

For simple communication like hand gestures to work, people need to be able to see each other, says Cole, but when you have to coordinate beyond line of sight – say to warn of a predator approaching – "that's where language really starts to play a role".

The pressure to avoid death from above may have even kickstarted language evolution, McGraw suggests. Evidence shows most primates use generalised alarms for various predator types, the same call for a lion or a leopard, for example. But with raptors, they respond with specific calls. Such signalling behaviour, McGraw suggests, could be interpreted as a precursor to human language.

Meet the culprits: Eagles and teratorns

The greatest crossover between giant predatory birds and our human ancestors is thought to have been in the Americas.

Early Americans would have crossed paths with teratorns. These were huge carnivorous birds that could swallow their prey whole. Soaring above the land, these condor-like birds boasted 6m (20ft) wingspans, and were both scavengers and predators. These birds were so huge, they could take to the air simply by opening their wings and getting an updraught, says Joanne Cooper, senior curator of the avian anatomical collections at London's Natural History Museum.

Teratorns ruled the skies for around 25 million years, dying out about 10,000 years ago – well after the arrival of the first humans in the Americas. The teratorn may have inspired the Thunderbird legends, says Cooper. In Native American mythology, the Thunderbird has a colossal wingspan, and is believed to control thunder and lightning.

The Aiolornis incredibilis – also known as the incredible teratorn – terrorised southern California and Nevada and had a wingspan of up to 5.5m (18ft). Further north, in Oregon, the Teratornis woodburnensis had a 4m (14ft) wingspan. This monster of the skies lived about 12,000 years ago. Its remains were found alongside those of mammoths, mastodons and ground sloths – as well as early humans.

Half a world away in New Zealand, the Maori legend of Te Hokioi – a huge eagle that snatched children – is thought to have been based on a real species, the enormous extinct Haast's eagle, experts suggest.

Haast's eagle was "essentially a flying tiger", says Cooper. It was roughly twice the weight of an adult harpy eagle, which is amongst the largest living eagles. The Haast's eagle preyed on another giant, but ground-dwelling, bird, the 4m-tall (13ft) moa. The giant eagle would swoop down – its weight giving it considerable acceleration – and strike its prey on the back with its 10cm (4in) long talons, knocking it flat to the ground.

"We see these huge talon marks on some moa pelvises," says Cooper, who notes the Haast's eagle would have been just as capable of attacking humans. "Kids would have absolutely been at risk. It must have been awesome and terrifying."

It may also be why strong legends of child-snatching birds persisted, in Maori and North American cultures, and in Greek mythology too – where storks didn't deliver babies, but stole them.

"When these birds fly over, they cast a shadow – and they cast a long shadow culturally all around the world," says Cooper.

How we outlived the giants

In all, giant predatory birds ruled the skies for close to 50 million years. Then, 2.6 million years ago, the Earth plunged into the Great Ice Age of the Pleistocene epoch. The Pleistocene was a time of severe climate swings, which is thought to have propelled human evolution.

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Conversely, by the end of the epoch, 11,700 years ago, the giant mammals had all but died out and the largest predatory birds too had disappeared. Experts aren't sure whether climate change or human hunters were to blame for the demise of the megafauna. But the expansion of humans, and the ways we changed the ecosystem, came hand in hand with the loss of up to 95% of all megafauna.

"We were either trying to eat them, or in competition with them," says Cooper. Perhaps, she suggests, this explains the tension between humans and raptors that persists to this day. "We're fascinated by them, we revere them – but we're not necessarily very happy about living alongside them."

As we exited the Pleistocene epoch, the climate began to stabilise. The glaciers retreated, and humans started farming. This was the dawn of a new era, the age of humans.

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'It's offensively cheap': How solar power is quietly becoming bigger than nuclear

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261023-how-solar-became-bigger-than-nuclear, 7 days ago

After defying projections, solar's dramatic growth means it is now overtaking nuclear as a global power source. Here are seven reasons for solar's success, and where it might go from here.

The world's solar power is crossing a threshold. A decade ago, it barely registered on a global scale, providing just 1% of the world's power. In 2026, it will almost certainly increase to 10% of power, and overtake nuclear, a mainstay of electricity since the late 1970s.

Globally, solar electricity generation quietly overtook nuclear power (just) in 2025, according to statistics from UK-based energy think tank Ember. And BBC analysis of Ember data over the past 12 months up to September 2026 shows it clearly outstripping nuclear, producing 13% more power.

"[Solar] generating more electricity than all the world's nuclear power plants is a pretty insane stat, for sure," says Dave Jones, co-founder of Ember.

From China's vast arrays to a recent solar upsurge driven by escalating oil prices, the incredible rise of solar power has defied all projections. Here are seven ways it has become an apparently "unstoppable force" – and what the future looks like from here.

1. An underestimated force

"Solar is now the engine of the power transition," says Jan Rosenow, a professor of energy and climate policy at the University of Oxford in the UK.

Solar has become the fastest-growing source of new electricity in history, and by far the largest source of new electricity globally. In 2025, it met three-quarters of the growth in the world's demand for electricity, overtaking wind power generation (wind power is also growing, just a little more slowly).

"It wasn't expected," says Rosenow. Mainstream projections, he says, have underestimated solar year after year. Outlooks such as those from the International Energy Agency (IEA), an influential intergovernmental organisation based in Paris, "assumed linear growth and slowly falling costs, and got both wrong".

Over 2026, multiple sources indicate solar electricity generation will almost certainly far exceed nuclear globally. Nuclear's electricity generation has remained more or less constant since 2000, while solar's has increased some 2,700-fold.

2. 'Offensively cheap'

Solar, a mature technology for some 15 years now, became the cheapest electricity in history in 2020. Since then, solar has scaled, efficiency has risen, and the amount of silicon and silver used in panels has gone down, leading prices to fall yet further, says Jones.

"Massive Chinese manufacturing scale and current overcapacity have pushed module prices to record lows," says Rosenow.

In particular, a large fall in the price of panels in 2023-24 pushed us into the current era of what Jones calls "offensively cheap" solar. "A panel in itself is just so unbelievably cheap," he says. "It's well under $100 (£75)… and that's going to keep you generating electricity for 30, 40 years without any input at all."

Of course, it's not just in purely economic terms that solar is bringing down costs. Researchers have calculated the US's rising wind and solar generation brought it $249bn (£186bn) in climate and health benefits between 2019 and 2022.

3. Global uptake

China is still the world's biggest solar power by far but is by no means the only player.

Despite the US imposing a variety of tariffs on solar, it remains the second country when it comes to installations, which are still skyrocketing – especially in states won by President Trump in 2024. In fact, the US now has enough solar to power more than one-third of its households.

"Tariffs and other federal policies that constrain renewable energy growth are certainly expected to raise costs and slow expansion relative to what we otherwise would have seen," says Alicia Zhao, an expert in US mitigation pathways at the University of Maryland.

"However, economics are a key part of why solar has been able to grow so quickly. Even with rising costs, solar is still one of the cheapest sources of new power in the US. And it is getting built regardless of political lines."

India, meanwhile, is moving away from fossil fuels far faster than China did, and new solar has met 60% of its rise in power demand in the past two years.

In Australia, over four million homes now have rooftop solar: well over a third of all households.

4. Unreliable fossil fuels

Countries like Pakistan and Lebanon have also begun installing solar at breakneck speeds, while across Africa countries are installing some 100,000 solar panels per day.

In many places, escalating diesel prices, driven by the Russia-Ukraine conflict and US-Israel war with Iran, has swung the cost needle yet further in solar's favour. This is especially the case in many African countries where home diesel generators are a mainstay due to unreliable grids. Rooftop solar panels, nearly all of them imported from China, have now taken off as an alternative.

Ethiopia has even banned the import of petrol and diesel cars in a bid to tackle oil dependency and pollution, says Jones.

Solar is also rapidly providing new electricity where fossil-based grids can't keep up with demand. Pakistan, for example, has become a surprising poster child for the solar revolution due to its extraordinarily rapid rise in installations. In 2019, solar provided less than 2% of its electricity; now it's 24%, driven by costly, unreliable grid electricity combined and cheap solar imports from China.

"What's really incredible in Pakistan is… generally most of the solar boom has been out of people's pockets," says Jones. "People can afford it, without needing to take out loans."

A similar story has been seen in several other "sun belt" countries, from Lebanon to Nigeria. "[Solar] lets households act without waiting for governments or utilities," says Rosenow. "In uncertain times, that speed and independence is extremely valuable."

5. Battery revolution

Solar power, of course, can only be produced during the day when the sun is shining. To turn it into electricity that can be dispatched at any time, it needs to be paired with batteries.

Fortunately, batteries have been having their own cost revolution, transforming their ability to support the solar rollout. "Solar plus storage is now routinely cheaper than new fossil plants in sunny regions," says Rosenow. "Batteries have largely solved the daily problem of shifting midday sun into the evening."

In California, for example, solar and batteries met on average over a quarter of electricity demand from 19:00-21:00 (the evening peak) over the first half of 2026. US states such as Vermont are now rolling out grid-integrated systems of home batteries, often paired with solar.

Barriers still remain for longer-term storage of solar across seasons, cloudy periods and monsoon seasons, though, both Rosenow and Jones say. It means the integration of solar into the wider electricity system still matters, says Rosenow.

6. Electrify everything

Solar is seen as a key part of the push towards electrification, reducing fossil fuel use in areas that previously didn't use electricity, such as via electric cars. Electrification has been chosen as a major theme at this year's UN climate talks in Turkey.

"That's where solar's going, to not just be king of electricity, but king of energy," says Jones.

Still, it all requires a plan, Julia Souder, chief executive of the Long Duration Energy Storage Council, a global executive-led non-profit established at COP26, warned recently. "There is an inherent danger in uncontrolled electrification, and adding massive new loads without built-in flexibility creates a fragile system," she wrote in a blog for international policy network Ren21. "Electrification is not automatically resilient."

The limits on solar are now grids, storage and how fast we electrify demand, says Rosenow – not panels or cost. "The bigger question is no longer whether solar grows but whether our power systems and institutions can keep up."

In the US, data centres and electrification mean power demand is growing for the first time in decades, says Zhao, with energy security a national priority.

"Renewables already make up over 90% of new capacity in the US," she says. "This need for secure, quickly deployable electricity could create a critical opportunity for [further] renewable energy growth even without support from the current federal government."

7. Expanding tech

In the past few years, plug-in panels (or "balcony solar"), have started spreading rapidly in Germany. These generate less electricity than rooftop panels but feed it directly into homes via a standard socket.

They have now been approved in several other countries and US states including California.

Meanwhile, agrivoltaics, which combines food production and solar panels, is being touted as a solution to concerns in some areas about the land use of solar.

Other technologies from floating and "mirror" solar plants to perovskite panels and solar windows could all see growth in coming years.

What's next for solar

In 2026, the world's solar capacity will go on rising, but the rate of expansion may slow down for the first time ever, says Jones.

This is down to China: last summer, it changed its regime for managing and supporting new solar installations, leading to a burst of installations in 2025 to fall under the old price regime. Elsewhere, it's a different picture. "If you exclude China, there's more panels being installed this year than last year," says Jones.

By 2030, the IEA thinks solar power generation will have reached double that of 2025's levels, with solar overtaking hydro to become the world's third-largest electricity source.

"Wherever grid power is costly and unreliable, the economics keep pulling people towards solar," says Rosenow. "There is one caveat: if Chinese solar panels are difficult to import this will not happen at speed."

More like this:

• The US state replacing power plants with home batteries

• The dream of beaming solar energy from orbit

• Perovskite: The 'wonder material' that could transform solar

There has been a lot of bad news about the climate recently. It's now incredibly likely the 1.5C global limit set in Paris in 2015 will be breached, the world is seeing rising climate impacts and is edging towards several climate tipping points this century.

But the solar success story shows we are also making progress in ways that were never anticipated. A decade ago, "no one was getting close to expecting that to happen", says Jones, noting that the growth in clean electricity has directly translated to fewer coal plants being built.

"Now, worst cases [of climate change] are somewhere between 2-3C of warming, rather than 4C of warming."

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I'm one of a growing number of Gen Z birdwatchers - it helps my mental health

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm87zl3jej81o, 6 days ago

"I would be such a grump," says Caitlin Andrew, recalling her teenage self on walks with her parents.

"They are both into birdwatching and they would stop and listen and look at things.

"We had some really nice walks and experiences, but I just didn't have an interest in them at the time. I do feel quite bad about it now."

Three years ago, during a difficult period in her life, Caitlin discovered birds offered an unexpected escape from her troubles.

She joined the growing number of young people flocking to birdwatching.

"I was 24 and living in Glasgow as a student," says Caitlin, who grew up in Midlothian.

"I had poor mental health and was feeling a bit low, and finding it quite difficult to connect to the world around me."

Around that time, Caitlin joined her family for a holiday on Islay.

The southern-most island of the Inner Hebrides is renowned for its wild birds, with more than 120 species to spot during the spring and autumn migrations.

"When we were there we did a lot of birdwatching," says Caitlin.

"And as you can imagine there are incredible things to see - choughs and white-tailed eagles."

Caitlin says, rather than feeling grumpy, she found a sense of peace and calm watching birds.

"Just taking time to look and listen and take in everything you are connected to the environment you are in."

Her parents were delighted when she asked for a pair of binoculars for her birthday.

But making her first forays into birdwatching, Caitlin felt no-one else shared her passion for birds.

"I did feel a little bit embarrassed to say I was doing it," she says.

"It is a stereotype, isn't it? It's associated with older people with a sedate life and picking it up in retirement - all things which I don't think are negative at all.

"But among my peers I was certainly the only person doing it properly in any kind of capacity."

Caitlin, who is a Gaelic speaker, found she was far from alone as a young female birdwatcher when she made a BBC Alba documentary about her hobby.

She came across an Inverness chapter of the Feminist Bird Club - a group founded in New York in 2016 to help make the interest inclusive and safe.

Caitlin also met female professionals and volunteers involved in bird conservation.

She says: "In the birdwatching community, everyone is so friendly and happy to tell you they have something interesting in their scope or have seen something interesting."

Research carried out for the RSPB suggests there are more than four million birdwatchers in Britain, up from 2.7 million eight years ago.

The number of Gen Z enthusiasts - people aged 16 to 29 - rose from an estimated 61,000 in 2018 to 724,000 today, according to the study.

Caitlin's favourite birds include crested tits, which in the UK are found in native pine forests in parts of the Highlands, Moray and Aberdeenshire.

"I love seeing crested tits in the Cairngorms. They are rare, so its a special thing to see them," she says.

Gannets are another favourite.

"I'm always happy to see a gannet. They are big and so powerful. They're like dinosaurs."

Caitlin enjoys how different birds signal changes in the year.

"When you start to hear a chiffchaff in maybe March or April you know spring is coming, and that is really exciting," she says.

"And then when coming into winter there are redwings and fieldfares.

"It feels like these creatures are giving you pointers that things are changing, and it's lovely to connect to that."

She adds: "Life can be so turbulent. Things go and down and you never know what's coming - the political nonsense and all the rest of it.

"And these little animals, they are just all about finding food, raising babies, fledging their young and then doing it all again - they're just trying to survive.

"It does make your problems feel very small."

The immortal jellyfish can beat ageing. It could inspire treatments for diseases of old age

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261016-the-rejuvenating-secrets-of-the-immortal-jellyfish, 14 days ago

The immortal jellyfish is capable of winding back its lifecycle to become young again. Scientists are unlocking its cellular secrets to find ways human cells could rejuvenate too.

The tiny translucent jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii is surprisingly hard to kill. The marine biologist Maria Miglietta of Texas A&M University at Galveston has cut them, boiled them, starved them, overloaded their tanks with salt or plopped them in fresh water – but the nifty creatures seem to cheat death every time.

Under duress, they stop in their tracks and fall to the bottom of their tank. Then something astonishing happens: the animals transform into balls of cells that bear no resemblance to the tentacled umbrella shape of adult jellyfish, known as the medusa. Within one to three days, a structure called a polyp – an early jellyfish life stage – buds off from this ball of cells and then grows into a colony, which will eventually sprout new medusae.

"From one jellyfish that doesn't die, then you get this colony that can form hundreds more," Miglietta says. And each one of these new jellyfish can, in principle, rejuvenate the same way – exhibiting a seemingly endless capacity to wind back the clock to youth.

Miglietta and other scientists are now studying the genetic and molecular processes that make Turritopsis dohrnii's death-defying feat possible. By unlocking these secrets, scientists eventually hope to explore whether they can trigger similar kinds of processes in humans. The goal is not to turn elderly people back into babies, Benjamin Button-style – an idea that's firmly in the realms of science fiction – but to coax cells and tissues into more youthful states to heal wounds and treat age-related maladies.

"The holy grail of this kind of thing, I think, would be regenerative biology: trying to reverse ageing-related degeneration or degradation," says Michael Koldobskiy, a pediatric oncologist and physician-scientist at Johns Hopkins. "We're a long way away from harnessing that for human benefit, but I think understanding these organisms that evolved these processes millions of years ago could potentially really pay off."

Turritopsis dohrnii's regenerative talents were first reported in 1992 by an Italian scientist who was keeping the animals in the lab and forgot to feed them over a weekend. Expecting to find them dead when he returned, "instead he found new polyps in the container", Miglietta says.

Soon, the biologist Stefano Piraino of Italy's University of Salento started to take an interest in what made this feat of rejuvenation possible. As embryos develop, so-called stem cells multiply and morph into the nerve cells, muscle cells and various other cell types that make up the body. Usually, they're stuck in that particular cell type until they age and die. But Piraino discovered that, during the immortal jellyfish's rejuvenation, certain tissues in the medusa undergo a "transdifferentiation" process where they revert back to a stem cell-type state and then specialise into other cell types.

"Adult cells become 'undifferentiated' and become something else that is needed to form the polyp," says Miglietta, who used to work in Piraino's lab.

Turritopsis dohrnii's ability to rejuvenate earned it the nickname "immortal jellyfish". It is – as far as scientists know – unique in the animal kingdom. While some lizards, worms and amphibians can regrow lost or injured body parts, none come close to reverting adult bodies back into babies. Turritopsis dohrnii is a remarkable demonstration that ageing and mortality is not always a biological inevitability (though scientists can't rule out that it doesn't eventually die naturally).

Genetic clues

Today, Miglietta and others are working to dissect the genetic processes that allow cells to go back in time. The ultimate dream, Koldobskiy says, would be to identify the molecular "switch" that controls this process. If the same control switch exists in humans, then perhaps it can be triggered to coax human cells to more youthful states. If possible, that could accelerate the healing of wounds or injured tissue after strokes or heart attacks, or perhaps even reverse the damage that occurs in age-driven vision loss or the neurodegeneration that happens in Alzheimer's disease.

"We're not going to shrink down to an embryo again and restart," he says, "but at the organ and tissue level, I think it's very much a possibility."

The research is young, but is already starting to reveal some clues. In a 2022 study, one team of researchers compared the genes of Turritopsis dohrnii and a related species that is not known to rejuvenate – though it's hard to be certain that it's not capable of doing so, as many jellyfish are understudied, says molecular biologist and bioinformatician Victor Quesada of the University of Oviedo in Spain.

Compared to the other species, Turritopsis dohrnii's DNA contained more copies of genes that produce proteins to help repair mutations and other kinds of DNA damage that accumulates with age. The immortal jellyfish also had more copies of genes that produce proteins involved in maintaining structures called telomeres – little caps on the end of DNA strands that protect the genetic material from damage. Normally, telomeres shorten with age, making the DNA more susceptible to damage, but the immortal jellyfish's enhanced ability to repair them could be one key to its longevity, Quesada says.

This is just the beginning of understanding the secrets of Turritopsis dohrnii's rejuvenation strategy and whether any aspect of it could be applied to humans, Quesada says.

"We assume in many diseases, that there's no way back," he says. "Perhaps there might be a way back, if we [learn] enough about… how those mechanisms work."

Miglietta, meanwhile, has been comparing the genes activated across Turritopsis dohrnii's different life stages and examining the ones that are only activated during the ball-like cyst stage, where cells reverse fate and then create new polyps. "That may be an indication that those genes are involved in that unique process," she says.

In 2019 and 2021 research, she and her colleagues found a heightened activity of mysterious genes with unknown functions, but also ones involved in repairing DNA and maintaining telomeres.

Another preliminary study by Miglietta found that there's some overlap in the genes being overactivated in the cyst stage and genes that have been linked to longevity in humans. That underscores the idea that there may be common pathways between the two species, Miglietta says.

Miglietta is now collaborating with Koldobskiy to better understand these processes and eventually explore whether they can be induced in human cells. Scientists have already discovered certain ways of inducing rejuvenation-like processes in mammalian cells, but applying this to human tissues has proven difficult. Perhaps studying Turritopsis dohrnii will reveal other, more effective ways of doing so, Koldobskiy hopes.

Fragility of an immortal organism

On top of its potential practical benefits in medicine, Turritopsis dohrnii also offers more philosophical lessons. "It's comforting to think that nature has found a solution to one of the main problems of humans: ageing and death," Miglietta says. And indeed, she suspects that Turritopsis dohrnii's incredible resilience is one reason why the species has become so widespread across the world's oceans, from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean and Japan.

But while it may seem invincible, the immortal jellyfish is also fragile. Miglietta says that there's a proportion of animals in her lab that seem incapable of rejuvenating. And among the ones that do, there may be an eventual limit to the number of times they can rejuvenate before dying of old age. It's hard to know for sure because it's difficult to maintain the species for long durations in the lab as it seems to require specific conditions to survive. And, in the wild, there's plenty of things that probably do kill them – including fluctuating availability of their plankton food, predators or algae that smother jellyfish colonies.

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As such, the immortal jellyfish offers an important lesson, says Maria Pascual-Torner of Spain's Institute of Marine Sciences, who conducted the 2022 study with Quesada. "Although it has the ability to rejuvenate and, theoretically, not die from ageing, it is at the same time an extremely vulnerable organism," she says. "The immortal jellyfish also reminds us that life and death are inseparable parts of the same reality." In other words, even nature's most immortal organism has to face death.

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Woman who flew with swans warns of lead danger

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqly0r3kp1mlo, today

A conservationist has welcomed new laws banning the sale of lead ammunition as she warns people are not aware of the scale of the problem affecting wildlife.

Sacha Dench, who lives in Chagford, Devon, is a member of the Lead Ammunition Collective, which campaigned to end the sale of the toxic substance, earning the group the RSPB Medal, the charity's highest accolade.

Also known as "The Human Swan", she is best known for flying a paramotor 4,300 miles (7000km) from Arctic Russia to the UK tracking the migration of Bewick's swans.

The Australian-born biologist said lead poisoning was a significant threat to birds across Europe and was one of the issues she explored in her 2019 expedition.

Dench said: "Up to 100,000 water birds in the UK are expected to die each year from lead poisoning, and that's maybe a million across Europe.

"It's a really big effect and enough to be pushing some species towards extinction."

Scientists and conservation groups have long warned lead shotgun pellets can contaminate habitats and harm wildlife after being deposited in the environment.

Dench said many people were unaware of the scale of the problem.

"Every time you shoot a cartridge there can be up to 300 small pellets of lead that are spread into nature," she said.

"Overall in the UK every year that amounts to somewhere between 7,000 and 13,000 tonnes of lead being spread into nature.

"Birds, particularly water birds, will mistake it for food or grit and eat it, and that is ground down in their stomachs. That's how they become lead poisoned."

Legislation banning the sale and use of lead shot in England, Wales and Scotland will be brought in from April 2029.

Among those who have already switched away from lead ammunition is deer manager Sharif Adams, who works in woodland in the Teign Valley.

The chairman of the South West branch of the British Deer Society said moving to non-toxic ammunition had been an easy decision.

"The deer management that I do is all conservation-focused," he said.

"So it was a no-brainer to me. Moving away from a toxic substance to something less harmful makes a lot of sense."

He said there were also practical reasons for making the switch, with game dealers increasingly only accepting deer shot using non-lead ammunition.

"Part of deer management is the venison food market, a really important part of it actually, and to be able to supply the human food chain with venison you need to be able to sell to the game dealers as well," he said.

The RSPB medal was received by Dr Ruth Cromie and Prof Debbie Pain on behalf of the Lead Ammunition Collective at the charity's annual general meeting earlier this month.

Dench said the award reflected an unusually broad partnership that had helped bring about change.

"The RSPB Medal is a really big deal," she said.

"It has been won by David Attenborough, it has been won by the King in the past.

"But it's an even bigger deal that it's recognising, on this occasion, not just us but a whole collective of people that you might not necessarily think of as working together for conservation."

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Verdict delayed on controversial sea defences

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq9vz2jj409vo, today

A verdict has not been reached over whether controversial coastal defences will be built in Blackpool.

Councillors have deferred a major planning application for 17 groynes after the RNLI made a formal objection to building of the groynes in April.

The charity previously claimed the council had ignored safety issues they had flagged, such as increased risk to tourists and rescue crews.

Blackpool Council has a statutory duty to deliver schemes to protect the coastline. It said if the proposals fall through, a new scheme would require a council contribution of £13m due to changes in government funding.

The proposed defences would see manmade rock headlands built on the beach to trap sand and prevent the loss of the town's sandy beaches. But since the application, more than 60 objections have been made.

But after the Blackpool beach management scheme was deferred by the council's planning committee last month, further discussions have been held regarding the risk assessments for the RNLI operations.

Since several multi-agency meetings and workshops have and are planned to discuss the risk assessment required by agencies for rescue and recovery operations around the groynes.

Blackpool Council's Health and Safety Teams have also assessed and updated the Council's Risk Assessments in respect of its own operations on the coastline. Subject to planning permission, work on the Bispham and Blackpool Beach Management schemes will start in early 2027.

'No longer funding'

But with government reductions in funding for new schemes announced this year, there is added pressure to ensure the current Blackpool Beach Management schemes can go ahead.

A report to Blackpool Council's Climate Change and Environmental Scrutiny Committee stated: "Consultation has taken place with business leaders all stakeholders and residents, which will continue throughout the pre-construction phase and once the schemes commence on site.

"If funding is withdrawn for these schemes there is no longer funding in the future at the current 100% level.

"New funding rules introduced by the Environment Agency in April 2026 require any new schemes to provide 10% of the capital funding for scheme over £3m in value.

"In the case of the Blackpool Beach Management schemes this would mean a contribution of £13m."

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Aquarium shark that helped 'dispel myths' dies

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c64g18lkz0kno, today

A sand tiger shark that had been at an aquarium since its opening almost 30 years ago has died.

Staff at the National Marine Aquarium (NMA) in Plymouth said they had noticed changes in the behaviour and condition of Howard, also known as Howie, and she was put to sleep after not responding to medical intervention.

She was initially living in the Great Barrier Reef habitat before moving to the Atlantic Ocean habitat where she grew to 9ft (2.7m) long.

The team said the shark was believed to have been almost 30 years old and acted as an "incredible ambassador, helping to dispel many of the myths around this critically endangered species".

Staff said: "The team at the NMA are very sad to lose such a presence from the aquarium.

"A huge thank you to our valued visitors for your support and understanding at this time.

"Rest assured, our beautiful sand tigers, Ushaka and Mandela, can still be seen in our Atlantic Ocean habitat."

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Rhino siblings celebrate first birthday with cake

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqrkypljk526o, yesterday

Two rhino calves have celebrated their first birthday with cakes made of pellets, carrots and salad leaves.

Siblings Markus and Mo were born at Cotswold Wildlife Park, near Burford, last year.

The pair weighed about 70kg (11st) at birth, and now weigh about 500kg (78st) each. Their arrival took the number of rhinos at the park to nine, the most in its 56-year history.

White rhinos were close to extinction in the early 1900s, with fewer than 50 thought to remain in Africa. They are now the most numerous of the five rhino species, but the park says conservation remains vital.

'Fascinating' rare beetle found in Wales again after 60 years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cry8317pdp5yo, today

A rare species of beetle has been found in Pembrokeshire after not being seen in Wales for 60 years.

The Short-Necked Oil Beetle is named after the adult beetles' stubby shape and its ability to secrete an oily yellow-orange substance from its knee joints when alarmed.

They were not reported in the UK for almost 60 years after 1948 as habitat loss brought the species to the brink of extinction.

Anne Hobbs, from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, said it was "very exciting" that the evidence suggested the species was breeding in Wales again.

The Short-Necked Oil Beetle is classed as nationally rare within Great Britain and listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List.

It is dependent on solitary bees for its lifecycle and needs a particular habitat to survive, with thick vegetation for shelter and dense flower coverage both essential.

The larvae of Short-Necked Oil Beetles lurk among flowers, waiting for a passing bee to carry them back to its nest, where they feed on the pollen the bee has collected.

Last year, the survey at Castlemartin found only dead adults of this particular beetle, raising concerns about the future of this species and its continued presence on the site.

But this year, after three years of searching, experts discovered larvae of the beetle on a small area of the site, suggesting that surveyors had managed to find some of the hatchlings from a larger batch of immature beetles.

The number and distribution of the beetle larvae seen also supported this, according to Natural Resources Wales (NRW).

They can typically be found from March to June in flower-rich coastal grassland and sand dune habitat, and are most active on warm, sunny days.

Adults can grow up to 24mm (0.9in) in length and the life span of an adult is approximately one year.

NRW said these conditions mean there are only a handful of suitable sites in the UK.

They were rediscovered in Devon in 2006 and on the Isle of Coll, in Scotland, in 2009. Since then, populations have been found on Tiree, Islay, Barra and Uist.

Castlemartin Range, in Pembrokeshire, is currently the only place in Wales where the species can be found and it is being consistently surveyed by conservationists.

The project is part of Wales's "flagship species recovery programme", said NRW, which works to conserve the Short-Necked Oil Beetle Sand other species that share similar habitats.

Hobbs described the Short-Necked Oil Beetle as an "amazing creature" and said their work needed to consider the "needs of several species to be effective".

She thanked their partners and volunteers for their continued support, despite having two years without a larval sighting.

"We look forward to the continued management of the site so that this amazing species can survive now and into the future."

Noise complaint sees rescue cockerel returned

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqwyrewp3drwo, today

A woman said she has returned her rescue cockerel to an animal charity after she was issued an anti-social behaviour notice and threatened with a £1,500 fine following complaints over his early morning crowing.

Laura-Jane Wain, from Upper Halling, Kent, took in Bruce Almighty in 2025 and said she had not received a complaint until July, when the council first warned her to take steps to minimise the noise.

"It's not a constant sound, it was only every so often, and I loved it," she said. "I thought it was a gentle crowing."

Medway Council said it had a "statutory responsibility to investigate complaints that may be considered excessive, regular or constant - and that unreasonably interfere with the wellbeing, comfort or enjoyment of a resident's property".

Wain told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: "They [neighbours] never came to us to say, 'can you do something about it?'.

"They did not even put a letter through saying it was getting on their nerves or whatever. Nothing. Nobody ever commented on it.

"I have had supportive messages from people saying they like hearing the cockerel, that it feels like the country.

"It's a semi-rural area and the houses are quite far apart with a decent amount of land between them."

Following the first complaint, she said the council wrote to her with suggestions about possible ways to remedy the situation, including placing Bruce in a darkened space to make him think it was still night-time.

Wain said she followed the advice and took the cockerel into her home's cellar in the evening, bringing him out again later in the morning.

"That seemed to take the sting [out] but then we still got the second complaint," she said.

After receiving the second letter from Medway Council with the anti-social behaviour notice in September, Wain said she decided to return the cockerel.

"It's just quite sad that so many people did say to me they enjoyed hearing the cockerel," she said.

A spokesperson for the local authority added: "The evidence collected by the council included diary sheets from residents, which logged dates, times and how they were being affected by a noise disturbance, which was then following by an investigation by officers."

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Motorists urged to slow down for red squirrels

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmx2d17lw0p3o, yesterday

An animal shelter has issued a plea to drivers to slow down in woodland areas after seven red squirrels were injured on an island's roads in one day.

The JSPCA Animals' Shelter, in St Helier, Jersey, said that it had been called to a worrying number of casualties in "a short space of time".

Jersey has a thriving red squirrel population, due to the absence of grey squirrels, which carry a virus deadly to their red cousins.

Red squirrels are endangered in the UK, with about 120,000 to 160,000 left in the wild.

A post on the shelter's Facebook page urged drivers to reduce their speed when driving through areas where squirrels may be crossing and to keep an extra lookout, particularly near wooded areas and roads surrounded by trees.

'Care and attention'

If you hit a squirrel, the shelter have advised islanders to stop somewhere safe and either call the JSPCA for advice or bring the squirrel directly to them if it is safe to do so.

"These little animals are precious, and every life matters," the shelter said.

"A few extra seconds of care and attention behind the wheel could make all the difference.

"The little squirrel pictured escaped with just a split lip, which was expertly stitched back together by our wonderful JSPCA vets."

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Charities warn of bonfire danger for hedgehogs

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6zjx7rzwmyzo, yesterday

Wildlife charities have asked people to consider hedgehogs before disposing of any debris from Storm Austen in bonfires.

Animal welfare groups in both Guernsey and Jersey said more people may be planning to have bonfires after the storm brought down trees and branches. It comes as hedgehogs numbers have plummeted in the Channel Islands as the animals struggle to survive in hot summers.

Jersey Hedgehog Preservation Group advised people to build a bonfire on the day and not several days in advance as it "only takes one night for a hedgehog to move in".

Steve Byrne from the GSPCA in Guernsey advised people to check their bonfire carefully before setting light to it.

Gill Morgan, from the Jersey group, said: "Given that there will be plenty of raw material from the aftermath of the storm and the weather is due to improve over the next week people may be planning to get rid of their broken branches, twigs and leaves by burning them.

"Hedgehogs will be venturing out looking for food after the bad weather, and this is the sort of habitat they love to curl up in during the day."

The GSPCA has cared for 7,000 hedgehog since 2011.

Byrne said: "The winter weather causes challenges for our prickly friends so popping out water and food can really help them and with many thinking about bonfires next week we all need to help our hedgehog friends."

Byrne also advised people to check areas carefully before mowing or strimming, ensure netting is kept at a height that allows hedgehogs to pass safely under and check compost heaps before digging into them.

He also urged people to avoid using pesticides and poisons in their garden, to cover drains or deep holes and ensure there was an easy route out of ponds and pools for hedgehogs.

Guernsey Hedgehog Rescue Centre has previously reported a "steep" decline in numbers, while Jersey Hedgehog Preservation Group in St Helier has also reported a sharp drop.

The Jersey group said it had never had a casualty brought in after bonfire night but feared the animals would have been "killed outright and not rescued".

It said hedgehog numbers were in decline all over Europe, so any hazards that could be prevented would help their numbers recover.

Dru Burdon, another member of the group, said hedgehogs were under constant threat and would have struggled to raise their young this summer.

"With the very hot dry summers we have had the last three years, they have really been finding life difficult," said Burdon.

"Food has become very scarce just when they are trying to breed and increase their numbers again."

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Emu's failed romance leads to massive egg dilemma

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c933xjk5n6zeo, yesterday

A farm has been left with more than a dozen emu eggs after a failed romance between their birds meant none of them had been fertilised.

Dexy the male emu was seemingly unimpressed romantically after he failed to fertilise any of the 14 eggs laid by his companion Eyeleen, at Cloverfield Farm in Crowfield, Suffolk, in recent weeks.

Farm co-owner Jo Saberton said Dexy had been good at helping incubate the eggs, but he perhaps did not "fancy Eyeleen enough" as no chicks emerged.

The unfertilised eggs, each equivalent to about 12 chicken eggs in volume and weight, can instead be eaten and Saberton said one could be scrambled to feed four people.

The farm bought Eyeleen four years ago and decided to bring in Dexy shortly afterwards for some company.

Eyeleen got her name after losing one of her eyes, and Dexy was named after Dexys Midnight Runners - the band behind the song Come On Eileen.

In the UK emus typically lay their eggs during the winter and it is the job of the males to incubate them.

"They get on OK, but I'm not quite sure we're ever going to have the patter of little emu feet," Saberton said.

She added: "I think he's just very young, maybe he doesn't fancy Eyeleen enough."

Saberton's husband Nick, who she runs the farm with, said perhaps it was Eyeleen's one eye that had caused Dexy to be "a bit more fussy", despite her "long legs".

Initially, they had stepped in and taken some of the eggs away to be placed in an incubator, but still no chicks arrived, making the farm owners believe Dexy had been able to fertilise them.

While the farm did nothing with the 28 emu eggs last year, Saberton said they were keen not to waste them this year.

Their grandsons had experimented with using one for boiled egg and soldiers, and it took 35 minutes to boil it.

"They gave it the thumbs up and then a friend of mine scrambled it and she sent me a picture," Saberton continued.

"We're probably going to try it [ourselves] now.

"They do look so lovely, you don't really want to break them because they look like an ornament."

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'Why were 50 cameras pointing at my window?'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjp3glwwe443o, yesterday

Looking out of your window to find "at least 50" photographers staring back at you isn't the norm for many people.

But that's what teenager Max was faced with when a rare bird settled on the guttering of the Norfolk house he was staying in.

Max had come face to face with a flock of bird fans who had travelled from far and wide to Mundesley in the hope of spotting a northern nutcracker, not seen in the UK since 1991.

The 17-year-old said: "It was mad because all the photographers that were around in the street, it looked like they were all taking photos of us."

However, he said the confusion was brief as his grandfather eventually put two and two together.

Max, from Ruislip, West London, had already read about hundreds of twitchers causing disruption to buses in Mundesley after the bird was spotted in the area.

He said the bird stayed put for five to 10 minutes, flew off and then returned to settle outside their window.

The teenager said: "I don't know much about birds myself but it wasn't a very spectacular-looking bird.

"I didn't notice it was anything special but it was amazing because it was clearly a big deal for all these other people."

Northern nutcrackers are slightly smaller than a city pigeon but much chunkier and heavier than a blackbird.

A spokesperson for the RSPB said migrations like this are "not unheard of". They said pine seed crops in Siberia have likely failed, causing many birds to venture west in search of food.

Following the descent on the village by people hoping to see the bird, avid twitcher Wayne Glossop set up a fundraiser for Mundesley Inshore Lifeboat.

He said he wanted to "give something back" to the community. It has raised almost £1,500 so far, almost tripling its target.

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Rare damselfly spotted by restored chalk river

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c617kvqjd81jo, yesterday

An endangered damselfly has been spotted in wetlands created by an "ambitious" project that restored a stretch of a rare chalk river.

The scare blue-tailed damselfly, one of the world's earliest flying insect species, was recorded alongside the River Ash near Hertford.

The 4.3-mile (7km) stretch at the Easneye Estate was restored to its original course last year.

The Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust said that for species facing increasing pressure, creating and restoring suitable habitats was "vital to reversing declines".

The scarce blue-tailed damselfly was recorded at two monitoring sites located close together in late summer.

A new assessment of Britain's dragonflies and damselflies highlighted growing concerns about the future of some species.

The British Dragonfly Society's Red List review reclassified the scarce blue-tailed damselfly from Near Threatened to Endangered.

It found that eight species were now classed as endangered, twice the number identified in the previous assessment in 2008.

The River Ash is one of about 260 chalk rivers in the world, and the restoration project has included the creation of new gravel beds.

The trust said brown trout were already spawning on them.

In addition, monitoring carried out before and after the restoration found an increase in river invertebrates, including mayflies and stoneflies.

Sarah Perry, rivers recovery manager at the trust said: "Natural rivers, connected floodplains and healthy wetlands support biodiversity by providing places for wildlife to feed and breed.

"They also help water move through the landscape and can contribute to resilience against both flooding and drought.

"The scarce blue-tailed damselfly sightings along the River Ash offer a hopeful example of what these efforts can achieve."

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Skipper who champions Cornish sardines gets award

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmd93py0ggn4o, yesterday

A skipper who champions sustainable Cornish sardines has been named Fishing Hero of the Year at a national awards ceremony.

Tom Lambourn, from Newlyn, Cornwall, received the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) UK award at a gala dinner at London's Fishmongers' Hall earlier this week.

He was recognised by the judges for his dedication to promoting the small scale Cornish sardine fishery.

In his acceptance speech, Lambourn said it was "brilliant to be part of a sustainable fishery".

The 30-year-old skipper, who left the coastal town to study for a chemistry degree, said he was drawn back by the pull of the ocean and now captains his own sardine boat, the Lyonesse, throughout the sardine season from July to April.

Lambourn was also credited for a decision taken by Paradise Park to feed their penguins Cornish sardines rather than sprats.

He said: "I'm really proud to accept this award and represent the fantastic Cornish sardine fishery.

"Sustainable fishing means that the future generations of my family will also be able to fish.

"It's so important to educate young people about the importance of the MSC and being certified."

Lewis Tattersall, MSC UK and Ireland senior fisheries outreach manager, said: "The judges could not help but be impressed by Tom's enthusiasm and effectiveness in championing the product he and his crew land but also the lengths to which they go to ensure stocks remain healthy and the Cornish coastline and its abundant sea life remains pristine.

"Tom is a very worthy Fishing Hero of the Year."

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Bute House protested by environmental campaigners

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9rkypk1g7k0o, yesterday

Environmental campaigners have staged a Halloween themed demonstration outside the first minister's official residence over "scary" fossil fuels.

Climate groups gathered outside Bute House in Edinburgh to protest against the Scottish government's decision to give the go-ahead for a new, gas-fired, power station at Peterhead in Aberdeenshire.

The decision has been branded a "catastrophic failure" by environmental campaigners, who said burning fossil fuels is the key driver of extreme weather such as recent storms, record heat and flooding.

The Scottish government said it remained committed to tackling climate change.

The protest also comes after the announcement from the UK government that the Jackdaw gas field near Aberdeen would be allowed to go ahead.

Protesters wearing Halloween themed masks and holding placards with messages such as "fossil fuel ghouls" and "this decision will haunt you" gathered on Charlotte Square.

Kate Whitaker of Friends of the Earth Scotland said fossil fuels are "scary" because of the harm they are causing "millions of people".

"When politicians make disastrous decisions to approve new oil or gas, people get even more terrified about our collective future," she said.

"Giving the go ahead for a new fossil-fuelled power plant at Peterhead is a catastrophic failure from the Scottish government to protect people from both climate breakdown and the increasing burden of household energy bills.

"Politicians could instead help allay our fears by focusing on climate solutions that improve people's lives such as warmer homes, reliable bus services and creating green jobs."

A Scottish government spokesperson said: "We remain unwavering in our commitment to tackle climate change, delivering positive climate action to achieve net zero by 2045.

"The full grounds for the ministers' decision are set out in the decision letter.

"Potential impacts on communities, nature and cultural heritage, including the cumulative effects of developments, were important considerations in the decision-making process."

Spider discovery like uncovering 'hidden treasure'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck1l32d9l967o, 2 days ago

Scientists have said they are "completely stunned" after discovering a new species of spider.

A team from Jersey's Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust was working with partners on the Mauritian island of Ilot Vacoas when the arachnid was spotted along a stretch of rock along the coast in 2023.

The charity said the discovery was confirmed as a new species of trapdoor spider which was named the Mauritian tidal trapdoor spider (Idioctis marevallum).

Dr Max Tercel, the entomologist who found the spider, said it felt like uncovering a "hidden treasure".

Recalling the discovery, Tercel said he found the spider on "a stretch of coastal rock with sparse vegetation".

It was "not somewhere we expected to find something so remarkable", he said.

"It was dark by then and I was carefully searching through crevices with my head torch when, to my astonishment, I noticed a familiar pattern - a spider's legs extending from its burrow, something I'd only ever seen before in lush forests and grasslands," he said.

"I was completely stunned."

Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust said rather than digging its own burrow like other trapdoor spiders, the Mauritian tidal spider lived in tubes in coralline bedrock believed to be created by worms and molluscs thousands of years ago.

The spider seals the entrance with a trapdoor made from silk, sand and algae, the trust said, with its home completely submerged at high tide and repeatedly hit by waves.

Nik Cole, Mauritius country manager at Durrell, said the discovery was "incredibly exciting".

He said: "The thing I remember most is Max screaming at me to come over because he'd just seen a mygalomorph - a trapdoor spider.

"I couldn't believe something from the same group as tarantulas could be living in a place like this.

"I was up all night, holding my phone in the air trying to get a signal and searching for any evidence of a spider like this in Mauritius."

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Are the autumns we remember disappearing?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw77pmrdel8lo, 2 days ago

Frosty Halloween mornings. Bonfire Night wrapped up in hats and gloves. Trees turning red, orange and gold.

For many of us, those are the hallmarks of a traditional autumn.

Yet as October draws to a close, with leaves still clinging to branches and patches of green lingering in parks and woodlands, some people are asking what happened to the autumn they remember.

After one of the hottest and driest summers on record, experts warned some trees had experienced a "false autumn" - shedding leaves early to conserve water rather than following the gradual seasonal process that produces vivid autumn colours.

Few people spend more time watching the seasons change than wildlife photographer Sharon Levi, who owns Brine Pit Wildlife Photography in Droitwich.

The Worcestershire-based photographer said the vivid reds and oranges often associated with autumn had been slower to emerge this year.

"It's like the silver birch trees this year started losing their leaves in the summer when it was hot," she said.

"They've still got some leaves on them, but they've not got as much leaf.

"We haven't got all the vivid reds and oranges that we get but there's a few trees about that are turning now."

So are our autumns really changing, or are we simply remembering the past through rose-tinted glasses?

What is happening?

Prof Dan Bebber, an ecologist at the University of Exeter, said many people would recognise the feeling that autumn no longer looks quite the way it once did.

"If we all think back to our childhoods, and I guess people of my age anyway, it was always freezing cold and frosty for Halloween and 5 November," he said.

"These days, it can be T-shirt weather."

But before getting to what has changed, it helps to understand why leaves fall in the first place.

While evergreen trees, such as pines, keep their needles throughout winter, deciduous trees shed their leaves to conserve energy as temperatures fall and daylight hours shorten.

"There's two ways of dealing with winter," Bebber said.

Evergreen trees "tough it out", while deciduous trees "cut their losses", reabsorbing nutrients from their leaves before dropping them and waiting for spring to return.

Bebber said trees could be thought of as a "solar-powered water fountain", constantly drawing water from the soil and moving it to their leaves.

When there is not enough water in the ground, trees come under stress and are forced to make difficult trade-offs.

"When it gets really dry, trees have to cut their losses and just decide it's too dangerous to even have leaves anymore," he said.

In some cases, that can lead to a false autumn.

"The false autumns tend to have duller colours because it's almost like a rush job and the trees are dropping their leaves without going through that complete absorbance of photosynthesis."

As a result, some trees can lose their leaves before producing the vivid reds, oranges and golds many people associate with autumn.

That does not mean those displays have disappeared altogether.

"If you've got the right kind of conditions where the trees are going through a kind of a real autumn, rather than just shutting off and dropping the leaves due to drought, then you will see that the trees will remove the green from the leaves," Bebber said.

"If you've got a big patch of the same types of species then you'll see those big displays."

Evidence from across England suggests there is no single autumn timetable.

Forestry England's Autumn Leaf Watch tracker suggests the season is unfolding at different speeds across the country. Sightings have been recorded in the New Forest in Hampshire and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire.

Reports have also been logged in Delamere Forest in Cheshire, Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, Thetford Forest on the Norfolk-Suffolk border and Dalby Forest in North Yorkshire.

Autumn changes have also been recorded at Cannock Chase Forest in Staffordshire, Haughmond Hill in Shropshire and Hay Wood in Warwickshire.

Forestry England says autumn colours are developing at different rates depending on local weather conditions, elevation and tree species.

That means some woodlands are already glowing gold and orange, while others remain noticeably green.

For Levi, however, the changes extend beyond the colours of the leaves.

"If you go back 30-odd years, we used to have proper winters," she said.

"My children have never seen that and they're in their 30s."

While Bebber believes weather patterns are changing, he is cautious about predicting exactly what that means for future autumns.

"We're entering a period of quite uncertain weather," he said.

"Things are changing.

"But exactly how they will, I wouldn't want to say."

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Rewilding project aims to restore peatland

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crq8nw0q7d5ko, 2 days ago

Work has started on a project to restore 435 hectares (1,077 acres) of damaged peatland.

Cumbria Wildlife Trust will carry out the work in Skiddaw Forest where it will also repair a 6km (3.7-mile) boundary fence.

The forest is home to one of the largest continuous areas of blanket bog in the Lake District and acts as a huge carbon store.

Peatland team manager for the trust Susie Webb said: "Once improved, the peatlands will also slow the flow of water off the fells, which will help protect local communities downstream from flooding and will benefit a huge variety of wildlife."

The project is expected to take between three and four months but public access to Skiddaw Forest won't be affected.

Webb said: "We expect to see an increase in specialist plants such as sundews and sphagnum mosses and greater numbers of dragonflies.

"Birds such as snipe, which live on wet grassland, marshes and moorlands, will benefit from the rewetted ground."

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Global nature talks reach deal but money remains an issue

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw1l32qyj8pqo, 2 days ago

In Armenia's capital this week a fight between politicians broke out - not the mass brawl in its parliament that was so widely documented on social media - but between delegates from nearly 200 countries.

The world's nations have been gathered in Yerevan for nearly two weeks negotiating, and arguing, over a new agreement on nature.

Early on Saturday morning, hours after talks were due to finish, they finally agreed the key parts of a new action plan.

"And that's it. Perfect," said the meeting president, Hambardzum Matevosyan.

Four years earlier the same countries had signed a landmark deal committing to "halt and reverse" the decline of nature.

That global deal in 2022 - the Global Biodiversity Framework - contained 24 targets including putting 30% of the world's land and seas into protection by the end of the decade.

They agreed that action was urgent.

The world is currently in a sixth mass extinction event with species becoming extinct at 100 times the natural rate because of human activities, scientists say.

But according to the UN this week, the world is on track to achieve just one of those two dozen targets.

As part of this week's deal, countries acknowledged they were falling behind.

"While not particularly exciting or detailed, it's good news that countries could reach agreement," said Catherine Weller, from environmental charity Fauna & Flora.

"We cannot just plod on to 2030 without a course correction; nature is critical to all life on Earth: to our economies, to our wellbeing," she added.

This was echoed by Craig Bennett, CEO of The Wildlife Trusts, who told BBC News: "We are still seeing an appalling loss, threatening the collapse of ecosystems globally. We run out of words really about how serious this is."

But he added "the better news is there are so many examples worldwide about how... to turn things around".

Countries have put 623 million acres (252m hectares) of degraded land into protection - an area bigger than Greenland.

Just last month the WWF praised conservation efforts which had achieved the recovery of key species including elephants, green sea turtles and tigers.

Countries have recognised the main barrier to accelerating those efforts is money.

In 2022, they agreed they would put $30bn (£22.4bn) towards nature recovery efforts by the end of the decade, and mobilise a further $170bn from private sources.

But years later many nations have been redirecting international aid to defence budgets and to deal with repeated energy shocks, such that pledges are not at the rate required to reach those targets, according to the UN.

At this meeting, more than $1bn was pledged, with half of that coming from philanthropists including Leonardo DiCaprio's Re:wild organisation.

Anna Ducros, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, said there had been some progress on countries committing to reducing subsidies for industries harmful to the environment.

"A concrete example is that governments subsidise large-scale fishing that is especially harmful for nature - for example, trawling."

Ducros, who was in attendance at the talks, added: "Right now, we have the situation where governments are paying twice.

"So they know that they need to increase spending on nature and climate, but at the same time, they're damaging nature."

A specific funding pot, the Cali Fund, was previously set up for private companies that profit from using genetic material found in the environment to donate to. It was estimated up to $3.6bn could be raised annually - at the start of the meeting just $10,000 had been pledged.

Little progress was made on that issue - its voluntary nature makes it difficult to put pressure on companies, Bennett acknowledged.

"When you have countries that have rich biodiversity in them and you have companies trying to make money out of the genetic material found in those countries they should be paying those communities," he said. "That should not be controversial."

'Blatant political move'

One of the easier issues on the agenda was meant to be the approval of scientific reports into the state of nature.

But a small group of countries, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, were reported to have frustrated that process.

"The attacks on science have bothered me a lot," French Ecological Transition Minister Monique Barbut was reported as saying by the AFP news agency.

Next month countries will gather for the annual climate conference - COP31. Its own science body, the IPCC, has faced similar challenges in the past month with passing its own scientific reports and securing funding.

"This is such a blatant political move...and the IPCC is no such place for such political manoeuvring since the outputs are in humanity's interest," said Prof David Lee, from Manchester University, who has worked on previous reports.

US approves sale of 500 Patriot missiles to Ukraine

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3vgxznlx7jzo, yesterday

The United States has approved the sale of 500 Patriot missiles to Ukraine, a critically needed munition for defence against escalating Russian aerial attacks.

However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned it could take "several years" for the deliveries to arrive.

The US State Department said the advanced PAC-3 interceptor missiles would cost $2.1bn (£1.6bn) and would be "funded entirely" by Kyiv's allies in Europe and Canada.

On Friday night Zelensky repeated his calls for the US to speed up the release of its Patriots – the only effective weapon for downing Russia's deadly ballistic missiles.

In an update on Saturday morning, Zelensky said around 200,000 households in the Dnipro region were left without electricity as well as at least 80,000 households in the Kyiv region following Russian strikes on Friday night.

He accused Russia of "deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure every day".

The US approved sale of Patriot missiles comes after a row between Zelensky and Donald Trump earlier this month when the US eased sanctions on Russia as part of a deal to secure Russian diesel.

The US president stated it was time for Ukraine to get a new leader to strike a deal to end the war with Russia. Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, having earlier seized Crimea and parts of Donbas in the east.

Tensions eased after Zelensky held talks with US envoys in Oslo on 20 October.

In Friday's statement, the State Department said "this proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a partner country that is a force for political and economic stability in Europe".

It said "Ukraine will pay for this purchase with donations from Canada, Germany, and Norway via the JUMPSTART program and national funds, financed by the European Union's Ukraine Support Loan".

The statement said the "principal contractor" would be American company Lockheed Martin, adding that "no US funds are involved in this sale".

Meanwhile, at the G20 foreign ministers' meeting European diplomats protested over the presence of Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov by refusing to stand for an official photograph.

The meeting is being hosted in Atlanta by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

"Let me say this directly to the Russian Foreign Minister: We all know who the aggressor in this war is," UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told Lavrov at the summit, accusing his government of killing innocent civilians in Ukraine.

Zelensky said earlier this week that Ukraine had been waiting almost a month for the US to sign off on critical missile supplies that the country was running critically low on.

In a post on X late on Friday, he welcomed the US announcement but said Ukraine needed the Patriot missiles "right now".

He said Russia was intensifying its attacks on key energy infrastructure ahead of winter with "more than 30 Russian strikes" on "critical parts" of Ukraine's power grid over the past two weeks.

Kyiv desperately needs the interceptors but there is a global shortage of the munitions due to their use by the US in its war against Iran.

It is not clear what the production schedule will be for the Patriots - but it is understood the order is for new builds rather than existing missiles, meaning there is unlikely to be any kind of rapid delivery to Ukraine.

Patriots also have lengthy production times, with only 600 missiles produced per year according to the US Department of Defence.

In July, Trump said Washington had "not agreed" to license Ukraine to produce Patriot missiles - three weeks after offering the country such a right.

Additional reporting by Victoria Bourne

Judge investigating whether Trump administration lied about golf course renovations

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmj6jpn8px28o, 2 days ago

A US judge said on Friday that she will launch an investigation into whether justice department lawyers deceived her about President Donald Trump's plans for renovating a golf course.

Trump has posted on social media that the East Potomac Golf Course would be closed in November for several months for the renovations, despite an ongoing legal challenge.

The judge is looking into whether the administration's last-minute notification to her about removing trees from the course was made in bad faith, and if government lawyers misrepresented Trump's renovation plans.

Trump, an avid golfer, has said his plans will create "one of the Best and Most Spectacular Golf Courses anywhere in the World".

He has called the 106-year-old course "Trash Island", saying it will be renovated over the course of 15 months to create a space that "will be open to the Public while, at the same time, designed to the Highest Level of Golf and able to hold World Class Tournaments".

The legal dispute goes back to February, when the DC Preservation League and others sued over redevelopment plans for the park.

It escalated this month when the National Park Service began to cut down hundreds of trees without notifying the judge presiding over the lawsuit, US District Judge Ana Reyes, until 15 hours before work was set to begin on a holiday weekend.

After the trees were cut, Reyes ordered the Trump administration to stop tree removal until at least 26 October and give her three business days' notice about making any other permanent changes.

In a 70-page ruling this week, she extended that order and also barred the administration from making further alterations to the course without ten days' notice while the lawsuit proceeds. The administration has notified the court it intends to appeal that ruling, according to CBS News, the BBC's US partner.

Despite the court-ordered block, Trump had recently announced that the course would be closed for 15 months beginning in November to accommodate the renovations. He also shared a rendering of the course redesign.

Government lawyers this week confirmed to Reyes that the course would be closed for renovations, after telling her earlier there were no plans to shutter it.

Reyes took a harsh tone with the lawyers at Friday's hearing, repeatedly questioning when they had knowledge of the plan to close the golf course.

At one point, she asked whether the Secretary of the Interior was involved in the project.

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward - the number three official at the justice department - responded by asking what she meant by "involved".

Reyes then read the definition of the word from a dictionary.

At the end of the hearing, Reyes said she would be investigating whether the justice department attorneys "have made misrepresentations to the court and otherwise violated ethical rules".

That included whether giving late notice to the court about the renovation plans was "done in bad faith" and whether the attorneys failed to correct previously false statements or withheld information.

She said she would carry out the inquiry with a special master, an independent third party. In the US, judges appoint special master to carry out investigations or other provide other legal work related to cases and disputes.

US inmate Christa Pike says she woke up 'confused and in pain' after failed execution

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck62ydn7dj9eo, 3 days ago

US death row inmate Christa Pike has released her first public statement since her botched execution in September.

"There hasn't been a moment since that night when I haven't been in pain," she said in the statement.

"My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn't just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul."

Pike, 50, was discharged from hospital at the end of last month after surviving two lethal injections of the drug pentobarbital, which left her in a critical condition.

She has since been sent back to the prison where she has spent the last 30 years for murdering Colleen Slemmer in 1995.

Pike is thought to be the only person to survive an execution attempt by lethal injection.

"I am recovering, and I know that I am getting stronger," she said in her statement on Friday. "But healing is not the same as being okay."

Her lawyers previously said she had suffered from pneumonia following the attempted execution, had significant swelling on her arms and was also unable to swallow.

Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed 19-year-old Slemmer, whom they had met at a job training camp for low-income young people.

Shipp was spared the death penalty because he was not legally an adult when the crime was committed. He remains in prison.

Pike's botched execution captivated and shocked the world last month and shocked Pike, too.

"I had not contemplated life beyond that night, and I'm deeply hurt by the incompetence that has put so many people in this terrible position," she said in her statement.

Bethany Mann, a friend of Pike's and a founder of Child Arise Tennessee, which supports children and families affected by parental incarceration, told the BBC on Friday that she had been in direct contact with Pike since the botched execution attempt.

When asked about her reaction to Pike's statement, Mann said: "Truthfully, I don't know that I have anything to add to what Christa has already expressed so powerfully herself, and I want to be respectful of her privacy."

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee paused all executions for the remainder of the year and ordered an independent review to "determine exactly what occurred".

Lee was asked by reporters this week about a potential second execution attempt. "I suspect her sentence will be the same as before unless determined otherwise by the courts," he responded.

Speaking about the state's response to what happened to Pike, Mann said: "I find it deeply troubling that, even after what Christa endured, Governor Lee has shown little public willingness to reconsider the death penalty itself, rather than simply the procedures used to carry it out."

She added: "What happened to Christa is not an isolated tragedy, nor should this conversation begin and end with her."

The Tennessee Department of Correction has not explained why the execution did not go as planned, though it has defended the method it used.

It declined comment on Pike's statement when contacted by the BBC.

Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, was among those pushing for Pike to be put to death and attended the botched execution, later calling it a "mess".

She told a local ABC News affiliate in Florida, where she lives, that she thinks the state owes her an apology.

"All I wanted was justice," Martinez said.

Pike was the first woman scheduled to be executed in the state of Tennessee in over 200 years.

Her lawyers have spent decades appealing her case. In the days leading up to her scheduled execution, both the US Supreme Court and Lee declined to block the execution.

The attempted execution of Pike was not the first in Tennessee in 2026 that did not go to plan.

The execution of Tony Carruthers, who was convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, was postponed in May after staff were unable to find a vein for a lethal injection. He was granted a year's reprieve by the governor.

In 2022, more than a third of executions across the US were botched or highly problematic, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which does not take an ethical stance on the penalty.

Canada stops using 'avalanche dogs' for rescues in Rocky Mountains, stirring outrage

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwdd8q8e9e9yo, 3 days ago

Scott Ward can still recall the relief he saw on parents' faces when a search and rescue dog he was working with found their children safe in Canada's vast and heavily wooded Banff National Park.

Another time, his canine partner led him hiking up a steep mountainside for two hours until they reached a man with a broken leg who was close to dying from hypothermia.

Now 73 and retired, Ward spent 17 years as a dog handler in the wilderness of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, work he described as gratifying.

Over the years, the rescue programme was cut back to just one person in the role, and Ward was shocked when he heard recently that Parks Canada will end the programme entirely as of this month.

Prime Minister Mark Carney's government is making broad funding cuts to Canada's public service, and Parks Canada announced last week that hundreds of their employees will soon be laid off.

The agency confirmed the news to the BBC, calling it a "difficult decision" to axe its sole dog handler position out of Banff National Park, one of the most rugged parts of Canada that welcomes more than four million visitors each year from around the world.

It added it is part of its efforts to modernise its law enforcement branch, and that "search and rescue operations will continue to be delivered" through other means.

Cutting this one role has stirred public outrage, with more than 5,000 people signing a petition since Tuesday to restore it.

William Stevenson, the Conservative Member of Parliament for the Banff area who started the petition, says he welcomes tighter government spending, but that this cut could harm public safety.

"How could they possibly make such a bad choice in where to cut?" he told the BBC.

The BBC has asked Parks Canada about how much the canine search and rescue programme cost to administer.

For 55 years, the government used rescue dogs in the Canadian Rocky Mountains who were trained to trace "everything", Ward said, from a small paper clip to shell casings to a human body.

After avalanches, a common winter hazard in the area, they were called upon to search for trapped hikers or skiers underneath heavy mounds of snow.

"It saves probers hours and hours of standing shoulder to shoulder and poking in the snow, and also exposing themselves to secondary avalanche hazards," Ward said.

In the summer, they helped find children who got lost, often after wandering away from their parents' campsites.

"We lost a huge public safety and staff safety resource," he said.

Other countries still rely on canines, often called "avalanche dogs", for mountain search and rescue, including Italy.

The last dog in Parks Canada's programme, a German Shephard named Leroy, was retired in August.

For the seven years that he was on the job, Leroy helped track 156 people, find 57 who were lost in the wilderness, and solve two murders in Banff.

A new canine was trained and ready for duty before Parks Canada gave notice last week that the programme would be eliminated as part of recent C$145m ($104m; £78m) budget cuts to Parks Canada, local newspaper Rocky Mountain Outlook reported.

Along with his petition, Stevenson also raised the issue in Canada's parliament during a late sitting on Thursday.

In response, Ryan Turnball, a Liberal MP and the parliamentary secretary for finance, said the government is focused on reducing Canada's deficit and "ensuring public funds support growth, resilience and the well-being of Canadians".

Stevenson said he will continue to push on the issue, and has asked for a sit-down meeting with Parks Canada's CEO.

As for Ward, he hopes that the programme will soon be restored.

He recalled a quote that was often uttered by an old park warden who trained him: "You can make an armpit smell like a lilac bush and you can put a man on the moon, but nothing can replace the nose of the avalanche dog."

Democrats have an identity crisis - it won't be an easy fix

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cknv08980d3vo, 3 days ago

James Stevens calls himself a democratic socialist. The 24-year-old film student is the type of Democrat who recalls watching the provocative left-wing internet commentator Hasan Piker six years ago, "before he became relevant in politics". Last year, James flew up from his home in Georgia to New York City to canvass for Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign.

His mother, Tamara, 56, is a loyal Democrat too. But of a different ilk. She grew up Republican then switched to the Democratic Party after seeing Barack Obama on Oprah. These days, she's a loyal party woman, championing reproductive rights, attending campaign rallies and donating to local candidates.

Both mother and son want Democrats to win control of Congress at Tuesday's midterm elections, but they don't entirely agree on what they want their Democratic Party to be.

"I'm very sick of how compromising Democrats are to Republican policies that don't benefit a large group of people," James told me, as his mother looked on. "There needs to be a bold vision for the Democrats," he says, arguing that the party should adopt policies affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a left-wing splinter group. In his view, that means anti-Zionism, getting corporate money out of politics, and government-run free healthcare.

The conventional wisdom in Washington is that Democrats are well-positioned to take control of the House, and possibly even the Senate, after the vote next week.

Underlying conditions are in Democrats' favour – Republican US President Donald Trump's approval rating is at a record low for a president heading into a midterm, comparable to George W Bush in his final term in 2006; the Iran war still isn't over and it's proving unpopular with American voters; and this has led to higher gas prices, which are frustrating an electorate that is already worried about the cost of living. Traditionally, the midterms are a referendum on a sitting president. In 18 of the last 20 US midterm elections, the party in power has lost seats in the House.

And yet despite those circumstances, the Democratic Party is also unpopular nationwide. The Real Clear Politics polling average shows the American public sees the Democrats as only marginally better than the Republicans. Recent polls show the Democratic Party still has a net unfavourability rating among Americans. Political analysts say that if the Republicans manage to buck the trend and survive these midterms, one key reason is that the Democratic Party (or the Democratic brand) is disliked by a majority of American voters too.

Behind the headlines of which party or which candidates win this Tuesday, there's also a story this election season about Democratic identity. This is a fight between institutionalists and reformists, of people who want incremental change and those who demand root-and-branch transformation. The question is, who will win out in the long run?

The not-Trump party?

I've covered every national US election in the past dozen years and this is an unusual one. When I was out interviewing voters ahead of the 2018 midterms during Donald Trump's first term, I was struck by how united many Democratic voters were in their opposition to the president. This time, I've noticed that under the facade of unity, there's a brewing fight.

There are persistent questions about what the Democratic Party stands for, and these divides erupted during the primaries this midterm cycle. "The identity of the party is pretty cloudy," said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a centre-right think tank. "It's all centred on reaction to the Trump administration and taking advantage of what is a thermostatic reaction against the administration... Beyond that, there's all these different factions in the party."

Part of the reason for this Democratic infighting is that the party never had a chance to have this fight during the 2024 presidential race, with the sudden departure of Joe Biden months before the election and nomination of Kamala Harris.

Analysts agree that if Democrats make big wins on election night, it still won't answer deeper, unresolved questions as they try to keep their big tent together to corral votes in Congress or eye the 2028 presidency.

In simplistic terms, the divide is between the centrist, more moderate wing of the party and its left flank. But operatives and analysts say it's also a divide between institutionalists and those who want to completely upend the existing institution. Both feel they have a better read on what voters genuinely want.

Usamah Andrabi, of the Justice Democrats, a prominent left-wing group, blames the Democratic establishment for ushering in a Republican Congress and president. "And so I think the people who led us into this mess are simply not gonna be the ones who lead us out of it," he told me.

"The affordability crisis… is a massive one, and it's not going to be resolved by tinkering at the margins," he added. Instead, he insists, it'll be solved through policies like universal healthcare and childcare, and redistributing money by cutting the Pentagon's budget to stop "endless wars". His organisation sprang up in 2017 to recruit and support the congressional members who became known as "the Squad", the furthest-left faction in the House, which includes members such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.

Healthcare will be one of the main arenas in which this fight is likely to play out, says Carrie Dann, managing editor of the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan newsletter that forecasts the competitiveness of races.

"There is a lot of appetite for, at the very least, more transparency, more understanding of why healthcare costs are so high," said Dann. " Take a bad step, break your leg, and a huge swathe of Americans would see their worlds turned upside down by that because of the healthcare system as it is."

Several Democratic candidates this election cycle have outlined ideas to lower "out-of-pocket" costs for those who already have health insurance - being hit with additional costs on top of regular insurance payments is a common feature of the American healthcare system. But there's another flank of the party that is fed up with incremental changes and wants a national healthcare system that is free at the point of use - Medicare for All.

Recent polling suggests a majority of Democrats favour this kind of healthcare system, but a majority of Republicans oppose it.

But some Democrats say there's nuance in the issue.

"People want to have universal healthcare, and they also want to be able to keep their health insurance," says Neera Tanden, Joe Biden's former domestic policy adviser, now CEO of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

Mainstream establishment Democrats acknowledge that many people see healthcare as a right, but they insist that others strongly oppose a fully government-run programme, fearing lower standards of care, and insist on having the option of keeping their private health insurance.

Healthcare costs have gone up across the board - health insurance and out-of-pocket healthcare expenses, hospital expenses and prescription drug costs have all surged in recent years, rising faster than the rate of inflation. As medical expenses have increased, polls suggest the idea of universal healthcare isn't as outlandish as it once seemed, and this campaign cycle has shown that it's far less taboo for politicians to openly call for it.

Back in Georgia, it's an issue on which Tamara and James agree - they want universal healthcare.

But their most fundamental disagreement is over Israel. Tamara calls herself a Zionist. "My kids get mad at me for saying that," she said.

And they're hardly the only Democrats having this debate.

Dann, from the Cook Political Report, says one of the biggest lessons from this election cycle is that Democratic voters weren't just looking for candidates willing to fight Trump, but candidates willing to take on the establishment. Dann points to the key swing state of Michigan, where in the primary, Abdul El-Sayed - a fierce critic of Israel and its actions in Gaza - came out on top over the objections of the Democratic establishment.

"I think one reason for that was that he was not only talking about taking on Donald Trump, but taking on the Democratic establishment… the establishment in Washington writ large," she said. And part of that anti-establishment attitude is about US support for Israel.

The Israel question

Some who left the party in 2024 because they believe Biden was too supportive of Israel's actions in Gaza are now returning, energised by El-Sayed's tough tone.

"My red line has been Gaza," said Samraa Luqman, an Arab-American activist in Michigan who voted for Trump in the last presidential election, feeling betrayed by Democrats that year.

"2023 and 2024 have really taught this community a lesson that we are no longer going to be wishy-washy about the issue. It's Gaza or bust," she told me. "If you're not good on Gaza, on Israel, on Palestine, then we don't need you. We don't need you in office, and we don't need to vote for you, no matter what your party affiliation is."

But as El-Sayed has energised voters, he's also alienated others, particularly some who see support for Israel as connected to Jewish safety in the US and feel that antisemitism in their party has grown after the deadly Hamas attacks of October 7.

Zach Nessel is one of those Democrats. And he's increasingly worried about becoming politically homeless.

"We have people who don't think Zionists should have a place in our party, that they should be removed from the party," Nessel told me. "And as a proud Zionist, I don't want to be removed from the Democratic coalition just over this one issue in the Middle East."

Support for Israel became a litmus test in some Democratic primaries this season, leading to mounting resistance to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the longtime influential lobbying group.

Ideological test

But Dann tells me that it's not just Israel that's a litmus test, it's El-Sayed's race itself.

"Abdul El-Sayed's theory of the case is that he can run as an unabashed progressive in a purple state [a state that swings between the 'red' Republican party and 'blue' Democrats] and win because progressive ideas are not only popular if they're communicated correctly, but also activate voters who are not necessarily a normal part of the political process, particularly young people," she said.

If he wins, left-wing candidates will see it as a model, she adds. And if he loses, Democrats in the more centrist wing of the party will see it as evidence that left-wing ideas are out of touch with mainstream voters.

But there are others, like Jim Kessler with Third Way, a centrist think tank, who think Michigan shouldn't be the focus. He pointed out that if Democrats take control of the Senate it'll be because of more centrist candidates: Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Mary Peltola in Alaska, James Talarico in Texas, Josh Turek in Iowa, Adam Hamilton in Kansas. They, he said, are the ones expanding Democrats' odds this cycle. " So the bigger the Democratic victory, the more it seems like the centrist Democrats came through, not the DSA candidates," he said.

DSA-endorsed candidates made gains during the primaries this election cycle, but their ideas are still controversial to many.

" I don't think… the vast majority of working-class people in America are kind of mini socialists," Tanden told me, pointing to reporting that suggests the majority of people who support the DSA are college-educated voters.

" Working-class people are pretty moderate on issues like crime and immigration," she added.

Nonetheless, if Democrats gain the majority, their congressional leaders will have to navigate a group of Democrats in which there will likely be an increase in the loudest and most left-wing voices.

" The Democrats' biggest challenge is to figure out how to actually deliver on running the economy better and making things more affordable, because they've said over and over again and very loudly that's what they're going to do," said Teixeira.

Seizing the momentum

In all likelihood, people will start thinking seriously about the next presidential candidate the day after the midterms.

So, who actually has the momentum: the left flank or the centre?

"I think after the election we'll see a lot of fighting between the factions to claim credit," Teixeira said. " And that will of course feed into the jostling for the presidential nomination for 2028."

Back in Georgia, Tamara and James may disagree on some things, but they both want Democrats to win big on Tuesday.

"I'm a very pragmatic person when it comes to progressive politics," James said. He wants to make it clear he doesn't agree with everything DSA members espouse.

So much of this midterm cycle has also come down to candidate quality - not just the message but the messenger. So I asked both mother and son who their "ideal" Democrat is.

Tamara instantly answered Jon Ossoff, the Democratic senator running for re-election in Georgia.

It's a point of agreement. They both really like their Georgia senator.

Ossoff is seen by many as a rising star of his party. The seat he is contesting is characterised by the Cook Political Report as "likely Democratic" - considered by analysts to be an impressive achievement in a swing state that voted for Trump in 2024.

"He knows how to speak to moderate Republicans, moderate Democrats, and members of the DSA," Tamara said. "He's not afraid to pull any punches… I appreciate how much he talks about corruption."

On Wednesday night, she joined thousands of people just outside Atlanta for a rally to cheer on the senator as former President Barack Obama campaigned for Democrats.

And when Ossoff took the mic, he spoke at length about what he sees as "corruption" in the Trump administration and in American politics, healthcare and corporate money.

And I heard this concern from voters in Georgia this past week, not just at the campaign rally, but at early voting sites in both Republican and Democratic counties.

"We have a corruption crisis," said Richard Schosky as he walked out of the voting booth in north Atlanta, after casting his ballot early. It's an issue that seems to be resonating deeply with voters, although the White House has repeatedly denied any allegations of wrongdoing.

In fact, Dann with the Cook Political Report says "corruption has become one of the central issues of this election".

Still, she added, "Democrats would be foolish to believe that a very good night for them in November is a mandate for the Democratic Party," said Dann.

"They are as almost as unpopular as Republicans and the president."

Lead image: Getty

BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. Emma Barnett and John Simpson bring their pick of the most thought-provoking deep reads and analysis, every Saturday. Sign up for the newsletter here

Four investigations Democrats could launch if they win control of Congress

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvglwg033027o, 5 days ago

Democrats in the US Congress are already planning how they would use their power if they win a majority in the House or Senate in next week's midterm elections.

Success is by no means guaranteed, even if midterms can sometimes be brutal for the incumbent party that holds the White House.

Control of the chamber, however, would give the party power to issue subpoenas - summons to testify or produce documents - as well as additional funding to launch investigations early next year.

Democrats are weighing whether to investigate senior figures in the Trump administration - and possibly the president himself. Staffers have begun assembling a list of possible investigations and witnesses, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Here are a few potential Democratic targets if the party emerges victorious on 3 November.

1. Trump's family and finances

Democrats have made it clear that lucrative deals brokered by the Trump family's vast business empire will be primary targets of any initial investigations.

"We want to make sure that [American] taxpayer dollars are being used wisely and not being stolen or pocketed because of corruption," Virginia Democratic Representative Suhas Subramanyam, a member of the House Oversight Committee, told the BBC.

Items under consideration for investigation include ties between the administration and corporate entities - particularly cryptocurrency firms - as well as the international business dealings of the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Other topics could include the $400m (£301m) aircraft gifted by Qatar to serve as Air Force One and multimillion-dollar defence contracts awarded to firms linked to the Trump family.

"What's shocking to me is not only that this administration, cabinet officials and even the president and his family have been corrupt and self-dealing, but they've been so brazen and open about it," Subramanyam said.

The White House has repeatedly denied any allegations of wrongdoing.

"President Trump is focused on retaining Republican majorities in Congress and doubling down on the progress he has made to lower costs for families," White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said.

"Democrats have no agenda to improve the lives of the American people, just plans to obstruct and baselessly target President Trump's commonsense agenda," she added.

A White House official said the administration is "always prepared" to respond to oversight requests regardless of who is in Congress.

2. Hegseth and the Pentagon

Democratic lawmakers have vowed to look into Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth's handling of the war with Iran that began in February - including the number of civilian casualties, munitions shortfalls, spending and claims of poorly prepared troops and facilities.

Other topics, according to a source familiar with the discussions, could include boat strikes in the Caribbean that the administration says are aimed at stopping the flow of drugs into the US.

In April, a group of House Democrats filed rare articles of impeachment against Hegseth. They cited the war in Iran and accused him of "high crimes and misdemeanours".

Impeachment requires only a simple majority in the House, but conviction - and removal from office - would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate. No cabinet official has ever been removed this way.

Some experts believe that the negative publicity that would come from congressional hearings could ultimately lead to Hegseth being fired or resigning from the position.

"[If] it looks bad for the White House, and it's a drag on their media attention, President Trump might be likely to cut loose those officials, because he doesn't want that bad press," said David Miller, a political science professor and expert on the presidency at American University in Washington DC. "In a sense that could be a win for the Democrats."

Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer under George W Bush, told the BBC that the decision to launch the war should come under scrutiny.

"The bigger issue is this: this war was never authorised by the United States Congress, and I don't care who the secretary of defence is," he said.

"The constitution says that Congress declares war," he said, and lawmakers should "haul these folks in" to answer questions.

In a statement, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson defended Hegseth's record, calling him a "transformative leader" who has "slashed bureaucracy, unleashed innovation, and delivered for our warfighters".

"By every measurable metric, the Department of War is better under Secretary Hegseth's leadership than before," she said, using the administration's preferred name for the defence department.

3. Immigration and ICE raids

Senior Democrats - including Robert Garcia, the California Democrat tapped to lead the House Oversight Committee should the party take back the chamber - have identified immigration enforcement as a key priority for potential congressional investigations.

These could examine allegations of misconduct by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during immigration raids across the country.

But these investigations may prove difficult and politically tricky.

In 2024, Trump campaigned on a promise of mass deportations of undocumented migrants - a message that resonated with many of his supporters.

But recent polls suggest many Americans, including those who backed Trump in that election, are uncomfortable with some of the tactics used by ICE in American cities so far this year.

It means Democrats will have to walk a fine line between opposing ICE tactics and appearing to dismiss broader immigration concerns, Painter told the BBC.

4. A third Trump impeachment

Democrats are split on the possibility of attempting to impeach Trump for a third time.

Some, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have expressed support for an impeachment, citing what they view as an unauthorised war with Iran and other alleged impeachable offences.

Others have called for a more cautious approach, arguing that any impeachment is unlikely to end in the Senate voting to remove Trump - who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing - from office.

It is also unclear whether the party could agree on a reason to launch impeachment proceedings.

"I can do whatever I want, if I want," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in October, adding that he sees the impeachment efforts in his first term and the later criminal cases brought against him as "very illegal things".

James Comer, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told the Washington Sun news outlet in June that Democrats were "one-trick ponies" who were "going to go after Trump".

There is no guarantee for Democrats that any potential investigation would end with a meaningful outcome.

But Subramanyam said their efforts would send a message.

"If we do not do something because we are scared of the optics, or we don't think it will be successful, or they stonewall us, that will be bad," he said. "Not just for the next two years, but for the next 20 years."

Uganda starts withdrawing troops from Somalia

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8zxlqxwed4do, today

Uganda has begun withdrawing its troops from Somalia after nearly two decades of military involvement in the country.

The first contingent of 109 Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) troops reportedly left the capital, Mogadishu, on Friday, following an announcement by Uganda's army chief, Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba.

Uganda's acting army spokesperson, Chris Magezi, did not respond to the BBC's request for comment.

Uganda was the first African country to deploy troops to Somalia under the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom), which was established in 2007 to help protect the country's transitional government from attacks by Islamist militants.

Last week, Gen Muhoozi said Uganda had begun pulling out its troops and would hand over security responsibilities to Somali forces.

"As we promised, we have started withdrawing UPDF from Somalia. After 20 years of a lot of blood and sacrifice, we are handing over security to our Somali brothers," he wrote on X.

The withdrawal is being carried out in phases and is expected to be completed in August 2027.

However, Uganda is not ending its entire military involvement in Somalia. Its troops deployed under a separate bilateral security arrangement will remain in the country.

An estimated 4,500 troops in Somalia under the Africa Union mission, alongside about 2,000 deployed through bilateral arrangements.

Somalia has battling a prolonged and deadly insurgency led al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-linked militant group, for more than two decades.

Uganda forces first deployed to the country in 2007 and played a key role in driving al-Shabab out of Mogadishu and other major towns.

They fought alongside the Somali National Army to recapture strategic territory and secure key government installations.

Ugandan troops continued its military involvement under successive Africa Union , including the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia (Atmis), which began in with the aim of gradually transferring security responsibilities to Somalia.

It was replaced in 2025 by the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (Aussom), which is focused on strengthening Somalia's security institutions and preparing its forces to take full responsibility for the country's security.

Aussom now faces uncertainty over its future funding, amid plans to wind down US and UN support.

A 12-month transition plan is due to begin to in January, giving Somalia and the AU time to seek alternative sources of funding.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

More than 5,000 die from Ebola in DR Congo's deadliest outbreak

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj5ynryyep2yo, yesterday

More than 5,000 people have died from an ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, government data shows.

Eight of 26 provinces are now affected, with more than 10,300 confirmed cases.

The outbreak, which started in May, became the country's deadliest in its history in August, public health officials said. The current case fatality rate is 48.6%.

In its latest update, the health ministry said the epicentre of the epidemic remains in the Ituri province, in the north-east of the country, which is a conflict zone, making it harder to contain the virus.

Cases have also been confirmed in Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda.

This marks the 17th outbreak in DR Congo's history, according to the United Nations (UN), and the second largest in history.

The World Health Organization (WHO) office in Africa said a "continued scale-up of key control measures, greater access to affected areas, and community outreach" is needed to end the outbreak.

Testing and treatment are under way, along with clinical trials of vaccines, it added.

The Bundibugyo species is behind the current outbreak, but there is not yet any treatment or vaccine for this strain.

DR Congo's previous deadliest outbreak saw 2,299 deaths recorded between 2018-2020, the UN said.

The deadliest in history occurred in West Africa between 2014 and 2016, killing more than 11,325 people and spread across several countries, including Italy, the UK and United States, according to the WHO.

The UN warns that the current outbreak is "taking lives at a much faster rate".

Ebola is a rare, deadly disease caused by a virus, and symptoms come on suddenly.

As the disease progresses, vomiting and diarrhoea develop and it can lead to organ failure. Some, but not all, patients develop internal and external bleeding.

The virus spreads from one person to another by contact with infected bodily fluids such as blood or vomit.

Adding to the challenge of treating the disease, some health workers and a politician have been attacked while responding to the outbreak.

Earlier this week, a nurse was killed and another health worker seriously injured in an attack when responding to an Ebola alert. Local youths had accused them of contaminating water sources and spreading the virus, according to the UN-backed Radio Okapi.

Last month, a politician was beaten to death after promoting measures to stop the spread of Ebola, while in August, the Red Cross said its volunteers had been injured and an ambulance set on fire in 11 violent incidents in the outbreak's first 100 days.

In Uganda, two people died and 20 cases were recorded shortly after the outbreak started, but no cases have been reported since August. Travel restrictions remain in place for those crossing into the country from neighbouring DR Congo.

In Kenya, there have been nine confirmed cases and two recorded deaths.

Two suspected cases were identified in Nigeria on Saturday, its disease control centre said, adding that the individuals have been isolated and they are undergoing testing.

Earlier in October, one woman was confirmed to have the disease in the country but was flown to Switzerland for further treatment.

The likelihood of infection for people in the Europe area is "very low," the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said.

Ethiopia acquires Russian fighter jets and air defence systems amid war in Tigray

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw78prj801pvo, 4 days ago

Ethiopia has received 12 Su-35 fighter jets from Russia, as fighting intensified in the northern Tigray region neighbouring Eritrea.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who is attending the Russia-Africa summit in Moscow, described the acquisition as a "milestone" that would boost Ethiopia's defence capacity.

He said Ethiopia and Russia had agreed on the deal several years ago and the warplanes had come ahead of schedule. He also said that Ethiopia had plans to acquire four S-400 air defence systems from Moscow.

The Ethiopian leader said the military hardware was essential to protect the country from external threats.

Abiy, who described Russian President Vladimir Putin, "as a close friend of Ethiopia", said Ethiopia had now become the first country in sub‑Saharan Africa to own this kind of "advanced combat technology".

"If we fail to build this capability, surviving as a country in our region will become difficult. Countries with sufficient preparation are not easily defied," he said.

Russia and Ethiopia have signed several military agreements in recent years, including a deal in 2021 to train and improve technology for the military.

Abiy explained that Ethiopia signed an agreement with Russia several years ago to procure the Su‑35 jets and S‑400 systems, citing global air force trends and security threats facing the country.

The Su‑35, he noted, was equipped for both air‑to‑air and air‑to‑ground combat, with the ability to detect and neutralize incoming cruise missiles at distances of up to 200km (124 miles).

Military intelligence analyst Qalaab Segatu told BBC Amharic that Ethiopia's acquisition of additional warplanes was a key indication that "it was preparing for possible wars with other countries, not just internal conflicts".

According to him, the jets are highly manoeuvrable and capable of covering large areas, with radars capable of ensuring air superiority and long-range scanning.

When combined, the fighter jets and air defence systems "create a significant capability to protect and defend major cities and critical infrastructure such as the Renaissance Dam, providing key strategic air superiority", Qalaab said.

Abiy said in addition to the advanced capabilities of the aircraft from Russia, the use of drones was equally important in strengthening deterrence.

Ethiopia has extensively used military drones, including those sourced from Turkey and China, in recent conflicts.

"We need to build capacity not only with drones, but also with the fourth generation capabilities of the Su 30 and Su 35 [aircraft]," Abiy said.

The latest acquisition of military hardware from Russia comes after the current conflict in northern Tigray started last month between the government and the party that controls Tigray, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF).

Both blame each other for violating a 2022 deal that ended a civil war.

Ethiopia accuses Eritrea of backing the TPLF, which it denies.

Tensions between the two countries have also persisted as Abiy terms Ethiopia's lack of direct sea access an "existential question", which Eritrea views as a direct threat to its sovereignty.

Eritrea gained independence in 1993 after a decades-long war with Ethiopia, with the latter losing access to the sea.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

Ethiopian PM puts ministers through military training

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmwyv2y7g9l8o, yesterday

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has put his cabinet ministers and other senior government officials through military training, saying armed forces discipline can help build stronger leaders and advance the country's development.

Photos shared by him on social media show him taking part in military exercises alongside ministers, deputy ministers and heads of government institutions at the Hurso military training centre.

The move is unusual in Ethiopia, where senior civilian government officials are rarely seen undergoing military training.

Those taking part include Speaker of the House of Federation Muferiat Kamil, Finance Minister Fitsum Assefa and Health Minister Mekdes Daba.

It is unclear when the training began or how long it is expected to last.

In his post, the prime minister, who is known as Abiy, said Ethiopia's ambition to achieve universal prosperity required its leadership to be physically fit, morally strong and intellectually capable.

He said military institutions offered valuable lessons in discipline, patriotism, teamwork, accountability and leadership.

"Soldiers have targets while civilians have goals. The objective of both is victory," he said, adding that combining military and civilian disciplines would help create a generation capable of achieving both.

Abiy argued that military training could help develop leaders with a strong sense of purpose, responsibility and the ability to work together towards common objectives.

The training comes as Ethiopia faces multiple security challenges, including continued fighting in parts of the northern Tigray region, conflict in Amhara and insecurity in Oromia.

It also takes place amid heightened tensions with neighbouring Eritrea, with concerns over the possibility of renewed conflict between the two countries.

Abiy has previously emphasised military preparedness and national development as central to his government's ambitions.

How Kenyans got caught in $130m US ghost student scam

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxvgdzpy7241o, 3 days ago

In May 2024, Francis Mogambi arrived in the United States after winning the Diversity Visa lottery, a programme that gives people from around the world a chance to become permanent residents.

Just over two years later, the Kenyan national found himself at the centre of a US investigation into an alleged nationwide scheme to defraud the federal student aid system.

On 19 October 2026, a grand jury in Nebraska indicted Mogambi on five counts of theft of government money and five counts of aggravated identity theft.

Prosecutors allege that, between November 2025 and May 2026, he worked with associates in Kenya to steal the identities of US citizens and use them to fraudulently enroll fictitious students in American colleges.

Once the fake students were enrolled, Mogambi allegedly diverted their financial aid payments to himself, keeping 30% and sending the remainder to his associates in Kenya.

The intended loss in his case was $20,000 (£15,000), according to prosecutors.

Court documents say Mogambi received $2,000 a week and attempted to recruit another person into the scheme. He allegedly told the individual he needed a business that would allow him to cash larger cheques without paying taxes.

Mogambi was arrested shortly after the indictment was returned and is being held in custody pending trial. He has not yet commented on the allegations against him.

His case forms part of a wider US investigation, dubbed Operation Ghostbusters, into the alleged use of stolen identities to enrol fictitious students at colleges and claim federal financial aid that resulted in a loss of $130m in taxpayers funds.

US authorities say the investigation has so far resulted in five indictments that involved Kenyan nationals, while a further 40 investigations remain open. Hundreds of people have been affected after fraudsters allegedly stole their personally identifiable information (PII) and used it to access federal student aid.

The stolen personal information was sometimes sold online for between $4 and $8, with fraudsters targeting low-income Americans who had never had the opportunity to attend college.

At a news conference on 29 October announcing the first charges in the investigation, Assistant Attorney General Colin M McDonald, who heads the Justice Department's National Fraud Enforcement Division, vowed to pursue those involved.

"If you steal taxpayers' dollars, if you exploit a programme meant to help students, we are resolved to find you and prosecute you," he said.

The Justice Department says those behind the fraud use what is described as "super intelligence" to place fake students in classrooms and complete coursework, creating the impression that they are attending college and allowing financial aid payments to continue.

"The goal is to keep the ghost student in school as long as possible. Semester after semester after semester stealing money from the taxpayers," McDonald said.

But the consequences extend beyond the financial losses suffered by the US government.

People whose identities are stolen can find themselves facing unexpected student loan debts, even if they have never enrolled in college.

"His identity was stolen, his credit is now at risk, and his name is on the bill," McDonald said, describing the impact on one victim.

He also said that nearly a third of community college applicants in California in 2024 had been identified as fraudulent.

The scale of the suspected fraud is significant.

Investigators identified 830,840 potentially fraudulent Federal Student Aid identification numbers associated with nearly $130m in September and October 2026. They recommended that the Department of Education disable them.

The figure represents financial aid associated with potentially fraudulent accounts, not confirmed losses.

"In a flash, the money vanishes, often overseas in places like Kenya," McDonald said.

The investigation has also exposed alleged financial links between the US and Kenya.

In September, US officials travelled to Kenya to work with local law enforcement on extraditions, prosecutions and the recovery of money allegedly stolen from American taxpayers.

With the help of Kenyan investigators, US authorities seized more than $750,000 from a cryptocurrency account belonging to a Kenyan national connected to the wider scheme. The Justice Department described it as the first international seizure of its kind in Kenya.

The seizure was not connected to Mogambi's individual case.

In a separate case in Virginia, prosecutors allege that a Kenyan national received more than 700 fraudulent student-aid refunds totalling approximately $1.44m. At least $1.3m was subsequently transferred through thousands of transactions to accounts in the US and Kenya.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, three people have been charged with allegedly acting as money mules in a scheme to obtain more than $1m in federal student aid.

Prosecutors say they received the funds through US bank accounts, kept a portion for themselves and transferred the remainder to alleged co-conspirators in Kenya linked to a purported safari company.

If convicted, Mogambi faces a mandatory prison term of at least 10 years, according to the Justice Department.

Authorities say those convicted will also face appropriate orders for forfeiture of assets and restitution to victims, in addition to any prison sentences.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

Suited and booted: How Joseph Kabila went from president to rebel leader

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr3wv311dwnlo, 2 days ago

Joseph Kabila was a commander in the rebel alliance that brought his father to power in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997, went on to succeed him as president and now, at the age of 55, he is a rebel leader once again.

In an even stranger twist, the man he has sworn to topple is the very man he handed power to after 18 years at the helm, and with whom he had formed a coalition government after stepping down. While one of the rebel groups he had fought against as president is part of his new alliance.

His career reflects the ever-shifting nature of politics in DR Congo, where alliances are ephemeral, with the use of force a constant threat.

When Kabila was named leader of the Front for the Refoundation of the Nation (FRN), earlier this month, it confirmed what many Congolese had long believed – that the former president was working with the M23 rebels, who last year seized much of eastern DR Congo, including the region's main cities of Goma and Bukavu.

Nevertheless, the confirmation sent shockwaves through DR Congo – a vast country two-thirds the size of western Europe, with huge deposits of gold, diamonds and even more importantly minerals used to make everything from the mobile phones to batteries for electric vehicles.

For Kabila, the alliance offers a possible route back to the power he had lost.

For the M23 rebels, his involvement brings the experience and networks of a former head of state to a movement whose military advances have yet to translate into broad national legitimacy.

But it is far from certain that they can achieve their stated goal of ousting President Félix Tshisekedi.

Policy analyst Henry-Pacifique Mayala told the BBC that Kabila had been left with few options for regaining political influence.

"He actually was left with no other choice," he said.

Facing a death sentence after being convicted in absentia of treason, as well as US sanctions over his alleged support for the M23, Kabila may have sought assurances that the partnership could serve his interests, Mayala suggested.

"I'm not sure that he is making this huge leap in the dark without having received considerable assurance," Mayala said, adding that the M23's military strength could give Kabila greater leverage in any future negotiations with the Congolese government.

Kabila's involvement also raises questions about whether the conflict could spread beyond the east.

The M23's territorial gains have been concentrated in the country's eastern provinces, some 1,500km (1,000 miles) from the capital, Kinshasa.

Kabila's political networks could give the rebellion a broader reach, but that does not necessarily mean it has the capacity to extend its military campaign across the country.

And it is not clear how far Kabila's national reach extends.

While he was in power, after being named following the mysterious assassination of his father Laurent in 2001, he was often seen as something of an outsider in Kinshasa. He was far more at home speaking Swahili, the lingua franca of eastern DR Congo, as well as east Africa, rather than the Lingala spoken in Kinshasa.

His father's rebel group actually walked across the country to Kinshasa, also starting in the east, over a period of seven months, before eventually seizing power in May 1996 and ousting long-time ruler Mobutu Sese Seko, who had governed the country as his own personal property for more than 30 years.

There is little suggestion that Joseph Kabila's FRN would try to repeat that feat but earlier this week, he likened Tshisekedi to Mobutu.

"You have a tyrant who wants to impose and dictate what he thinks is right and not necessarily follow the constitution, which is the supreme law of the land," he told Conspiracy Trackers Great Lakes (CTGL), a pro-M23 research group.

Kabila accused the government of using the death penalty, ending the moratorium introduced during his own presidency, to intimidate civilians, politicians and members of the military, as well as himself.

"This is personal," he said.

He framed his confrontation with Tshisekedi as a fight against authoritarianism, invoking Section 64 of the constitution, which calls on citizens to resist anyone who seizes power or exercises it in violation of constitutional provisions.

Tshisekedi is rumoured to be planning to change the constitution to allow him to seek a third term in office, with the C64 coalition of opposition parties named after that same section of the constitution, campaigning against such a move.

But in a sign that he may not get everything his own way, the C64 coalition this week refused to back Kabila's rebellion, saying that Congo's multiple security crises cannot be resolved by military means alone. Instead, it announced plans to seek direct talks with both Tshisekedi and Kabila in pursuit of what it called a "genuine and inclusive national dialogue".

Richard Moncrieff, a Great Lakes analyst with the International Crisis Group think-tank, said President Tshisekedi retained substantial advantages.

"Tshisekedi has strong American backing. He has a lot of money. And he generally controls the political system and, as far as we can see, the military system," Moncrieff said.

In his first public reaction to Kabila being named FRN leader, Tshisekedi was damning: "In my view, it's simply proof that he has never loved this country, and even less its inhabitants," he said last week.

And yet Kabila is widely believed to have helped ensure that Tshisekedi succeeded him, rather than Martin Fayulu, who was the true winner of the 2018 elections, according to leaked results provided by the Catholic Church, which had observers around the country.

Indeed, the former head of the electoral commission who announced Tshisekedi as the winner, Corneille Nangaa, has said as much.

Now one of Kabila's deputies in the FRN, he claimed that Kabila and Tshisekedi had reached a political agreement before the final election results were announced.

"I can confirm that I helped draft the deal," Nangaa told France 24 in September 2023. "Tshisekedi is a liar. He knows there was an agreement and he knows what was contained in the deal."

Tshisekedi has maintained that he won the election legitimately.

After the disputed election, Kabila and Tshisekedi entered a power-sharing arrangement that allowed Kabila's coalition to retain control of parliament even after Tshisekedi took office in January 2019.

The arrangement unravelled in December 2020, when Tshisekedi moved to break Kabila's parliamentary dominance and build his own majority. The former allies became rivals, and Kabila went into self-imposed exile in South Africa.

From exile, Kabila's criticism of Tshisekedi grew louder.

He returned to DR Congo in 2025 and appeared in rebel-held Goma. In September that year, a military court sentenced him to death in absentia on charges including treason and financing violence in eastern Congo.

At the time, he rejected the accusations.

Yet another intriguing sub-plot to the announcement is Kabila's relationship with Rwanda's President Paul Kagame.

In the early years of his presidency, ties were strained between DR Congo and Rwanda, which accused its giant neighbour of not doing enough to remove ethnic Hutu militias involved in the 1994 Rwandan genocide from its territory. Their presence in what is now DR Congo has been used to justify Rwanda's repeated military involvement in its giant neighbour, going back to its backing of Laurent Kabila's rebellion.

The M23 was formed in 2012, vowing to stand up for the rights of ethnic Tutsis and to protect them against these militias, but also battling the Congolese army, under the control of Joseph Kabila.

From the start Rwanda was accused of backing them. It has always denied these allegations, as it still does despite overwhelming evidence.

However, relations later improved and Kabila's government worked with Rwanda against the Hutu militias.

Alex Adams, Africa programme director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Kabila's appointment as rebel leader could bring his interests into alignment with those of Rwanda's president, even though their objectives differ.

"Kabila wants to recover political influence nationally, while Kagame is primarily concerned with Rwanda's security and strategic position in eastern Congo. This is an alignment of convenience rather than a partnership built on deep trust," he said.

Policy analyst Mayala said Kabila's involvement could help Rwanda counter accusations that it was interfering in Congo's internal affairs.

"This is a former president. It's finally a Congolese rebellion," he said.

Even before the announcement of Kabila as the rebellion's leader, fighting was continuing despite a peace accord overseen by Donald Trump last year.

Part of that deal saw the US sign an agreement to extract DR Congo's mineral wealth and the US has since seemed to side with Tshisekedi by imposing sanctions on various Rwandan officials and bodies, accusing them of prolonging the violence.

Elections are scheduled for 2028, but Tshisekedi has warned that fighting in the east could delay voting.

Against this backdrop, Kabila has questioned whether elections alone can resolve the country's political crisis.

"Does Congo need elections or a revolution?" he asked, arguing that lasting peace required a fundamental overhaul of the country's executive and legislature.

International security analyst Ovigwe Eguegu argues that Kabila is banking on military force to regain political influence, while Tshisekedi seems to be trying to extend his time in office beyond what the constitution allows.

"It looks like the Congolese people are going to lose either way, because neither of these two sides present a credible economic transformation plan for both the eastern Congo and the entirety of the country," Eguegu said.

Additional reporting by Emery Makumeno in Kinshasa

More about DR Congo from the BBC:

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Demands for post-poll justice as Tanzania accused of weaponising counterterrorism laws

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqdr8mgl5756o, 4 days ago

Families affected by election-related violence in Tanzania that led to the deaths of at least 500 people a year ago have told the BBC they want justice for those killed in the protests and help with medical expenses for those injured.

"We can no longer afford to pay hospital bills," Meshack Sane, who was shot in the leg, told the BBC.

On the eve of the anniversary of the poll that saw President Samia Suluhu Hassan elected with 98% of the vote, rights group Amnesty International also accused her government of "weaponising counterterrorism laws to silence critics and instil fear".

The opposition dismissed the result as a "mockery" of democracy as Samia's two main challengers were excluded.

Tundu Lissu, the 58-year-old leader of the main opposition Chadema party, had been put on trial for treason ahead of the poll - preventing him from standing.

He had been demanding electoral reforms and a verdict in his case is due next week.

Earlier this week, Lissu went on a hunger strike as he was not being allowed access to his lawyers - an allegation the prison authorities denied.

His lawyer Dickson Matata told the BBC on Wednesday he had now been granted a meeting and would be eating again.

In its statement, Amnesty said it had documented how over the past year security agencies had committed human rights violations with impunity against government critics, opposition supporters, media organisations and dissenting members of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party.

"Not a single official has been criminally investigated, let alone prosecuted and punished for the excessive force that Tanzanian security forces used against protesters," said Tigere Chagutah, the group's regional director for East and southern Africa

"In fact, the situation has only deteriorated since the crackdown began. In a classic tactic pulled out of the authoritarian playbook, the authorities are increasingly weaponising counterterrorism laws to silence critics and instil fear."

The authorities in the East African nation have repeatedly denied accusations of widespread abuses and say the government is committed to respecting human rights.

Samia, 66, has insisted the election was fair and transparent and blamed foreigners for the unrest, saying it was part of a plot to overthrow her.

Last year, the BBC verified multiple videos of police shooting towards protesters. Footage posted online showed demonstrators being confronted by heavily armed units blocking their progress and firing tear gas to disperse crowds.

The BBC has since spoken to families of some of the victims of the electoral violence, who are still seeking answers.

Many, like Mwajuma Hamisi, have been left destitute. Her husband George Kisivani was shot in the northern city of Arusha on 29 October 2025, the day of the vote, and died two days later.

"I lost my husband, upon whom we, a family with five children, depended. We now have no other source of support. I am left to fight for the family on my own. We have no other assistance," the 32-year-old told the BBC.

She now sells vegetables at a nearby market to support the family - and would like help from the government.

Sane, who shot in the leg in Arusha, has been suffering physically and financially.

The father of three says he has undergone more than five major operations to deal with the gunshot wound. He still needs further surgery but says he can no longer afford treatment.

"We have done everything within our means, but we have reached our limit," the 33-year-old told the BBC.

"The government should look into the situation of those of us who have suffered these tragedies, so that we can receive medical treatment, as some of us are still very sick."

He explained how in the wake of the violence hospitals initially refused to treat injured people.

In the intervening months, his relatives have sought help from local officials and the district commissioner, but he says they were told the government had not allocated a budget for victims of the violence.

The BBC has not independently verified his account of those conversations.

A commission of inquiry's report into the violence was handed to President Samia in April, officially recording 518 deaths.

But Amnesty has criticised the fact that the full report has not yet been made public, saying it "entrenches a culture of secrecy".

The president has since set up another commission to inquiry to identify those behind the violence.

"It is imperative that this new commission comprehensively address the role of security forces in the election-related crackdown," Chagutah said.

The rights group says that between 3 and 17 September 2026, it interviewed 17 people who gave details of a continuing crackdown by the authorities.

Some of them were targeted after demonstrations were called for 7 July to demand democratic reforms and justice for those killed last year.

These marches were banned by the authorities. A 26-year-old man who had expressed support told Amnesty how he was arrested on 24 July in Dar es Salaam and held without charge for 47 days.

He said he was blindfolded by his interrogators who wanted to know who was funding the protests and threatened to kill him.

"On the first day, they didn't give me food. When I asked for water, they urinated on my blindfolded face and said, 'That is the price for those of you opening your mouths to make noise'," he said.

"On the second day, I was taken to Gogoni police station where they beat your legs until they get numb but then insist that you must stand."

The right groups also cites other "acts that may amount to torture... arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances and abductions".

The authorities did not respond to the BBC's or Amnesty's request for comment.

Many of those who lost relatives a year ago want the government to acknowledge their suffering and address their questions about justice, like 40-year-old Neema Munuo.

She says her grief over the death of her 18-year-old daughter Maria Chami, who had gone out to buy phone credit in Arusha when she was shot, has often left her too distraught to leave the house.

"It is a date I will never forget for the rest of my life, because whenever I recall it, I feel as though I am burning inside," Munuo told the BBC.

This feeling resonates with farmer Juma Nasibu, who lives near the city of Mwanza on the shores of Lake Victoria.

He has not seen his 25-year-old nephew Juma Shabani since the unrest.

The young man had been at a cinema hall in the evening when his uncle later heard unconfirmed reports that he was amongst people rounded up and shot. His family have fruitlessly searched for him at hospitals, police stations and prisons.

"To date, what still pains me is that we were never able to recover the body," Nasibu told the BBC.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

'I cannot teach you integrity': How employee theft is hurting small businesses in Africa

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmz98plpjzplo, 8 days ago

When popular Kenyan food creator That Girl Boina took a two-week holiday to Europe, she expected to relax. A week into the trip, an Instagram direct message exposed a problem that would ultimately lead to the closure of her business.

"I was at your studio, I liked everything. The only problem was that I was asked to send money to a different number. It wasn't the number on the wall," a customer wrote to her.

Boina had opened Waxaholic Studio, a waxing and hydrafacial parlour in Nairobi's central business district, on 1 September 2024. A year later, she had hired a receptionist and two specialists and felt confident enough to take a two-week holiday, her first international trip of the year.

"I trusted them. It's two rooms and a reception - how do you mess that up?" she recalls thinking.

"It never occurred to me that maybe I was getting clients and someone else was stealing from me," she tells the BBC.

The discovery prompted Boina to examine the business more closely. Although the business had made a profit in the first few months, revenue began to fall in early 2025. She initially dismissed the decline as a seasonal slump but then realised there was a problem.

"Everyone around was making money apart from me," she says in hindsight.

She had already considered closing because it was not making a profit, but her initial investment, three employees depending on the business and her vision for it kept her going. The customer's message became the turning-point.

"If I am not making money and I am willing to wait and see where this goes and you guys are not giving me the same energy, then why are we still open?"

Rather than confront the employees, Boina decided to close the studio. That weekend, she put it up for sale but found no buyer. She sold some of the equipment and took others, including decorations, home. Waxaholic Studio closed in October 2025.

"I remember my friend taking me to a restaurant, and I started crying. We were both silent."

"What else would we do?"

Boina describes the experience as the worst feeling she has ever felt. The closure was not just a financial setback, but the loss of something she had built to secure her future.

In September, nearly a year after the business closed, Boina shared a video on TikTok recounting the experience, explaining that she had needed time to heal before speaking publicly about what happened.

The video went viral after being reposted on X, formerly Twitter, garnering close to one million views. It drew responses from many Kenyan business owners who described how theft, ranging from payment diversion to stock theft and the sale of expensive equipment, had pushed their businesses to the brink, forcing them to fire staff, sell their businesses or shut down.

"Although I have recovered emotionally, I am yet to recoup the money I invested in setting up and running the studio," says Boina.

The reaction to her story showed that employee theft is a huge problem for many small businesses owners in Africa, where a handful of employees may control payments, stock and supplier transactions, often with limited oversight.

A 2022 survey by PwC, one of the world's biggest consultancy firms, found that 63% of respondents in East Africa said their organisations had experienced economic crime, compared to a global figure of 46%.

The risks are not confined to small businesses. Some of East Africa's biggest supermarkets have also reported significant losses linked to employee fraud and stock theft. Tuskys and Nakumatt have both collapsed this decade amid wider financial and operational problems partly attributed to employee theft.

At its peak, Tuskys had more than 6,000 employees and over 60 branches across Kenya and Uganda. In 2015, the retailer hired loss-prevention firm Hipora Business Solutions East Africa to help tackle fraud. An audit found that Tuskys was losing more than 100m Kenya shillings (£581,000; $770,000) a month to employee theft, Business Daily reported. The alleged schemes included cashiers pocketing money, manipulating till transactions, and colluding with suppliers over goods received.

Nakumatt also suffered significant stock losses attributed to employee theft before going under, with a Kenyan policy firm reporting that more than $100m (£75m) worth of stock was unaccounted for.

Hipora, which works with businesses across East and Southern Africa, says employee theft is a huge problem, estimating that it accounts for more than 60% of losses recorded by small businesses.

Employee theft has evolved over the years, Hipora boss John Wanjohi tells the BBC. "Employees are like a cartel that colludes with clients and suppliers to perpetuate theft."

Employee theft does not always involve money being diverted to an employee's phone. It can sometimes take subtle forms, making it harder for business owners to detect.

For Cris Njoki, founder of IKOJN, a Kenyan ready-to-wear clothes brand, the problem lay further up the supply chain.

"I found out that one of my staff was asking our suppliers to quote higher for some of the raw materials we were getting from them," she says.

The employee allegedly colluded with a supplier to inflate prices, with the two sharing the excess money after the company paid the invoices. Njoki investigated the scheme and confronted the employee with the evidence. The employee subsequently left the company.

Since then, Njoki has tightened her firm's procurement controls.

"We have now centralised the procurement process and created a paper trail. Finance speaks to the supplier and then makes payment," she tells the BBC.

Across the continent in Accra, Ghana, employee theft came close to bringing Muftawu Nabila's business to an end.

The Joy News sports journalist says he was robbed by two different employees in the four years he has run his electronics shop. But theft by a third employee, he says, nearly forced him to close it altogether.

His first employee was let off with a warning. The second tripled monthly sales but left when her university semester resumed.

Before traveling to the United States to cover the Fifa World Cup in June 2026, Nabila hired a third attendant, leaving the business with little supervision.

"She almost collapsed my shop," he says.

While other employees had taken smaller amounts, sometimes as little as 50 cedis ($4; £3) at a time, the third attendant was operating on a larger scale, he says.

"Assuming we are making a sale of $200 (£150) a day, she could take up to $30," he says.

The theft continued for two months. When Nabila tried to restock the shop, he realised the money coming in was not enough to replenish his shelves. He began counting his stock every morning.

When he confronted the employee, she denied the allegations. But a stock count she conducted herself revealed a significant gap between inventory and sales receipts.

"I just told her: 'If you go home today, don't come back,'" he says.

His salary from his journalism job allowed him to rebuild the business.

For him, the shop is a way of creating jobs, making the theft particularly frustrating.

"We have to generate the money from the shop for me to pay you. So if I pay you, pay electricity bills, shop rent and you steal some, where am I expected to generate money?"

Theft happens in businesses around the world, but its consequences can be particularly severe for small businesses in Africa.

Many operate on tight margins, with limited access to finance, high borrowing costs and unpredictable tax environments.

Purchasing power is also lower in many African markets, limiting how much businesses can recover through sales or pass on to customers.

This is especially significant in a continent where the informal economy accounts for a large share of employment and economic activity.

For businesses without much of a financial cushion, the loss of cash, stock or equipment can threaten their ability to pay staff, restock or keep operating.

What might be a manageable loss for a larger company can push a small business to the wall.

Wanjohi says many small businesses lack proper safeguards to prevent theft.

At one struggling pharmacy branch, his team tightened controls over cash handling, stock movements, and cashier operations. Wanjohi says daily sales subsequently increased from 80,000 Kenya shillings to 200,000 after the changes.

Wanjohi says many businesses seek help from loss-control specialists only after the problem has become serious.

Detecting suspected theft, however, is only part of the challenge. Employers must also follow the law when investigating allegations and deciding whether to dismiss an employee.

Judith Guserwa, an advocate, says employers must investigate suspected theft, gather evidence and allow employees to respond before taking disciplinary action.

If employees admit to theft and choose to repay, let it be in writing: "If they don't, you terminate with a valid reason and press charges," she says.

The experience has changed how Boina approaches hiring.

She says she will now be slow to hire and quick to fire.

"I cannot teach you integrity," she concludes.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

Hospitals deliberately targeted by Sudan's RSF fighters, BBC finds

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c54g1kxw4nvvo, 10 days ago

A BBC investigation has found evidence that Sudanese paramilitary fighters systematically destroyed el-Fasher's healthcare system during their long siege and subsequent takeover of the city in Darfur a year ago.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk called the findings "deeply disturbing", saying multiple attacks by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on civilian infrastructure, including health facilities, were serious violations of international humanitarian law and may amount to war crimes.

The RSF has rejected the BBC's findings.

The health minister of the group's civilian-affiliated government dismissed the allegations as propaganda.

Dr Alaa Eldin Nugud said it was a deliberate attempt by the national army and its allies to smear the RSF's reputation.

Using sources who were on the ground in el-Fasher, the BBC has found details of at least 43 separate attacks on hospitals and healthcare sites from May 2024 to October 2025 - some hit multiple times.

Under international law it is illegal to attack health facilities or their staff during conflict.

The investigation also reveals the toll on medical workers in the western city. In the period from April 2023 to October 2025, the BBC's data shows 120 were injured, 55 killed and 10 forcibly "disappeared" or abducted.

"The RSF [were] trying to evacuate the hospitals, to put them out of service because the health system is the cornerstone of any city or any state," says Dr Muhamed Suliman, a surgeon who was based in el-Fasher during the siege and spoke to the BBC.

"The RSF started hitting these areas so citizens have no longer any way to stay there. It was intense. It was deliberate. It was planned."

The investigation comes a year after the fall of el-Fasher, one of the most brutal chapters of the civil war which erupted in April 2023 between the RSF and Sudan's military.

Both sides have been accused of attacks on health facilities.

In March 2026, the World Health Organization (WHO) condemned the bombing of al-Daein hospital in RSF-held eastern Darfur, which killed dozens and forced the site to close. Sudan's military is believed to have carried out the drone strikes, although it has denied responsibility.

But events in el-Fasher represent "one of the clearest and most severe examples of the wider impact of the conflict on health care in Sudan," the WHO said in response to a BBC query.

UN investigators have reported that the fighting in el-Fasher bore the "hallmarks of genocide", where historical ethnic animosities have seen Arab militias - now the backbone of RSF forces - target non-Arab groups such as those that populate the city.

The BBC's investigation reveals for the first time a detailed chronology of attacks on healthcare during the long siege of the city.

Some medical facilities in el-Fasher closed down within weeks of the country's civil war starting in April 2023.

Crucially this included one of the main hospitals - the Teaching Hospital - located in a conflict zone in the middle of the city.

Its operations were moved to el-Fasher's South Hospital. There medical services continued, although increasingly hindered by power cuts and dwindling supplies.

The situation changed dramatically a year later, when the RSF mounted its siege of el-Fasher.

In late May and early June of 2024, the South Hospital was shelled several times as paramilitary fighters pushed forward from their positions in the east of the city.

The first bombing came as a shock, says Dr Suliman.

The area around the hospital that was hit was "very crowded because it was the only working hospital in the city providing surgical services", he says.

On that day medical staff operated on 16 injured patients, he added.

The attacks culminated in an RSF raid on 8 June. Hospital staff were taken by surprise - many of them escaped over the back wall as the RSF fighters entered the building, says Dr Mustafa Ahmed, a pharmaceutical specialist.

But the director general of the hospital, surgeon Izzeldin Ahmed Dawaud Asow, encountered a group of the paramilitaries outside his office.

They did not know he was a doctor, he said, but denounced him with ethnic slurs.

"There are no citizens here. You are Falangi," they said, using a derogatory term implying that non-Arab Sudanese are foreigners.

Dr Asow says he was beaten with rifle butts and lost consciousness at one point. Ultimately, he saved himself by pretending to be dead.

"They put their hand on my chest, and I stopped breathing. And they said: 'Leave him, leave him. The rubbish has died. Leave him.' They left me."

That same day the RSF was driven out by the Sudanese military and its allies and Dr Asow returned to find the bodies of several patients and the surgical equipment in his operating room thoroughly destroyed, he said.

The hospital closed and later fell into RSF hands when the army retreated.

Dr Nugud, a prominent Sudanese surgeon who has joined the RSF-backed civilian government as health minister, insisted the South Hospital was being used as a military base.

According to international law, hospitals can lose their protection if they are used by a party to the conflict to commit an "act harmful to the enemy".

In an interview with the BBC, Dr Nugud declared that missile launchers were set up on the grounds and shared a video showing remains of weapons filmed more than a year after the hospital closed, which he said supported his claim.

He also showed us what he called maps of landmines planted around the Teaching Hospital, which is located next to Sudanese military headquarters.

Doctors told us the hospital was not incorporated into the base and said they visited it to pick up medical equipment during the war.

The BBC has found no independent evidence of Dr Nugud's allegations. And the government of the Darfur region categorically rejected the charges.

After the South Hospital shut, its staff and remaining equipment were moved to the Saudi Maternity Hospital in the west of the city, where the army had its main bases.

Within days the pace of attacks on the facility picked up. At this stage the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) sounded the alarm.

"We do not know if hospitals are being intentionally targeted, but… the belligerents are not taking any precautions to spare them," it said in a statement.

However, in the course of our investigation we spoke to six doctors who described a pattern of systematic targeting.

They told us how Saudi Hospital was repeatedly struck - on some days up to 25 times, with a mix of shelling and drones, the latter "intelligent rockets" with precision-guided attacks.

Smaller medical facilities also came under fire. The BBC's timeline records the steady closure of private hospitals and neighbourhood clinics.

Furthermore, when some of these healthcare buildings shifted locations, the alternate venues were also attacked.

The Specialised Children's Hospital, which shut down at the beginning of the war along with the Teaching Hospital, moved to two other locations, both of which were then shelled and forced to close.

Similarly, the main dialysis centre was struck and then attacked again after it relocated.

By the time the RSF seized the city in October 2025, the Saudi Hospital was the only functioning health facility left.

The medical staff there had rallied to try to keep working as conditions worsened.

Doctors described how sandbags were set up to protect the building.

They built underground bunkers out of steel containers and established a number of alternative sites to house and receive patients and conduct surgery as the threat of attacks and the damage to the main structure steadily increased.

Dr Asow said this makeshift surgery was attacked five times in 2025.

In one case, he says, he was operating on a patient's neck when the building was shaken by an explosion - the medical staff ran out in fear, but he stayed.

In another case, health workers had prepared the theatre for an operation, but he told them to move the patient elsewhere because it needed a deep clean given the relentless case load. Shortly afterward the room was destroyed by shells - and the patient survived.

"From that day, some of my staff called me 'Mr Deep Cleaning' because they think that the issue of deep cleaning saved that patient," he said.

Dr Asow also describes how drones tracked the movement of patients.

On 15 March 2025, people carrying the injured from the site of an attack to one of the temporary wards were followed by a hunting drone, he says.

It struck as they reached the gate of the building, killing nine people.

On 17 August of the same year a donkey cart was transferring patients to the alternative operating theatre because all the ambulances had been destroyed, Dr Asow told the BBC.

It was hit by a drone, killing two patients, the driver and the donkey, he says.

The RSF health minister dismissed these accounts as "a continuation of lies" by the military (SAF) and their local allies, known as the Joint Forces.

"Even the medics, and many of the people who were there, because of this conflict, these tribal issues, these racial issues, they are allied with the Joint Forces and with the SAF. That's why you don't depend on that narrative," he said.

Doctors told the BBC they believed RSF fighters deliberately targeted medical facilities because army or allied fighters were among their patients.

The onslaught of shelling and bombing culminated on 25 October 2025 with the RSF storming the hospital amid allegations of a massacre that killed more than 460 patients and their companions.

The RSF has denied a massacre occurred, although the WHO condemned the reported killings and satellite imagery published by the Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) at Yale University appeared to show clusters of bodies on blood-soaked grounds of the hospital.

The BBC investigation is the first full account of all known attacks on healthcare during the siege of el-Fasher. It follows evidence of alleged RSF atrocities previously gathered by non-government organizations including the HRL, Amnesty International and the Avaaz activist group, as well as the UN's independent fact-finding commission.

We shared details of our findings with the UN human rights chief, who said they were "deeply disturbing", and consistent with the analysis of his office.

"Our monitoring and documentation shows the RSF repeatedly struck el-Fasher's main hospitals and makeshift health facilities, destroying or seriously damaging them and severely impacting access to health services for thousands of civilians trapped in the city," Türk said.

Healthcare in el-Fasher is now being run by the RSF-backed government. It has released several videos showing the Saudi Hospital and the Teaching Hospital re-opened, cleaned up and seeing some patients.

Dr Nugud says South Hospital is also set to reopen. He denied that doctors were forcibly abducted, telling the BBC that instead they had chosen to stay on to work.

"I have a video in front of the children's hospital when we freed a consultant, a doctor and six of the medical staff who were working with the SAF, and then when el-Fasher got liberated, there was a forgiveness for all of them.

"We liberated them," he said.

The BBC spoke to one of the doctors in the video, Dr Al-Haj Mohamed Ahmed. He told us he had no choice: "I was forced to be there.

"If I spoke out of line, they'd put a bullet through my head."

He was among several medical workers captured while trying to escape the city and sent back, along with Dr Mustafa Ahmed.

They distinguished themselves by bringing a cholera epidemic in a temporary prison at the paediatric hospital under control and were subsequently taken to Saudi Hospital.

"They started to say that you are the people of the city, and we take the city, so we need to work together for the sake of the city," says Dr Mustafa Ahmed, who describes waking up several mornings in a row at the prison to find 50 inmates dead of cholera.

A year on from the fall of el-Fasher, the trauma of this dark period in Sudan's civil war is still painfully sharp.

The front lines have shifted elsewhere with no signs of a resolution to the conflict. And attacks on healthcare continue as part of a wider and devastating humanitarian crisis.

Additional reporting by Peter Mwai, BBC Verify

Maps and graphics by Miguel Roca-Terry, Jake Friend and Matt Mitchell-Camp

More from the BBC on Sudan's civil war:

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

Is Ebola under control in Kenya after nine cases confirmed?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c693z948px0jo, 6 days ago

As fears grow that the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo could spread further, Kenya, which announced its first Ebola case three weeks ago and has since had eight more cases, is hoping for the opposite.

Nine cases and two deaths have so far been confirmed.

With the first 20 of the people who came into contact with the first Ebola patient being released, the government has described it as a "milestone worth celebrating".

The government expects the outbreak to be declared over in less than two months, if efforts to contain the spread holds. But that is assuming there are no more cases, including from the 98 people still in quarantine and due to be freed next week.

Should Kenyans still be concerned?

Despite the initial release of the people in quarantine, Kenya's Health Director-General Patrick Amoth has reiterated that the focus was "firmly on the finish line".

The outbreak can only be declared over after 42 days from the time the last confirmed patient twice tests negative for Ebola, he said on Monday.

"We cannot afford to drop our vigilance until we reach that point," he said

In the days after the first case was announced, concerns had been rising that the virus could start spreading further, even as the government sought to assure citizens.

The US warned it citizens against travelling to Kenya, while neighbouring countries such as Uganda, Ethiopia and Somalia remain on alert.

Concerns remain among Kenyans that the disease could still spread more widely.

Nearly 5,000 people have died since Ebola was confirmed in DR Congo in May, making it the second most deadly outbreak of the disease.

With more than 10,000 cases in DR Congo, Kenya faces a steady risk of new cases arriving across borders, according to the International Rescue Committee, which has been working alongside both governments to contain the spread.

The latest outbreak has been caused by the Bundibugyo species, which is relatively rare, with no approved vaccine or treatment - though trials are under way.

Kenyans raised questions from the outset, about how the first patient was able to spend time in the region worst-affected by Ebola, then travel to two more countries before his illness was identified. He died days after his arrival in Kenya.

As a regional transport hub, the risk of the outbreak spreading remains a big concern.

The doctors' union in Kenya expressed concerns at "lapses" at various border points, including with neighbouring Uganda and Tanzania, as well as at Kenya's main airport.

Dennis Miskellah, the union representative, told the BBC that border and port facilities were grossly understaffed.

In the latest update on Monday, Amoth says that "each milestone brings us closer to the end of this outbreak, and together we will get there".

What is being done to stop it spreading?

When the first case was announced, the authorities urged people not to panic, assuring them of heightened surveillance at airports and border crossings.

Kenya has since introduced enhanced screening for travellers arriving from 10 countries it considers to be at high risk: DR Congo, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Zambia, Ethiopia, South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

Travellers arriving from those countries are required to complete a digital surveillance form before boarding their flights, and to present a QR code to port health officials on arrival.

Kenya also ordered enhanced public health screening of aircraft arriving from those countries, as authorities seek to prevent further imported cases.

Within the country, the government has been sharing public messages to create awareness about Ebola, including encouraging people to promptly report any suspected cases and seek care at a hospital.

It has also focused on hygiene and safety measures, such as washing hands and avoiding close contact with sick people.

The government has additionally designated treatment and isolation facilities across the country, and health workers have been trained to deal with the disease.

Amoth also said that a dedicated laboratory had been set up at the Kenyatta National Hospital Infectious Disease Unit to handle Ebola tests, to ensure that the hospital's laboratory was not contaminated.

Following confirmation of the first Ebola case on 6 October, the health ministry conducted "robust contact tracing of anyone who may have been exposed", the World Health Organization (WHO) says. By 22 October, all contacts had been traced, both in Kenya and internationally, and placed in quarantine, it adds.

The government says that the confirmed cases so far are connected and there is no evidence that the virus has spread to the community.

Earlier, the International Rescue Committee noted that with all of those infected having links to the first victim, it showed Kenya's early response was working.

The government has been working with international partners, including Africa CDC and the WHO to support its response, including surveillance, communication and community engagement.

A toll-free emergency hotline, 719, has been provided to the public to report suspected symptoms.

Is Kenya prepared in case it starts spreading further?

Amoth earlier said that none of the contacts of the first patients had showed symptoms before going into quarantine "and therefore the potential to spread to another person is very minimal, literally non-existent".

The incubation period for Ebola ranges from two to 21 days, meaning those exposed to the virus may not become ill for several weeks. The Ebola virus spreads through contact with infected bodily fluids such as blood or vomit.

Despite that, Kenya's health ministry said nearly 5,000 healthcare workers have been trained to deal with Ebola at the national and local levels, besides the facilities that have been designated to handle the virus.

The ministry urged people to remain calm and vigilant. It also asked Kenyans not to stigmatise people identified as contacts of Ebola cases.

The ministry, along with the WHO, have produced posters to help people understand Ebola and support its containment. One message reads: "Stop stigma, choose support. Stigma can discourage people from reporting symptoms or cooperating with response teams."

In addition, the government has procured supplies of protective equipment.

Is enough being done to protect health workers?

Not according to the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Union (KMPDU).

With three health workers and a hospital cleaner among those infected, questions have been asked as to whether the government could do more to protect workers.

Health workers and carers can face a higher risk of Ebola infection because caring for infected patients may bring them into contact with blood and other bodily fluids.

Dennis Miskellah, the KMPDU deputy secretary general, told the BBC that protective equipment should be provided to hospitals so that they were fully protected, especially in case patients with symptoms do not declare that they have been in areas with Ebola.

He suggests the government ought to conduct proper health education to destigmatise the virus, so that people do not seek to hide their symptoms.

The International Rescue Committee also called for continued funding for contact tracing, border screening and training of frontline health workers in Kenya.

Will there be any restrictions, like a travel ban?

Kenya remains open with no restrictions on travel, trade or public gatherings.

Despite confirming nine cases, the authorities have explicitly ruled out a national lockdown or general travel ban for Kenyans.

The US on 19 October issued an advisory asking citizens to reconsider travelling to the country over Ebola concerns. Other countries have issued health alerts, including the UK, which warned its citizens that they may encounter enhanced health screening, and Canada, which has asked citizens to monitor their health for 21 days.

No country has issued an outright ban against their nationals visiting Kenya, nor have Kenyans been blocked from entering other countries over Ebola fears.

Has business and tourism been affected?

Analysts have raised concerns over the potential impact of public health fears on international travel and tourism but there is no evidence this has happened yet.

But the situation could change if the outbreak were to spread into the wider population.

How many Kenyans are there in DR Congo?

The exact number of Kenyans living in the DR Congo is not clear.

A report authored last year by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think-tank put the number of Kenyans living in eastern DR Congo at about 2,500, including about 50 investors. It also noted that there were about four times as many Congolese living in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, alone.

The Kenyan embassy in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, which represents Kenya's interests in four countries - DR Congo, Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon - has in the past urged Kenyans living in the region to formally register so that it is able to serve them better.

How have neighbouring countries responded?

Several countries in the region have announced tightening of surveillance measures and enhanced screening for visitors.

One man who came into contact with the man who died in Kenya is under quarantine in Somalia and samples have been sent to Kenya for testing.

Somalia has also said it was taking precautionary measures, including enhancing surveillance measures at border points "given the evolving regional situation and the movement of people between countries".

The suspected case in Somalia had travelled through Ethiopia, which has also said it had tightened surveillance to prevent an outbreak

In Tanzania, visitors are expected to undergo daily health monitoring for 21 days, through an automated tracking system, which was announced after Kenya confirmed multiple cases of Ebola infections.

Uganda said after Kenya's first Ebola case that it was continuing to "maintain strong surveillance measures to protect public health". It later said that 60 people who had

The Kenyan businessman had travelled through Uganda on his way home from DR Congo.

Uganda later said 60 people who were being monitored after coming into contact with the Kenyan patient had all been discharged.

Uganda had reported two Ebola deaths shortly after the outbreak was reported in DR Congo, but the WHO has since declared it to be free of the disease.

On 20 October, Nigeria confirmed a case of Ebola in a female patient who travelled from Uganda to Abuja. Nigeria is the first West African state to report a case linked to the current Ebola crisis in East and Central Africa.

The woman, a 42-year-old Ugandan-born national is a wife of a Swiss diplomat who had travelled to the Ugandan capital for a holiday.

The health ministry stressed she did not have symptoms while transiting through Uganda and only developed them after arriving in Abuja.

She has since been evacuated from Nigeria to Switzerland.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

Refugee athlete to make history for second time at Youth Olympics

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq74pjgxdrx2o, 3 days ago

When he started running, Yiech Pur Biel had to compete barefoot. Far from home in a new country, it was the first step towards rebuilding his life as a refugee.

"That's when I decided now it is time to depend on myself and also to start a new life with determination," he tells BBC Newsbeat.

In 2016, Biel made history competing in the 800m event as part of the first Olympic refugee team at the Rio summer Olympics in Brazil.

Ten years on, he's making history again leading the first refugee team for the Youth Olympics as their Chef de Mission.

Joining almost 3,000 athletes, the small team of six will be wanting to make sure their debut counts - but Biel says they're also hoping to send a message that "refugees still need our help".

Hosted in Senegal, Saturday's opening ceremony will launch the first ever Olympic sporting event on African soil.

Africa is home to nearly 45 million displaced people, out of almost 120 million globally, representing the world's biggest displacement crisis.

Biel says for the refugee team, the Youth Olympics is "a chance for them to tell the world and also to represent the population, especially the refugee population, in Africa".

"It's about representing the hope of young people who are living in a refugee camp, who have lost their motivation or their talent."

Biel was a child when he was forced to flee his home in South Sudan after his village was attacked.

He ended up in Kenya, telling BBC Newsbeat: "It traumatised me, starting a new life, being alone in Kakuma," referring to the major refugee settlement close to the border between Kenya and South Sudan.

"But I started a new life, I believe that school helped me a lot. It helped me to interact with young people who faced the same challenges."

The rest of his childhood was spent on the refugee camp where he took an interest in football.

After realising it wasn't the sport for him, he gave running a go during trials set up by the International Olympic Committee - where he raced without shoes.

It made him "believe that if I can work harder by myself, I can achieve", he says.

One of the athletes on the refugee team, Arno Yafunga Botay, also lived at Kakuma after fleeing his home in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2017, when he was six.

Now 15, he will be competing in judo and told BBC Sport Africa he's promised to bring back a gold medal which he'd like to take to the refugee camp.

"I think if I achieve [a] gold medal, I can go there and teach them the value of judo," he said.

As for Biel, he says it's an honour to be chosen as the team's Chef de Mission.

"This is so important for them, to learn from my experience as an athlete and also as a refugee who is coming from a refugee camp," he says.

"So this role means a lot to me and also means a lot to those young athletes who are going to compete."

Competition at Dakar 2026 begins later, with the opening ceremony on Saturday.

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

US convicts Rwandan man who hid genocide role for decades

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmkgq90yxg7ko, 4 days ago

A Rwandan man has been convicted in the US of lying under oath about his involvement in the 1994 genocide during the trial of a former university classmate.

A federal jury in Boston found Eric Nshimiye, 54, guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice charges stemming from his testimony in the 2019 immigration fraud trial of Jean Leonard Teganya, who was also accused of participating in the atrocities.

Nshimiye fled Rwanda for Kenya in 1994 and was admitted to the US as a refugee the following year.

About 800,000 people, mostly from Rwanda's minority Tutsi community, were killed by ethnic Hutu extremists during the 100-day genocide.

Prosecutors said Nshimiye concealed his involvement in the genocide to secure entry into the country.

Evidence presented at his trial showed that, while a student at the University of Rwanda in Butare, he took part in attacks of the Tutsi people, including by striking them on the head with a club.

He faces up to five years in prison for each of the four perjury counts and a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison for obstruction of justice.

He is due to be sentenced on 26 January 2027.

"For nearly three decades, this defendant concealed his involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the heinous acts of violence he committed, including clubbing people to death," US justice department prosecutor Tysen Duva said.

"Then he lied to immigration officials in order to become a US citizen, and he lied to a federal jury to protect himself and a fellow perpetrator of the Rwandan genocide," Duva said.

Nshimiye's lawyer, Kurt Kerns, said in a statement that they were "obviously ⁠disappointed with the verdict" and would pursue "all avenues of relief".

During his opening statement at the trial in October, Kerns argued that the charges were based on "fabricated accusations", saying Nshimiye was not in Butare when the violence began.

He also said Nshimaye was charged only after testifying as a character witness for Teganya, his former university classmate.

Teganya was sentenced to eight years in jail in 2019 for what prosecutors described as "the most serious form of immigration fraud", after lying about his involvement in the genocide.

He was also accused of participating in at least seven murders and five rapes, but denied being involved in the genocide.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

President Tinubu to 'pray for Nigeria' during Saudi Arabia trip

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw78pry0788no, 4 days ago

Nigeria's President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is travelling to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia to perform the lesser Hajj pilgrimage, known as Umrah, where he will offer prayers for the West African nation, the presidency says.

The visit would provide the 74-year-old president with an opportunity for "spiritual reflection, devotion and prayers for Nigeria's peace, unity, stability and continued progress", his spokesman Bayo Onanuga said.

Tinubu, a Muslim from southern Nigeria, last travelled to Saudi Arabia for Umrah in 2022, while campaigning to become Nigeria's president.

The next election is in January and the country's widespread security challenges have become a major campaign issue.

Onanuga's statement said the president would "perform the religious rites associated with Umrah, seeking Allah's guidance and blessings for Nigeria and its people".

Unlike the Hajj, which has fixed dates once a year and is a pilgrimage that Muslims who are able to must perform at least once in their lifetime, Umrah can be performed at any time and involves a shorter set of religious rites.

Meanwhile, Tinubu's media aide Olusegun Dada has dismissed speculation that the real reason for the trip is that the president needs medical checks.

There was widespread discussion about the president's health last weekend after a video went viral on social media appearing to show First Lady Oluremi Tinubu popping something into Tinubu's mouth at the election campaign launch for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party.

There has been no official comment regarding the incident.

In a post on X, Dada said the president's trip was intended to offer "supplications for the country" and to commit the president's re-election bid "into the hands of God" as he began "another major political journey".

According to a survey by US-based Pew Research Center, more than 90% of Nigerians say religion is "very important" in their lives - one of the highest proportions globally.

Nigeria - Africa's most populous nation - is roughly evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, with a small number of traditional believers.

"It is a regular practice among Muslims when they want to embark on any critical journey or attain a milestone," Dada said, reminding his followers that Tinubu had last done the lesser Hajj ahead of the APC's presidential primary in 2022.

The next elections are scheduled for 16 January when Tinubu's main challengers will again be former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar and former Anambra State Governor Peter Obi.

As campaigning gets under way the economy and insecurity are major issues for voters.

The country faces an array of security challenges including an Islamist insurgency, attacks by criminal gangs - known locally as "bandits" who loot and kidnap for ransom - clashes over land and separatist unrest.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

US sanctions Rwanda's defence ministry over DR Congo conflict

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm87zw51qw0jo, 4 days ago

The United States has imposed sanctions on Rwanda's defence ministry over its alleged support for the M23 rebel group in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, increasing pressure on Kigali to withdraw its troops and halt support for the rebels.

"Rwanda must halt its support for M23 and withdraw its troops from eastern DRC," US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

The sanctions come months after Rwanda and DR Congo signed a US-brokered peace agreement aimed at ending the conflict.

Fighting has continued in eastern DR Congo since early 2025, when M23 seized the cities of Goma and Bukavu. Rwanda denies backing M23.

The US Treasury says Rwanda's defence ministry directed thousands of troops to fight alongside M23 in eastern DR Congo, providing weapons, equipment, logistics and training.

The M23 has seized mineral-rich areas, including gold-mining sites in South Kivu and Rubaya, a major coltan-producing area in North Kivu. Washington says minerals from rebel-held territory enter Rwanda's supply chains, alleging that Rwanda exports more minerals than it produces.

The sanctions are intended to reinforce the Washington Accords, signed by the Congolese and Rwandan presidents in December 2025 under US mediation. The deal aimed to end the conflict and expand regional trade and investment, but fighting has continued.

On 24 October, ahead of the sanctions announcement, DR Congo President Félix Tshisekedi urged the international community to increase pressure on Rwanda.

"We must firmly demand that the international community impose concrete sanctions against Rwanda and exert increased pressure, so that we may finally secure a lasting peace in our country," he said.

In a statement to Reuters, DR Congo foreign ministry welcomed the sanctions and urged Rwanda to honour its commitments under the Washington Accords, respect the UN Charter and withdraw its troops from Congolese territory.

"The Washington Accords contain clear commitments regarding Rwanda's security, specifically the neutralization of the DR Congo-sponsored FDLR genocidal militia, which are wholly unmet, and with no accountability," Rwandan government spokesperson Yolande Makolo told the BBC.

The FDLR is a militia linked to perpetrators of Rwanda's 1994 genocide. Kigali considers it a security threat and cites its presence in eastern DR Congo to justify its military posture.

"Rwanda remains ready to fully implement the Washington Accords, concurrently with the willingness of the DRC to fulfill those commitments, and with the mediator holding all parties accountable," she said.

The US also sanctioned Zigama Credit and Savings Society, a popular bank and financial institution serving Rwanda's security services.

Washington alleges it facilitated tens of millions of dollars in transactions for M23 and its political wing, the Congo River Alliance, helped pay for military equipment for Rwandan forces from China and enabled gold to be transported from rebel-controlled areas to Kigali.

The sanctions freeze the designated entities' assets under US jurisdiction and generally prohibit US individuals and businesses from conducting transactions with them, unless authorised or exempt. Violations can result in penalties for US and foreign parties.

The measures follow earlier US sanctions against Rwanda's army and four senior military commanders in March 2026. The US imposed further sanctions on Gasabo gold refinery and three mining companies accused of smuggling conflict minerals in June 2026.

Pressure is also mounting over Rwanda's international sports partnerships. Two US senators have urged the National Basketball Association (NBA) to reconsider its commercial relations with Kigali, questioning whether it aligns with the league's stated commitment to human rights.

In a letter sent to NBA commissioner Adam Silver on 23 October, senators Jeff Merkley and Marsha Blackburn questioned the league's continued partnership with Rwanda amid allegations of human rights abuses.

The NBA has yet to issue a substantive response to the letter.

Rwanda has used sports high-profile sports sponsorship to raise its international profile. Early this month, it secured a 10-year deal to host Formula 1's African Grand Prix in the early 2030s.

The country's sponsorship of Arsenal ended in 2026, while Bayern Munich has also ended its commercial partnership with Visit Rwanda.

The M23 has recently joined a new rebel coalition, known as the Front for the Refoundation of the Nation (FRN) and led by former Congolese President Joseph Kabila, which wants to oust Tshisekedi's government.

More from Rwanda on the BBC:

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

Popular Australian children's author jailed over child exploitation offences

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmjwe9nggp60o, today

Australian children's author Craig Silvey has been sentenced to seven months in jail for possessing and distributing child exploitation material.

In handing down her sentence, Judge Hayley Cormann called Silvey's actions "repulsive" and "degrading".

In January, Silvey was arrested after police raided his home in Western Australia and seized several electronic devices. In May, the 44-year-old pleaded guilty to possessing and distributing child exploitation material and in October he was jailed pending his sentencing.

The father-of-three is best known for his award-winning young adult novel Jasper Jones and children's book Runt, both of which were later made into movies.

"You have devastated and betrayed the trust of thousands of people, and you've let entire communities down," Cormann said on Monday, according to WA Today.

Police said Silvey had online chats, in which he discussed child exploitation, open at the moment they turned up to raid his house.

In them, the court heard, Silvey had described himself as "extremely open minded" and "obsessed with taboos".

He'd discussed his sexual interest in children as young as five with another user of a pornography site, and detectives found images and videos of other adults abusing children on his devices.

He was initially charged with four offences, but prosecutors later dropped two.

Prosecutors said Silvey contributed to the "cycle of abuse" victimising the children in the images, and argued a harsh sentence was required.

However, the author's defence lawyer said he did not have a "sexual interest in children" and was seeking out "the most depraved material" as a form of "emotional" self harm.

"His behaviour provided temporary relief from psychological agitation," Eloise Barker said.

She said Silvey had displayed genuine remorse for his offending, and that his high profile and the resulting media scrutiny - which lead to his former partner and children relocating interstate - was already a form of punishment.

Judge Cormann did not accept many of her arguments, and said Silvey's offending was extremely serious.

"These children, the victims of this type of offending, are real and are traumatised… the consequences for them from these abuses are long lasting and very, very traumatic," she said, according to The Australian.

Silvey was sentenced to seven months in jail, backdated to 22 October. He is eligible for parole.

Silvey's coming-of-age novel Jasper Jones sold more than half a million copies and was awarded the Book of the Year Award by the nation's peak publishing body in 2010.

The novel, set in Western Australia with two teenage boys as the main characters, was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Awards and the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

It was later turned into a film starring Toni Collette and Hugo Weaving in 2017 as well as a stage play.

Another of his acclaimed works is 2022's Runt, about the adventures of an 11-year-old girl and her stray dog and set in the Australia outback. It was also adapted for film in 2024, featuring Celeste Barber.

Since his arrest, publishers and book shops have pulled his works from shelves while schools in some states have removed Jasper's books from teaching lists.

He questioned Thailand's monarchy dressed as Harry Potter. Now he's in jail for 34 years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmjwepvd0qq9o, 2 days ago

Even before they come through the door, you can hear the prisoners walking towards the courtroom, the shackles round their ankles clinking with each step.

The five who walk into the courtroom are familiar with the routine; they are facing multiple criminal prosecutions and have spent much of the past five years going back and forth to court.

One of them, a small, bespectacled man with greying hair, opens his arms to hold his three-year-old son, who has been brought to court by his partner to see him.

This is Arnon Nampa, a 42-year-old human rights lawyer. His offence was to call for Thailand's powerful monarchy to be scrutinised and held accountable. He did this dressed as the eponymous young wizard at a Harry Potter-themed demonstration in central Bangkok in 2020.

On Friday a court in Bangkok sentenced him to two years and eight months for violating Thailand's lèse majesté law, or article 112, under which more people have been jailed for perceived insults against the royal family than in all the other countries that have such laws combined.

This is just one out of 14 cases brought against Arnon under the same charge, bringing the cumulative sentence he has received so far to more than 34 years. The verdict in two cases is still pending.

"To me, this isn't a surprise," he later told reporters. "If the country was more open, we would be able to talk about these issues freely."

The past six years have seen the most extensive use of lèse majesté in Thai history, in response to unprecedented student protests in 2020 which for the first time called for a public discussion of the role of the monarchy. Two hundred and ninety-four people, including 20 under the age of 18, have been prosecuted, receiving prison sentences of up to 50 years. Dozens of them are still on trial.

Most of those charged under this law are denied bail and kept in jail, even though their court cases can last several years. The standard defence of the law given by Thai officials is that it "reflects the culture and history of Thailand, where the monarchy is one of the main pillars of the nation, highly revered by the majority of Thai people".

Article 112 of the Thai criminal code simply reads, "Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, the Queen, the Heir-apparent or the Regent, shall be punished with imprisonment of three to 15 years."

In practice, though, the law has been interpreted to cover a much wider range of comment about the monarchy, and a much wider range of figures. Saying anything negative about any member of the royal family, about the institution of the monarchy, even about long deceased kings, or in one case, the king's dog, has resulted in prosecutions.

"If you ask me what the text of the law says, I can tell you," says Akarachai Chaimaneekarakate, assistant director of Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, which helps defend those accused of breaking it. "If you ask me how the courts interpret the words "defame" or "insult", I don't think I can give you a definition, because it's so ambiguous, it's so vague. Even questioning the law itself, for example, can constitute lèse majesté under Section 112."

From his cell in the Bangkok Remand Prison, where he has been for the last three years, Arnon has been writing to his young daughter and son.

"Dear Pran and Karl, my beloved children," one of his letters reads, "The winter wind has not only brought us cool weather, but also brings back stories from the past. I miss the time we travelled outside Bangkok that first winter after Karl came into this world. It was such a magical time for me. I shall miss it every winter I spend here until I regain my freedom."

Hearings like the one Arnon attended weeks before Friday's verdict are the only times he has seen Karl since he was a baby.

Karl is shy at first, but soon he's happy to be picked up and shown off to the other prisoners. His 10-year-old sister Pran sometimes visits their father in prison, and often draws and paints him.

But Arnon and Lookwa, his partner, think Karl is too young to visit. For now, Karl thinks the court is just where his dad works. A group of supporters has come too, filling the little courtroom. They mingle cheerfully with the prisoners, laughing and exchanging gossip before the judges walk in to start the hearing. It is an improbably informal setting for men facing one of the most feared charges in Thailand.

The effect of the law has been to smother any public discussion about the monarchy. Until six years ago, opinions on it were only ever whispered in private. In one notorious case a taxi driver was jailed because a passenger reported what he had said while riding in his cab.

That changed on 3 August 2020.

That year younger Thais had become increasingly frustrated with the conservative government led by coup-leader Gen Prayuth Chan-ocha. The year before millions had given their votes to a new party, Future Forward, which promised sweeping reforms, but in February 2020, the Constitutional Court dissolved the party on a technicality. The arrival of the Covid pandemic prevented any protests for three months, but as infections in Thailand started to fall, students began holding rallies calling for an end to the military's role in politics. Arnon Nampa argued this did not go far enough.

In the garb of Harry Potter, he gave a speech saying it was time to talk about the opaque power and wealth of the monarchy. He criticised King Vajiralongkorn's decision to take personal control of the vast assets held by the Crown Property Bureau, and over important units of the army.

In a single speech Arnon shattered a taboo which had hung over Thai society for the whole of its modern history. For the rest of that year the student-led protests continued, with increasingly bold demands for changes to the monarchy.

At the time, the use of the lèse majesté law had been suspended for three years. Sources close to the palace have in the past acknowledged that the negative publicity generated by lèse majesté convictions might do more harm than good.

But the protests forced a hasty reassessment. From the end of 2020 prosecutions under the law restarted and accelerated. Dozens of young activists have fled into exile to avoid being jailed.

One of them is Supitcha "Melinn" Chailom. The 24-year-old from Chiang Mai in northern Thailand lives in Montreal, a fugitive from four 112 charges which have been filed against her.

She was an 18-year-old school girl when she stood up and made a speech at a protest in Chiang Mai University, just three weeks after Arnon Nampa's call for reform of the monarchy.

A local photographer captured the moment she raised her hand in the three-finger Hunger Games salute, eliciting loud cheers from the crowd. It became one of the defining images of the protests, and propelled Melinn to nationwide fame.

She travelled up and down the country as one of the leading voices in the movement, demanding changes to Thailand's old-fashioned education system, conducting polls on what people thought of the monarchy.

"I love playing games, and I dreamed of being a game designer," she told me from Canada. But her parents did not approve.

"I felt that, as a young person, I could not question, or have a discussion with people older than me. The monarchy gave me the same vibe."

In November 2020 Melinn joined a protest in the southern city of Hat Yai, where she gave a speech comparing the royal treatment given to the king's dog with that of ordinary people. Nine months later the police delivered a summons to her home charging her with lèse majesté.

"It was a shock. I wasn't expecting it because I only talked about the dog. It was during Covid when the police came to my home with the summons, so they knew my parents would be there with me. They tried to stay calm, but I nearly lost my mind."

Her family tried to persuade her to co-operate with the authorities, to admit her wrongdoing. But Melinn refused.

She joined a movement calling itself Thalu Wang, which translates as "breaking through the palace". Instead of giving speeches, they came up with stunts like holding polls on the street, asking people what they thought of royal motorcades holding up the traffic, or whether they believed the monarchy had too much power.

"We knew the risks, but we thought it would be safer just conducting a poll. It turns out it was not."

She was given two more lèse majesté charges in 2022, and detained before being released on bail. She had to wear an electronic monitor on her ankle and was barred from leaving her home between 4pm and 6am. Her parents were forced to sign a document promising to inform on her. She was facing decades in jail.

Melinn decided she had no choice. With a friend she fled Thailand and eventually got asylum in Canada.

Article 112 is on paper just a law, like any other, passed by the Thai parliament, which can, theoretically, be amended by elected MPs. In fact it has been amended in the past, notably in 1976 when the punishment for breaking it was increased to between three and 15 years in prison.

But today the Constitutional Court has decreed that the law itself, like the institution it protects, is untouchable. The reformist Move Forward party - the successor of Future Forward - was dissolved in 2024, and its leader banned from politics, merely for proposing that the punishments be less harsh. And the courts make it very difficult for those charged under it to defend themselves.

"In many cases, like the one against Arnon Nampa, prosecutors accuse the defendant of lying about the monarchy," says Chaimaneekarakate, the lawyer. "But when we ask the judge to subpoena documents or witnesses who could show the truth of what the defendant says, the judge refuses to do it. When one lawyer protested against the court deciding that the trial would be held in secret, she was warned by the judge to be quiet or face a contempt of court charge."

He says judges sometimes criticise the young activists over their alleged actions even before the trial has started.

As the one who ignited the debate about the monarchy Arnon appears to be getting the harshest punishment. Despite the formidable odds stacked against him he still prepares carefully for every court appearance, taking part in his own defence and helping other inmates with theirs.

This isn't easy; he is not allowed to bring any of his written notes, and must memorise all his arguments.

The judges object to him playing the part of a lawyer in his regulation-brown prison shorts, his feet bare and shackled. But it does give him an opportunity to see his family.

The letters he writes are the only other way he stays in touch with them. He may spend his entire life in prison. He wants his children to know him, and to understand, when they are older, why he chose to challenge the system and lose his freedom.

"Since the first day that we made up our mind to take up this mission, we knew of the dangers. Speaking the truth is not difficult. What is difficult is speaking a forbidden truth. I remember well that on the evening of 3 August 2020, after speaking at the Harry Potter event, I felt very good, content, and relieved to have finally begun speaking about the truth, in public," he wrote to his family last year.

Earlier this year, he wrote: "Living here is a struggle. But it is just a dot in the bigger picture of our movement's struggle. We must play a part in writing our own history. Become a drop of water that will one day become an ocean."

India's opposition holds mega rally seeking election chief's resignation

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c60qk92dvlwgo, yesterday

Tens of thousands gathered in Delhi for a rally demanding the resignation of India's chief election commissioner over a controversial revision of voter lists.

Organised by the opposition INDIA bloc and led by Rahul Gandhi's Congress party, the protest drew many of the alliance's most prominent leaders in a show of strength against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government.

Protesters waved flags and chanted "Save the vote, save the country" and "Vote thief, give up power".

It was the latest in a series of protests over electoral roll revision that the opposition says has removed eligible voters to benefit the Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP and the Election Commission deny the allegations.

The crowds gathered at Ramlila Maidan, a sprawling ground in central Delhi known for hosting major political and cultural events. Some protesters sang and danced to patriotic Bollywood songs, while others waited beneath a large canopy in the colours of the Indian flag to hear opposition leaders speak.

Gandhi and several senior opposition leaders arrived at the venue in an open jeep, travelling through crowds of cheering supporters.

The event was also attended by Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge, alongside leaders of regional parties such as Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav, Mehbooba Mufti, Supriya Sule and Tejashwi Yadav.

Addressing the crowds, Rahul Gandhi said those gathered had sent a message to Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

"This is not the voice of a single political party or of politicians. It is the voice of India's youth, women, farmers and workers," he said.

"We will not allow democracy to be destroyed in India. We will not allow the constitution to be destroyed."

Other opposition leaders echoed Gandhi's criticism of the Election Commission. Congress president Kharge said the alliance would continue its campaign until Kumar resigned, while Banerjee pledged to keep fighting against what she described as threats to democracy.

Speaking to reporters in Delhi on Sunday, senior BJP leader and federal minister JP Nadda accused the opposition of trying to create unrest and destabilise the government under the guise of defending democracy.

He described the rally as a "calculated conspiracy to plunge the nation into anarchy - in the name of democracy".

At the centre of the dispute is an exercise known as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which has resulted in more than 130 million names being removed from India's draft electoral rolls.

The Election Commission says the exercise is intended to remove duplicate registrations and the names of people who have died, moved away or are otherwise ineligible to vote. It says eligible voters who have been wrongly excluded can seek to have their names restored.

But opposition parties allege that the process is removing legitimate voters and could benefit the governing BJP in future elections.

The controversy deepened in September when The Indian Express newspaper reported that Kumar had made key decisions about the revision despite repeated objections from the two other election commissioners.

The poll panel said differences of opinion were normal in any institution and did not affect its functioning.

Sunday's rally followed weeks of protests over the voter-list revision, including demonstrations by student groups and the Gen Z-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP).

Last month, Gandhi led tens of thousands on a march from central Delhi's Connaught Place to the Supreme Court, demanding Kumar's resignation.

The CJP also backed Sunday's rally but chose not to participate. Its founder Abhijeet Dipke said the group wanted to maintain its independence from established political parties.

The event took place under strict conditions imposed by Delhi Police. According to local media reports, organisers were required to end the gathering by 5pm, install CCTV cameras at the venue and ensure that protesters did not march beyond the designated grounds.

The restrictions came against a backdrop of tensions over the policing of demonstrations in the capital. On 10 October, several leaders of the CJP were detained during protests against Kumar, while BBC reporters witnessed police dragging demonstrators away and beating some with batons.

At Ramlila Maidan, however, the atmosphere was largely peaceful, with people of different ages and professions turning out to express their concerns about the integrity of India's elections.

"We don't even know if this is a people's mandate or a stolen mandate," Isha, a development sector professional from Delhi, told the BBC.

Deepro Guha, a lawyer from Delhi, said he was concerned about the way the revision had been carried out.

"It's important because voting is the basis of democracy. If people's names are removed without any explanation, there is a problem," he said.

On Saturday, opposition leaders also staged a symbolic impeachment of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, accusing him of undermining the electoral process.

The proceedings were purely symbolic and had no legal standing. Under Indian law, the chief election commissioner can only be removed through a formal parliamentary process.

But the move was another show of unity by the INDIA bloc, an alliance of opposition parties formed in 2023 to to take on Modi's BJP.

Modi did not directly comment on the mock impeachment, but at public rallies on Friday and Saturday he accused opposition parties of trying to create chaos and undermining the dignity of the constitution.

Record number of purges as Xi emphasises 'party discipline' at China political gathering

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq5ynw94k7kzo, 3 days ago

A record 33 members have been expelled from China's Communist Party as it concluded a major annual political gathering, which had the most empty seats ever seen.

The fifth plenum was attended by 279 Central Committee members, compared to 315 at the fourth plenum in October 2025 and 364 at the third one in July 2024.

While recent plenums focused on economic reforms or social and development issues, party discipline took centre stage at this week's gathering.

Xi Jinping has made the fight against corruption a central pillar of his rule since he took the reins in 2012, calling it the "biggest threat" to the party.

Since then, more than two million individuals have been disciplined for cases related to "pointless formalities, bureaucratism, hedonism and extravagance", Zhang Fuhai, from the party's disciplinary commission, told a press briefing on Friday.

He also said the party would enhance its efforts to ensure officials "dare not, cannot, and do not want to be corrupt".

Anti-corruption purges continue

Sixteen of the 33 members expelled are from the military, according to a communique issued on Thursday, which marked the end of the four-day closed-door gathering held at a hotel in Beijing.

It's unclear what specific charges these members face beyond "serious disciplinary and legal violations". Such broad allegations have become routine under Xi's anti-corruption campaign.

It has now become "an effort to consolidate and maintain authority", says Chong Ja Ian, a non-resident scholar with Carnegie China.

"In this case, the campaign will continue and expand depending on how secure Xi feels rather than any real issue with corruption."

In its statement, the party said it has "squarely confronted the grim reality that party leadership had at times weakened or hollowed out" and that it will continue to "enforce strict party self-governance, including turning the knife inwards to... curb disorder".

The latest expulsions bring the total number of members removed under Xi's third term to a record 51, up from 35 and five in his first and second terms respectively.

Beyond the plenum, China's top anti-corruption watchdog reported that 680,000 people across the party apparatus have been disciplined in the first nine months of this year.

This is also the first time in Xi's 14 years of leadership that plenum attendance fell below 300. The current Central Committee started its term in 2022 with more than 370 members.

Observers argue that Xi views corruption not just as graft but also ideological impurity and, crucially, disloyalty.

In January, he warned against "two-faced cadres" who profess political loyalty but defy orders and act in their self-interest.

Who are the key figures purged?

Among the high-ranking officials expelled are former Xinjiang party chief Ma Xingrui, and ex-top generals Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli. Official statements announcing their removal this year said they "seriously violated [the party's] discipline and rules", which is widely read as a euphemism for corruption.

The culling of the military's top brass has been particularly significant, with Neil Thomas, Lobsang Tsering and Shengyu Wang from the Asia Society Policy Institute describing it as "in a category of its own".

"It raises serious questions about organisational leadership and combat readiness, even as China continues to unveil formidable new military hardware," they wrote.

Zhang was also vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, which controls the armed forces. The seven-member commission has since been whittled down to just two members: Xi as chairman and Zhang Shengmin vice-chairman.

Ma and Zhang Youxia were former Politburo members. Their removal, along with former general He Weidong in 2025, meant the powerful 24-man Politburo was at one point left with 21 members.

Zhang Shengmin was promoted to the top decision-making body at the fifth plenum, bringing the number to 22.

Former prominent diplomat Liu Jianchao, who disappeared from public view in July last year, was also named among those who have been purged.

"Xi has few qualms about removing people he promoted," Chong says. "That he does so at will with little opposition underscores how unassailable his position is at the moment."

Xi's plans for the future

Analysts believe one reason for the increased emphasis on discipline – which many interpret as loyalty – is next year's Party Congress, when the CCP will vote again for its next leader.

A leadership reshuffle is due in 2027 and many analysts expect Xi to hold on to the top job for a fourth term and beyond. No leader has served that long except Mao Zedong, the founder of Communist China.

Xi has reason to "scrutinise the next cohort more closely" given the fall of so many officials from the current committee, Thomas says.

"Today's rising stars tend to be relatively young, boast technocratic backgrounds, and have connections to Xi's political network," he says, adding that "provincial leadership ranks are a promising place to look".

Observers say that ultimately, Xi is expected to dominate personnel selection at the 21st Party Congress, which will further cement his grip on the party and the country.

"Xi's focus is further consolidating power around himself... The readout from the plenum suggests he intends to be at the centre of China and the Communist Party for the foreseeable future," Chong says.

"However, further down the road, such concentration of power may pave the way for a more serious power vacuum when Xi ages and slows down."

Audacious Indian jailbreak saga ends with 17 prisoners recaptured

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmx2qrgy591ro, 4 days ago

A fake medical emergency, an audacious jailbreak and a 36-hour search operation that ended with 17 prisoners being recaptured.

Those are the highlights of a story from India's Tamil Nadu state that has captured headlines across the country.

It began on Monday night after 17 men escaped from a prison in Theni district in the southern state after overpowering guards, and ended almost two days later with police catching them in batches.

The incident has drawn attention to overcrowding in Indian prisons. Police say the Theni prison was housing 334 inmates against a capacity of 200, leaving authorities unable to maintain control once chaos broke out.

The state police said it has suspended nine staff at the prison for alleged negligence in connection with the incident.

All the men who escaped were undertrials - inmates on trial or awaiting one - and 18 of them were in one cell at the prison in Thekkampatti in Theni.

On Monday night at 2230 local time (17:00 GMT), one of the prisoners acted like he was going through a seizure. The other cellmates shouted for help and a jail official responded. He was soon overpowered by the prisoners, police said.

The prisoners then got out of the cell, reportedly attacked two other jail guards and took away keys which they used to open the main gate and flee. While 17 escaped, one returned to the prison immediately.

Several prison personnel were injured in the attack.

Police sources told BBC Tamil that they were examining the possibility of collusion between some prison officials and the escaped men.

Sandeep Rathore, Director General of Police for Prisons in Tamil Nadu, said in a press briefing that the jailbreak was caused by "human error".

"There was a clear breach of security protocol as the prisoners managed to pass through a three-tier barrier manned by security personnel," he said.

On Thursday, he was replaced as the head of state prisons and transferred to a different department.

At the time of the incident, only four guards were on duty, far below the staffing required to maintain the prescribed 1:6 guard-to-inmate ratio recommended by the state - which should have worked out to 34 guards against the approved strength of 200 prisoners.

The police then launched a manhunt, calling forces from across the state.

"Advanced technology, drone surveillance, CCTV footage analysis, and the tireless efforts of police personnel played a crucial role," the department said in a statement on X.

Four men were arrested at a bus station in a nearby village, and the fifth was caught while he was travelling in a tuk-tuk.

A drone search of a forest near the prison led to eight more escaped prisoners being caught. Videos of the arrests showed the men obeying police instructions even as they did not answer questions from reporters who were also seen at the scene.

Two more were captured with the help of drone surveillance, police said, while the last two men surrendered on Wednesday.

News agency PTI reported that all 17 recaptured prisoners have been moved to high-security correctional prisons.

Rathore told media that all prisons across the state would be audited to check if rules were being followed.

The incident evoked memories of one of the biggest jailbreaks in Tamil Nadu in 1995 when 43 suspected militants escaped from a special camp after digging a 153-foot-long tunnel beneath a historic fort. Some of them were never recaptured.

While the investigation is going on, the incident has sparked a conversation on overcrowding in Indian prisons. The National Crime Records Bureau's last Prison Statistics India report from 2023 showed a national occupancy rate of 120.1%.

Data shows that undertrial prisoners - individuals who are detained while they await police investigation or court trials - make up more than 73% of India's total prison population. Human rights groups and legal experts have also raised concerns about delays in investigations and trials that lead to people languishing for years behind bars.

Additional reporting by Siraj and Prabhurao Anandhan

Philippine police obtain warrant to search Thomas Markle's devices

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm0j06y3pn75o, 4 days ago

Philippine police have obtained a warrant to examine devices allegedly removed from the former home of Thomas Markle, father of the Duchess of Sussex.

Earlier this month, it was reported that hundreds of images of child sexual abuse allegedly belonging to Thomas Markle Sr, 82, had been found at the property in the Philippines.

Four boxes of material, including computers, phones, hard drives and old videotapes, were handed to police by Meghan's half-brother, Thomas Markle Jr, last week. However, officers in Cebu needed a court warrant before they could examine the items.

Thomas Markle Sr, who is now in the US, has strongly denied the allegations made by his son, describing them as "sick lies".

Cebu Regional Prosecutor Graeme Elmido told the BBC that Thomas Markle Jr was "adamant" that the case should be investigated, and that he felt his father "has to answer for it".

Last week, the Sun on Sunday reported that Thomas Markle Sr's ex-wife, Roslyn Loveless, had sent a letter to the Metropolitan Police about the 2019 allegations, which was shared with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex at the time.

Loveless, who has since died, is the mother of Meghan's two half-siblings. She divorced Thomas Markle Sr. in 1975, before he married the duchess's mother.

The duchess has been estranged from her father since 2018. The BBC understands she broke contact with him last year, telling him she and the authorities knew he had abused young girls.

In a statement shared on Friday, Meghan confirmed the existence of the letter and wrote: "I am deeply distressed... my thoughts are with any children who may have been harmed."

She said she hoped it could be understood why she had largely cut off contact from her father and did "not allow him to have contact with our children".

Speaking to the Sun, Thomas Markle Jr also apologised to Meghan for initially siding with her father during their long-running estrangement, and said he had "been protecting the wrong person for the past nine years".

Thomas Markle Sr moved to the Philippines last year after he had a series of strokes, and lived in Cebu until May.

He is reportedly now living in a Florida rehabilitation centre learning to walk again after having his leg amputated.

The police say they must identify how the material was obtained before they can consider any criminal charges.

Campaigners describe Cebu as a known hotspot for the sexual exploitation of children, and authorities say they take any such allegations very seriously.

China made Mbappé apologise - but many don't know exactly what he said

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm3wv36d603yo, 3 days ago

On Monday night, as Kylian Mbappé was attending the Ballon d'Or ceremony in London, he was also becoming the centre of a huge controversy on Chinese social media.

Football fans had stumbled upon a clip of him joking about the meme that makes him "laugh the most" - where his face is superimposed on a "Chinese dictator" resembling Mao Zedong, who oversaw one of the bloodiest chapters in the country's past.

The controversy spread like wildfire as Chinese brands cut him off one by one and China Media Group, the parent group of state broadcaster CCTV, suspended broadcasts of La Liga matches. A foreign ministry spokesperson said: "Words and actions that hurt the feelings of the Chinese people will naturally be met with joint opposition from all sectors of Chinese society."

But on the Chinese internet, few were explicitly spelling out those words and actions, or even using the name of Mao - who remains a near-sacred figure in the country.

China's sophisticated censorship system, which cuts 1.4 billion people off from the global internet, meant many didn't know exactly what had happened.

The accusation of "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people" alone seemed enough to trigger a tsunami of anger, amplified by social media algorithms and a heavily controlled internet, where people are wary of disagreeing with the majority view.

It wasn't long before Mbappé, one of the biggest football stars in the world, said he was "sincerely sorry" for his "ill-judged" comment. His club, Real Madrid, and the Spanish league La Liga, also issued apologies. China is a huge market for the world's most popular sport.

Beijing later confirmed it was taking the footballer's apology "seriously". China Media Group has yet to say whether broadcasts will resume.

But the anger online lingered.

"An apology is the least he should do, but I don't forgive him. I support a ban on him," read a top comment on Weibo.

Mbappé did not mention Mao by name in the interview, but many felt any joke that involved the founder of Communist China crossed a line.

"Do you know who you hurt? He is the spiritual pillar of the Chinese people," read one Weibo comment liked by more than 700 users.

"He's the most important figure in our history. Do you think a simple apology can make everything okay?" another wrote.

Ironically, despite the heavy backlash, many on Chinese social media are still asking what exactly the French forward said. They tried AI chatbots, which are just as censored as the Chinese internet and couldn't provide any answers. Others attempted to explain, but skirted around any mention of Mao.

References were made to "the person on the 100 yuan note" and "the teacher", a title Mao once used for himself. Screenshots of the meme and interview were shared, with both the word "dictator" and Mbappé's face blurred out.

Neither the Chinese foreign ministry statement nor the apologies issued by Mbappé, Real Madrid and La Liga mentioned Mao directly.

Mao, who led the Chinese Communist Party to victory in the civil war and founded the People's Republic of China, died in 1976.

Despite the turmoil of his rule, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which led to a famine that killed tens of millions and unleashed violent purges across Chinese society, he remains a revered figure in China.

A portrait of Mao overlooks Beijing's Tiananmen Square, a symbol of how central he is in the modern Chinese imagination. Unlike other former Chinese leaders, his embalmed body is placed on public display there, drawing tens of thousands of visitors every day. In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in him among young people, who read his works and watch clips of him on social media.

Chinese history books downplay the devastation during Mao's rule. The Chinese Communist Party's verdict on Mao is that his achievements outweigh his mistakes. In their eyes, he is "a great revolutionary and a great Marxist".

But outside China, history sees Mao as both a revolutionary and a dictator. And so reactions among the diaspora - dissidents as well as people whose families fled China decades ago, in the wake of Mao's rule - was very different.

"You don't need to apologise, you are not wrong," a highly liked comment written in Chinese under the football star's X statement read.

"The ones who should apologise are the CCP; they kidnapped the Chinese people and brainwashed them," another Chinese user wrote.

On X and Threads, neither of which are accessible in China, the controversy spawned even more memes. Some feature Mbappé's face on other images of Mao, while others go further, placing him on the body of current Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

And then there was the rest of the internet which was simply puzzled.

"It's honestly hard to understand... It seems like people aren't allowed to speak out against their leaders. And they expect the whole world to think the same way they do? That's ridiculous," read a top comment under Real Madrid's apology on Instagram.

"How dare you call a dictator a dictator? Terrible," another user on X wrote.

The Indian chef who brought curry to America - then vanished

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crm941n0413o, 2 days ago

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, in 1901, an Indian chef opened what was almost certainly the first Indian restaurant in the US.

Ranji Smile was one of the most colourful and enigmatic figures to shape the American food scene.

In the summer of 1899, Smile sailed from London to New York. We know hardly anything about his origins and early life, not even his real name.

"Ranji" was probably a nod to the Indian cricketing sensation KS Ranjitsinhji, then a star attraction at Test matches in Britain. "Smile" could have been an anglicisation of "Ismail".

Whatever his origins, Smile possessed an uncommon knack for reinvention. Once through the portals of Ellis Island, he appended a new name to his identity, something more in keeping with America's egalitarian promise: Joe.

Joe Ranji Smile arrived in New York to work at Sherry's Restaurant, a glittering new establishment on Fifth Avenue.

In London, he had been a curry cook at the Cecil and Savoy hotels. Here, according to an 1899 profile in Harper's, he was noticed by Sherry's owner, Louis Sherry, who invited him to bring his culinary skills across the Atlantic. Late Victorian London already boasted an Indian dining scene: as early as 1810, Sake Dean Mohamed, a native of Patna, had opened his Hindostanee Coffee House near Portman Square, plying customers with both curry and hookah.

Manhattanite tastebuds lacked much exposure to masala. There was, however, growing curiosity about India and its culture. Swami Vivekananda, the spellbinding orator and exponent of Hindu philosophy, enthralled audiences during his visits to the city in the 1890s. At the same time, more Indian sailors, students and professionals trickled into New York. This was probably why Louis Sherry decided to add a curry cook to his kitchen staff.

At Sherry's Restaurant, Smile joined one of the great culinary institutions of the American Gilded Age. Positioning itself as a rival to Delmonico's, New York's byword for fine dining, Sherry's catered to city plutocrats like the Astors and was famed for over-the-top dining experiences. During one such soiree, patrons marched their horses into a ballroom, saddled up and ate on horseback.

Smile, a skilled showman, thrived in this environment.

Customers soon flocked to taste his preparations of Bombay duck, a glutinous lizardfish that is a delicacy along the western Indian coast, and novel creations like "Lettuce Ceylon".

Cooking and serving became a performance. Dressed in a satin coat and blue silk turban, Smile salaamed in front of customers before enquiring, "Will you have the curry hot or mild, sahib?" Pictures of Sherry's curry chef were soon splashed across newspapers and magazines. One headline said it all: "New York women go wild over him."

As his fame grew, Smile decided in 1901 to leave Sherry's and set up his own establishment, one exclusively devoted to Indian cuisine. For financial backing, he leaned on Roland R Conklin, a prominent financier and the inventor of an early version of the motorhome.

Omar Khayyam, Smile's Indian restaurant, opened in late 1901 at 325 Fifth Avenue. This was prime real estate, a block away from the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel where, 29 years later, the Empire State Building would rise. Smile adorned the restaurant with Indian draperies and hanging lanterns.

As the New York Herald reported, a fleet of Indian waiters in "voluminous turbans" staffed the premises, as did a group of Indian musicians. Now quite the embodiment of the American immigrant success story, Smile eagerly awaited his customers and fans.

Alas, they never materialised. Within a year, Omar Khayyam shuttered. The New York Sun claimed that people had "tired" of Indian fare, dismissing it as a passing fad.

Smile's stardom, which had blazed so brightly in the Big Apple, also began to dim. Unfortunately, his showmanship and flair for theatrics shaded into deceit and criminal activity.

Smile began claiming that he was, after all, not an everyday Joe but rather a prince, the son of the emir of Baluchistan, a fictional title. And, before opening Omar Khayyam, he made a quick visit to Bombay, where he pronounced himself to be a guest at the upcoming coronation of King Edward VII in London and recruited a retinue of staff: valets, a dancing girl, and "mahouts to drive his herds of elephants".

All of this was reported in New York newspapers like the Times because, as a subsequent federal case against him alleged, Smile illegally trafficked this staff into the US to work at his restaurant. Instead of becoming a pioneer outpost of Indian gastronomy, Omar Khayyam nearly got Smile deported.

"Prince" Joe Ranji Smile evaded deportation (many in his retinue were not as lucky) and went on evolving his invented persona, all while wooing and marrying a series of impressionable young American women. He began claiming that Indian food was a secret elixir for female beauty. "The eye will grow lustrous, the complexion will be yet so lovely," Smile promised, displaying his wives as clinching proof.

Meanwhile, he honed his performing skills at Indian cooking demonstrations across the country.

In Washington DC, Smile prepared dishes, including a dubious-sounding dessert called "bungalow", while a juggler and dancing girl entertained him. On his way to Chicago, as one newspaper in remote Idaho reported, he declared himself to be no longer the son of the emir but the brother of an even more fanciful figure, the "great Beglerberg of Baluchistan". If Smile was guilty of being a conman, then his American interlocutors were equally guilty of wide-eyed gullibility.

While Smile's theatrics and good food kept people entertained for a while, the tall tales and outright fabrications soon caught up with him.

Smile retreated from the public gaze, hurt by further brushes with the law which ranged from forcible confinement of one of his dancing girls to refusing to pay a bill at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. By the 1920s, he apparently abandoned cooking entirely, listing his occupation as a merchant.

The final shred of evidence about Smile dates from 1937, when his fourth or fifth American wife approached the New York Supreme Court and filed for an annulment of her marriage to her now-absconded husband. Ranji Smile's last act of reinvention was to simply disappear.

Despite this inglorious end, Smile and his Indian restaurant did pave the way for the popularisation of Indian cuisine in America. Other immigrants soon tested the waters.

In 1909, Saint Nihal Singh, a peripatetic journalist from Punjab, introduced readers of the Chicago Daily Tribune to recipes for bhajias, puris, halwa, and "Fried Chicken a la Hindoo".

Aware of the unfamiliarity of many Indian ingredients amongst Chicagoans, Singh urged readers to look for them in the city's Chinese grocery stores. On another occasion, which might make contemporary chefs blush, he suggested that hamburger meat was an adequate substitute for preparing gosht pilau (a meat pilaf).

Not long after Ranji Smile was hauled to court for trafficking immigrants, a young man from Ceylon named KY Kira arrived at Ellis Island.

Like Smile, he had a talent for reinvention. Kira joined a troupe of Sinhalese dancers which performed for American circuses like Barnum and Bailey and Ringling Brothers. In 1913, he opened an Indian restaurant in Harlem, eventually called the Ceylon India Inn. Unlike Omar Khayyam, the Ceylon India Inn was a hit.

New York now had a much larger immigrant Indian population and the restaurant attracted expatriate nationalists and revolutionaries. But it also benefited from a burgeoning American interest in Indian culture and food. By the 1920s, Kira's restaurant, now located off Times Square, catered to Broadway and Hollywood stars. The Ceylon India Inn remained in business until the late 1980s, touting itself as the first Indian restaurant in America.

That, of course, was not the case. Ranji Smile might be long forgotten, but 125 years after the brief existence of his Omar Khayyam restaurant, his legacy lives on in the thousands of Indian eateries flourishing across the US.

Dinyar Patel is associate professor of history at SPJIMR in Mumbai

'Like cutting up a Picasso': AI microdrama edit of Neighbours worries actors and crew

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj1dw9znd1q1o, 4 days ago

Former Neighbours actors and crew have raised concerns about plans to use AI to help re-edit old footage and make mini episodes for mobile phone viewers.

Fremantle, producer of the now-defunct Australian TV soap opera, has partnered with US-based RoseBerry Media for the project that will use AI to "scan decades of episodes" to help make short vertical videos.

Footage of Margot Robbie, who played Donna Freedman from 2008 to 2011, will be the initial focus of the micro-drama.

Both companies say the move will bring the show - which aired its final episode last year - to new audiences. But some actors and crew say they have not consented to their images, voice or work to be re-purposed.

Robbie has yet to respond publicly. The BBC has contacted her agency for comment.

In a statement, the companies behind the project said the AI-assisted technology will "scan decades of episodes to map character arcs, storylines and standout moments, helping editors quickly identify the strongest material".

The micro-drama episodes will use "original, previously broadcast footage, dialogue and performances", according to Fremantle spokesman.

"It does not generate new scenes or performances, alter actors' faces or likenesses, or use synthetic voices," he said, adding that a human editor would be "reviewing and approving every stage of the editing process".

The mini episodes will likely feature Matt Werkmeister, 34, who joined the set of Neighbours in 2005 when he was 13 years old. He played a regular character, Zeke Kinski and shared many scenes with Robbie's character.

Now a Melbourne-based producer and director, Werkmeister says he hasn't been approached by the companies behind the micro-drama and is concerned what the episodes will feature.

"If they're creating a new micro-drama out of something that already exists, I feel there needs to be consent for using our image and voice as well as the writers," he said.

Robbie is "obviously a big draw card" and "it's nice to watch old clips from shows you used to watch," Werkmeister said, but when he signed his contract two decades ago, "streaming didn't even exist as a platform" so he's unsure of what his rights are.

That uncertainty is also at the forefront of Sam Clark's mind. He played Ringo Brown on Neighbours from 2006 to 2010, a character who later marries Robbie's fictional character.

Speaking from Los Angeles, Clark – now working as a producer and voice actor - said he hadn't heard about the micro-drama until a friend sent him an article.

"I don't have a negative view of the work that we did all those years ago getting a second life as long as it's not being manipulated into new storylines," Clark, 39, said.

"AI and social media obviously wasn't a thing when I signed my contract 20 years ago so I'm still trying to understand exactly what those parameters are."

Sound recordist Bruce Findlay, 68, has worked in the TV industry for close to five decades and Neighbours has a "special place" in his heart, having worked on the show from episode one.

Using AI to help make short episodes from old footage was "like cutting up a Picasso and rebuilding it".

"We worked so hard to get this product out… and now they're chopping it up into little tiny pieces, throwing it up in the air and putting it back together again using AI - it belittles the process".

Guy Hameiri, head of RoseBerry Media, said the project is the first time the company will use its in-house AI tool to sift through Neighbours footage - there are more than 9,300 episodes - to make "premium vertical television".

The project will "reimagine" the material, giving it "new audiences, new relevance and new value," he said.

The head of Fremantle's commercial and international arm, Jens Richter, has called the project "an exciting example of how technology and creative thinking can unlock new value" from their catalogue.

It's understood that Fremantle is in discussions with two unions on the issue and that residuals - ongoing payments for actors and writers when their work is re-aired or syndicated - will be paid, but this does not apply to crew.

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, one of the unions, confirmed the talks.

"Workers should be consulted before their likeness or expertise is used in a way they could never had envisioned when they signed contracts decades ago," said MEAA's acting CEO Adam Portelli.

China's families are now supporting more old people than kids

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr20wzwyzl1qo, 5 days ago

Families in China are for the first time supporting more elderly people than children, the country's government has said.

Official data released in the last week show the ratio of China's dependent elderly people compared to the working age population rose to 23% last year, overtaking the figure for children, which stood at 22%.

The numbers are closely watched for signs of how China's shrinking workforce will impact both the world's second largest economy and global growth as a whole.

The latest figures mark a significant milestone as China grapples with an ageing population that could have implications for families, pensions and healthcare spending, analysts say.

China has been preparing for a growing proportion of elderly people in recent years, while urging younger generations to get married and for couples to have more children.

The latest data from China's National Bureau of Statistics show there are now more than 223 million people in China aged 65 and above, accounting for nearly 16% of the country's total population.

At the same time there are about 213 million children aged 14 and under.

No official commentary was published with the statistics. But Chinese state-controlled news outlet Global Times wrote that the nation's "entry into a moderately ageing society" is the result of a mix of factors, including the "size of past birth cohorts" and longer life expectancy.

The shift could place added strain on pension, healthcare and long-term care systems, while also creating opportunities in the so-called silver economy that caters to older consumers, the newspaper said.

"It reflects a historical trend in demographic development rather than a short-term phenomenon," Global Times quoted one researcher as saying.

The demographic shift is "symbolic" and could suggest more public spending will move from families and schools to pensions and healthcare, said Professor Stuart Gietel-Basten from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

It may also pose a challenge to the country's ambitions, as it could limit its economic growth as well as people's spending power, said National University of Singapore sociology lecturer Mu Zheng.

China's ageing population has been driven by a mix of factors, including rapid urbanisation and the effects of the controversial one-child policy, which was in place from 1980 to the end of 2015.

The strategy, designed to keep China's rapid population growth under control, is estimated by the country's government to have prevented about 400 million births since it began, though this number has been contested.

The policy played a key role in shrinking the population and means there are fewer younger people to support a growing number of elderly relatives, Mu said.

But despite easing restrictions on the size of families, Beijing has struggled to persuade couples to have more children, with birth rates hitting historic lows.

Other contributing factors include changing gender roles, rising living costs and higher education levels that have put pressure on fertility rates, Mu said.

Beijing made further support for older people a part of the measures in its five-year economic blueprint that was announced earlier this year.

Financial help for pensioners has been a growing part of Chinese government spending. More than 53 million elderly people were receiving senior citizen allowances and subsidies by the end of 2025, according to official figures.

The Global Times noted that many people entering old age who were born between the 1950s and the 1970s have generally higher incomes compared to previous generations, stronger purchasing power and are healthier.

The dependency ratio is widely-used to measure ageing populations but it has also been questioned by some experts who argue that its scope is too limited.

Gietel-Basten said the use of the statistics risks "taking agency away" from older people - many of whom he says have been misrepresented as dependants.

It also does not take into account improvements to healthcare, he added.

India's largest share sale could end cheap mobile internet for millions

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw78pe7vlej5o, 6 days ago

India's biggest telecom giant, the Meta and Google-backed Jio Platforms, is set to make its stock market debut on Wednesday.

Despite a bruising spell for Indian markets, its historic $3.2bn initial public offering (IPO) - the country's largest ever - has drawn overwhelming demand from top global fund managers, domestic institutions and mom-and-pop retail investors.

Bids outstripped the shares on offer within hours of subscriptions opening on 21 October.

Owned by Asia's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, Jio is one of India's most consequential companies, with half a billion people subscribing to its cheap mobile data. But its meteoric rise has also been dogged by controversy.

The company burst onto India's crowded telecom scene in 2016, offering throwaway tariffs that got millions of Indians hooked to the internet.

But its launch led to a huge disruption in the telecom sector. A market once crowded with 17 operators shrunk to an oligopoly of just three, with critics accusing the deep-pocketed company of waging a price war that pushed rivals out of business.

More recently, Elon Musk criticised Ambani, calling him the "real boss of India", suggesting that Jio was trying to thwart Starlink's entry into India. Reliance dismissed the allegations saying it welcomed competition ‌from Musk.

For all the scrutiny it has faced over the last decade, Jio's discounted data plans have been a bedrock of India's digital revolution, spawning a huge digital economy and democratising online payments, food delivery and e-commerce in Asia's third-biggest economy.

Within three years of its launch, customer data usage rose fifty-fold and data prices crashed.

This aggressive discounting helped Jio rapidly amass some 553 million mobile subscribers by 2026. It also cemented its dominance in other segments, capturing 50% of the wireless broadband market and more than 40% of fixed broadband.

Jio also carries 60% of India's wireless data traffic and boasts of the largest 5G subscriber base outside China, according to brokerage Emkay Global, which has described the company as the "digital engine of India".

But analysts say its stock market debut - which will see its promoters dilute their shareholding by about 3% - could mark a turning point in Jio's pricing strategy, potentially bringing an end to years of ultra-cheap tariffs.

"The era of Jio using cheap tariffs as a market-share weapon is drawing to a close," said Nitya Shah, co-founder of KamayaKya Wealth Management.

"A listed Jio must answer to minority shareholders… which structurally reduces its incentive to keep pricing suppressed."

Jio's future growth will no longer be driven primarily by adding subscribers through discounted plans. Instead, it will depend on "earning more per subscriber - through the migration to 5G, successive tariff revisions, and the extension of fixed wireless broadband into homes fibre has never reached", brokerage company Motilal Oswal said in a note.

The listing could also pave the way for Jio's competitors to raise prices, as fears of being undercut by a cheaper rival begin to recede.

"The biggest beneficiary of this shift could be Vodafone Idea," says Shah. "It is a moment the sector's weakest balance sheet gets its strongest tailwind".

For Indian consumers, any further increases would come on the heels of an industry-wide tariff hike a few years ago. Analysts say another round of price rises could trigger a fresh churn in the market as price-sensitive customers switch to the cheapest plans available.

While consumers may have to brace for higher bills, Jio's IPO offers investors a bet on India's seemingly insatiable appetite for data - and the growing ecosystem of digital services the company offers across entertainment, cloud computing, gaming and financial services.

India has emerged as the second-largest consumer of mobile data in the world, driven by lower tariffs and rising penetration of smartphones.

Jio's monthly data use per customer has climbed from 28.7 GB in 2024 to 42.3 GB in 2026 - up by 52% in two years. As per some estimates, usage is expected to surge further to 65GB by the end of this decade as disposable incomes rise.

All of this will give a tailwind for Jio to drive long-term growth in average revenue per user.

"Penetration of most digital services remains well below China and the US, which leaves significant headroom [for growth]," according to Emkay Global.

The listing is also likely to enhance transparency and provide investors with a "clearer market valuation" for the company, according to Moody's rating agency, as Jio is currently part of Reliance Industries, which has businesses spanning oil refining and retail.

But as much as its central and growing role in India's economy has excited investors, the buzz about the IPO also comes from the fact that this is the first share sale from the Reliance conglomerate in over two decades.

The company - which started as a small spice and polyester yarn trading venture in 1958 before expanding into textiles, petrochemicals, refining and eventually to retail, telecom and digital services - is known for its track record of long-term wealth creation, and enjoys legendary status among mom-and-pop investors.

Dhirubhai Ambani, the founder of the Reliance empire, is said to have played a foundational role in popularising equity investing and taking it beyond the preserve of traders and wealthy families in the 1980s and 90s.

In its early years, Reliance built a vast base of individual shareholders by turning its annual general meetings into grand spectacles of big announcements, dividend payouts and celebrations of public share ownership. Over time, this helped forge a fiercely loyal investor base, many of whom developed a deep emotional bond with the company.

And while Reliance Industries' stock has fallen nearly 20% over the past year, its longer-term track record continues to inspire confidence.

"The company has given average annualised returns of around 30% consistently for thirty years," Kranthi Bathini of Mumbai-based WealthMills Securities told the BBC.

"That's why there's anticipation that the same magic can be replicated with the Jio IPO."

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China's big political meeting could see Xi 'tighten discipline' in party

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6n8djd1078ro, 7 days ago

A major political gathering is under way in the Chinese capital, with a closed-door meeting of senior figures that could shape the look of the ruling Communist Party in the years to come.

The Fifth Plenum brings together around 300 members of the Central Committee and state media said it would pave the way for a "tightening of discipline" within the Party's ranks.

The four-day session that started on Monday will give Xi Jinping an opportunity to further consolidate his grip on power following recent purges.

The normally annual plenums are highly secretive, but a summary of decisions and a more detailed document will be made public after.

What is a plenum?

They are essentially closed door meetings of the Party's central committee that happen at least once a year.

There are usually seven plenums during each five-year Central Committee term and they are watched from afar because they are meant to signal the leadership's priorities.

The timing for this year's gathering is important because it is a year away from the next Party Congress, where a new set of priorities is set up and a new central committee appointed.

Officially, the Central Committee selects the Party's top leadership but the real processes leading to the selection are kept secret within the Party elite.

The next Party Congress will almost certainly reappoint Xi as the country's leader, following the abolition of term limits.

What is on the agenda this year?

Past plenum sessions have been used to declare Xi as "the core" of the Party, abolish term limits which cleared the way for him to remain in power indefinitely, and elevate his personal philosophy – branded as "Xi Jinping Thought" – to the same level as Chairman Mao.

This year's plenum is an opportunity for Xi to dictate strategy in the run up to the Congress, ensuring that views are aligned and delegates loyal.

Even the location of the meeting, which will wrap up on Thursday, has not been announced. Past plenums have been held inside Beijing's Jingxi Hotel.

According to a readout from the powerful 21-member Politburo this September, the plenum will adopt a decision on "several major issues persistently advancing the comprehensive strict governance of the Party", which is being read as a way to further ensure obedience and effectiveness from distant party officials.

This means it would also be a time of nervousness for delegates as they look around the room with its "empty chairs" following the scale of recent purges within the Party.

Allegations of corruption, even "moral corruption", have seen large swathes of senior figures culled.

"Moral corruption" has been seen by experts as a way of cracking down on perceived disloyalty to Xi because overall disloyalty to the Party can be interpreted as a breach of "morality".

The Asia Society Policy Institute has estimated that of 44 military members appointed to the Central Committee in 2022 only two have not been taken down.

The all-powerful seven-man Central Military Commission, which runs the armed forces in China, has also been whittled down to only two people, Xi Jinping and one other general.

This plenum is an opportunity for him to appoint new officers to this body.

Human rights lawyer couple sentenced to 10 years' prison in Pakistan

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crq5nplyvlg8o, 3 days ago

A Pakistani anti-terrorism court has sentenced human rights lawyer Imaan Mazari and her husband Hadi Ali Chattha to 10 years in prison, over an alleged security breach during a cricket tour in 2024.

The couple were accused of removing road barriers and obstructing police officers in Islamabad - charges that both have denied.

Mazari and Chattha were previously sentenced to up to 17 years in prison for social media posts criticising the military.

Pakistan's Supreme Court had suspended those sentences in August, but police re-arrested the couple before they could be released. They have been imprisoned in Rawalpindi's Adiala Jail for the past several months.

This latest case concerns an incident on 25 October 2024, when England's cricket team was touring Pakistan.

Prosecutors accused Mazari and Chattha of removing barriers from a road designated for the team's security convoy and obstructing police officers at Zero Point, a major cloverleaf road junction in Islamabad.

They were each sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Anti-Terrorism Act, as well as additional one-year and two-year terms for obstructing and using force against public servants. All sentences will run concurrently.

The court also fined each of them 200,000 Pakistani Rupees (£541:$723).

In statements recorded during the trial, the couple described themselves as "prisoners of conscience" who had faced state persecution.

"I am being punished for not only supporting my wife's work and activism, but for choosing this path of resisting injustice as our life journey together," Chatta said in his statement to Dawn News.

The couple had earlier said that they were "being made an example to further cement the chilling effect against those who stand (or want to stand) against tyranny, oppression, and injustice".

Amnesty International has criticised the proceedings, saying the couple were denied an open and fair trial.

"These convictions are an indictment of Pakistan's justice system." said Yasmine Ahmed, Amnesty International's Senior Director for Regional Human Rights Impact.

"Imaan and Hadi are being targeted solely because of their refusal to stop their fearless human rights work and for exercising their right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly."

The organisation also raised concerns that the trial had been moved inside the prison, where Mazari and Chattha were kept behind a cage-like structure during hearings.

The couple have faced several criminal cases in recent months.

They have been in custody since 23 January, when they were arrested in a separate case involving an alleged altercation outside the Islamabad High Court. A day later, they were sentenced to up to 17 years in prison under Pakistan's Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act over social media posts critical of the military.

Pakistan's Supreme Court suspended those sentences and granted them bail on 17 September - but they were arrested again the same day in connection with a separate case over a protest in March 2025, in which they were accused of chanting "anti-government slogans" and "blocking roads".

Mazari and Chattha are prominent human rights lawyers who have represented activists, journalists and marginalised communities subjected to enforced disappearances.

Mazari's mother, Shireen Mazari, is a former human rights minister who served in the government of former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan.

The couple's convictions have long drawn criticism from international human rights organisations, which have raised concerns about the treatment of lawyers and activists in Pakistan.

Disbelief as Tasmanian Tiger head found under bed

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm4g1p899p54o, 5 days ago

The "most important item" ever to be sold at an auction house is about to go under the hammer after being found under a bed, an auctioneer has said

A newly discovered head of a thylacine, also known as a Tasmanian Tiger, was dug out from the owner's storage after they saw a similar specimen make the news in August.

Nicknamed Trevor, the new specimen is "only the third known taxidermy Thylacine head in existence" and could sell for up to £50,000, according to Bristol auction house Auctioneum.

Auctioneer Andrew Stowe said: "Hands down, it's the most important item we've ever sold. When I unwrapped it, I couldn't believe it."

The thylacine head is due to go under the hammer in Bath on 26 November, with an estimate of £30,000 to £50,000.

The thylacine was a wolf-like carnivorous marsupial, about the size of a large dog, which once roamed the forests of Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania. Hunted to extinction, the last known Tasmanian tiger died in Hobart zoo in 1936.

In the summer, a Victorian taxidermy head, mistakenly thought to be a fox head, sold for tens of thousands after eagle-eyed bidders recognised it as the head of an extinct thylacine.

Stowe said the find made international news.

"We thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment. To have unearthed another is extraordinary," he said.

"Scientists, academics, and collectors dedicate their lives to finding these rare specimens - to have two pass through our hands in a matter of weeks is nothing short of phenomenal."

It is thought the specimen was shot by a farmer in Sheffield, Tasmania, at the beginning of the 1900s and brought to the UK in 1905.

"Uncovering two-thirds of all known thylacine heads is extraordinary,' said Stowe.

"We've sold some incredible pieces over the years, but this goes way beyond another rare item."

The specimen has officially been added to the International Thylacine Specimen Database (ITSD).

Dr Stephen Sleightholme, from the ITSD, said these remains "provide an essential record of a species lost to extinction".

"Thylacine remains are exceptionally rare and rank among the most valuable zoological specimens," he said.

"The [database] is helping to establish a clearer picture of what survives and supporting the ongoing study of this remarkable marsupial predator."

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Mushroom murderer fails to overturn convictions in Australian court challenge

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck8dz8j5n993o, 3 days ago

Australia's mushroom killer has failed to overturn her murder convictions on appeal, with the court also ruling that she never be released from prison.

Erin Patterson, 52, was found guilty of murdering three relatives and attempting to kill another when she served them a toxic mushroom-laced meal in 2023. Her life sentence included a non-parole period of 33 years.

In Victoria's Court of Appeal on Friday, three judges threw out her appeal against her convictions and agreed with the prosecution that her sentence was inadequate, as it allowed for the possibility of freedom.

Patterson's crimes were "extraordinarily cold and calculated" and had to be "denounced in the strongest terms," they said.

"We have concluded that the case involved such shocking criminality that it is inappropriate to fix a non-parole period," Justice Stephen McLeish told the court, on the panel's behalf.

After a high-profile trial last year, a jury found Patterson guilty of murdering her in-laws, Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail's sister Heather Wilkinson, by serving them individual portions of beef Wellington containing death cap mushrooms.

Patterson was also found guilty of the attempted murder of Heather's husband Ian Wilkinson, a local pastor, who also ate the toxic lunch at Patterson's home in rural Victoria.

He survived after spending weeks in hospital and has ongoing health issues due to the poisoning.

Simon Patterson, the host's estranged husband, was meant to attend the lunch but cancelled at the last minute, in part due to his belief that his wife had repeatedly tried to poison him over several years.

Patterson was sentenced last September, with the trial judge allowing a non-parole period of 33 years due to the "harsh prison conditions" she would likely face.

She promptly launched an appeal against her convictions, with her legal team in August arguing seven grounds for her appeal.

They claimed a hotel booking mishap - which saw the jury stay in the same place as the prosecution, a key police witness and the media - was "catastrophic" and undermined the integrity of her trial.

They also argued certain pieces of evidence shown to the jury were irrelevant and prejudicial - such as cell tower data suggesting Patterson visited areas where death cap mushrooms might be found and Facebook posts where she complained about her in-laws.

Meanwhile, the judge wrongly blocked other evidence that would have demonstrated the mother-of-two's long-time hobby of mushroom foraging, they said.

The defence team also asserted that the prosecution's five-day cross-examination of Patterson was "unfair and oppressive", and that the Crown was inconsistent in its arguments about a motive.

On Friday, the appeal judges dismissed all seven grounds.

Patterson has 28 days to decide if she will seek to convince the High Court of Australia to hear another appeal over the case.

'I made the wrong decision,' Hyrox athlete who soiled herself in race tells BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6gr8l15k744o, 3 days ago

An Australian athlete has admitted making the wrong decision and putting others at risk by continuing to race after soiling herself during an endurance sports event.

Speaking exclusively to the BBC ahead of her return to the sport, Joanna Wietrzyk suggested her determination to win the Hyrox race in Beijing in September had clouded her judgement: "It was my decision to continue racing so I take full responsibility for that."

Challenged over why she carried on, she said: "I didn't really think about those around me… the decision that I made in hindsight was the wrong decision and I'm truly sorry for everyone that I did affect."

The 24-year-old said that the experience and subsequent backlash was "traumatic". She also said she had considered walking away from the sport, in which she holds a world record.

Hyrox sees participants alternate between running a kilometre and doing fitness exercises, including a sled push, burpee jumps, indoor rowing, and lunges while carrying a sandbag.

The competition has exploded in popularity since it was founded in 2017 in Hamburg, in northern Germany, and is now held across the world.

Roughly halfway through her event last month, Wietrzyk suffered a bout of diarrhoea. Images of faecal matter on parts of her body were then shared widely online.

Asked whether officials should have stopped her, she said no-one encouraged her to do so at the time.

Hyrox's co-founder, Moritz Fürste, has issued an apology saying it had been a mistake not to react immediately during the race.

New rules have now been introduced giving race directors the power to remove athletes if their vomit, urine or faeces pose a risk of contamination or threaten the welfare of themselves or others in a race that is primarily held indoors using shared equipment.

Although initially defiant in a now-deleted Instagram post, Wietrzyk apologised in the week after the Beijing event and said she would forfeit the win and retroactively withdraw from the race.

Due to compete in Hamburg on Friday, she said she was "nervous" about her return and hoped that the high-profile incident would not define her.

"I don't want it to become my identity," she said.

In her first interview since Beijing, Wietrzyk said she had suffered a bacterial infection from food poisoning but had gone into the race "feeling fresh, feeling really, really good".

"It was a very sudden experience," she told the BBC.

"It wasn't until about halfway through the race where everything did transpire... In that moment, right then and there, as a very competitive person… and an elite athlete that I am, my only focus is on racing.

"Obviously I did put other people at risk," she admitted.

Hyrox China has since reportedly refunded some competitors their entry fees.

Wietrzyk also said she regretted an initial social media post published after the race which included the words "Go hard or go home" and "a win is a win". She said she had been in "flight or fight mode" as she sought hospital treatment.

"I didn't really account for what the public would have seen that situation as."

Challenged over whether her apology could be seen as an effort at damage limitation, or too late, she said that she hadn't expected so much exposure from the incident.

"I needed those days to reflect on it and process it."

Speaking about the mentality of elite athletes, she said: "They're so hyper-vigilant on winning and doing the best that they can, putting their training to good use and showcasing their fitness to the world."

After reflecting over the past weeks, she said: "There is more to life… than just racing and just winning."

After Wietrzyk's identity was shared online, Hyrox said anyone sending abuse or threats to the athlete would be banned from future events.

Speaking about the comments and photo shares online Joanna Wietrzyk said there had both been support, to make sure she was OK, but that it had also shown social media can be a very "toxic place".

Wietrzyk told the BBC that it had been a "mentally and emotionally taxing period" and she had not expected the global scrutiny, saying her family had also received threats.

"[It] was very eye-opening for me to see the effect of social media nowadays, especially from someone who's 24, just out there racing.

"Yes, I did make the wrong decision but I don't believe I should have received such backlash and such scrutiny online… At the end of the day I'm only human."

Wietrzyk said had been trying to stay offline and had sought to "isolate herself from the world" for a time: "I can't do that forever."

"I still have so much more I can achieve in this sport so I think, for me, my mental resilience is the key here where I can inspire others through what I've been through."

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'Targeted' attack on much-loved MP leaves Australian town heartbroken

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmgr8q88r5eqo, 12 days ago

Wangaratta has been thrust into an unwelcome spotlight this week. Residents in this rural Victorian town are used to catering to tourists passing through on their way to regional wineries, or music lovers visiting its annual jazz and blues festival.

Instead, locals are fielding endless questions about their MP - and having to explain to strangers what it all means for the town's nearly 30,000 people.

They are clearly in shock about what police say was a targeted and deliberate attack on Helen Haines on Monday afternoon, when she was struck by a car just outside her office.

"People are simply dumbfounded and finding it very hard to fathom the scale of this tragedy," Australia's Governor-General Sam Mostyn, who represents King Charles, said at a press conference on Wednesday.

The independent federal MP had to have both legs amputated after she was airlifted to Melbourne. But the "two most important parts of Helen", her heart and her mind, were in "good shape", her husband Phil Haines said.

The MP isn't a divisive figure, locals tell the BBC, and no one can understand why she was allegedly targeted.

"Everyone knows Helen," says Jane Hill, who owns a giftware shop a few hundred metres down the town's main street from where Haines was hit.

"She is a such a good person in our community. She'd go to everything - celebrations, funerals, she's one of those genuinely kind people - and so are her family."

Local man Brendan Nugent, whose father has been good friends with Haines for decades, faces at least three charges over the alleged attack including intentionally causing harm and appeared in court on Wednesday. Police say they are considering further charges, including attempted murder.

MP 'thanked everyone' as she lay injured

First elected to parliament in 2019, Haines is best known for her years-long efforts to establish a national anti-corruption commission.

She was spurred on by a series of major political scandals which, in her words, saw "public money spent for political gain", disproportionate spending on "shiny infrastructure projects" in marginal seats and decisions benefitting big donors over ordinary people.

The commission finally opened in 2023 under Anthony Albanese's Labor government.

Haines has also helped to secure funds for housebuilding, railway improvements and health infrastructure in her region, which she argues has long been sidelined by policies favouring cities.

On a spring afternoon in Wangaratta, nobody seemed to have a bad word to say about the former nurse and midwife turned politician.

Local Mayor Irene Grant described her as "warm", "cheerful" and "committed", and pointed to her record on climate action and Indigenous rights.

In a police update on Wednesday, Victoria Police Commissioner Mike Bush said she'd given "wonderful support" to local police when two officers were shot dead in the nearby town of Porepunkah last year.

Bystanders who came to Haines' aid recalled how she thanked them even as she lay severely injured.

"It was incredible," Jacklyn Black told Nine Network's Today show. "We were having conversations, she was telling me about her grandkids."

"To be in that situation and be as calm as she could be in the moment, but also thankful to the aid that the community had given her... I could [not] speak any more highly of her in a moment like that," Cody Lepoidevin added.

"She just thanked everyone."

There's a large print-out of Helen Haines plastered onto the window of her office - anyone delivering flowers for her gets a big smile back as they look up and walk away.

Across the road on Tuesday, a man waved an Australian flag. On his T-shirt were the words "Wangaratta - this is not us!!"

It's clear that many feel that way in this friendly community where people look out for each other.

Next door to Haines' office is RickyChops barbershop, owned by Ricky Jefferies. When he heard the chaos unfolding outside, he rushed to help, pinning down the suspect.

"I just leant over him and once he was on the ground and he was no longer a threat, I just stood with him, and I told him that he can't leave," he explained after the incident.

"I don't think I'm a hero. I think that I just was a person who had an opportunity to intervene in a safe-ish sort of way."

Some clearly disagree with Ricky. By Tuesday afternoon, he too had received a bouquet of flowers tied to his shop's door, and a small balloon with the words "thank you".

Down the road at the Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral, a vigil was held, attended by a couple of hundred people lining up to light a candle for Haines.

Some hugged the clergy, while others wore campaign T-shirts carrying the words "Team Helen Haines".

Her husband Phil said he had received "thousands upon thousands" of messages of love and support.

"I can only say how much of a difference that makes to all of us," he said. "Helen's road to recovery will be long and difficult, but we know she is a fighter."

"Whether you vote for her or not, she seems to have the community at heart so that's all you can really ask for; a politician that represents your community," said Austin Longfield who lives in nearby Albury.

"It's just something that you wouldn't expect in our community," he added. "You see it in other countries and it's just something that I didn't comprehend could happen here."

With additional reporting by Simon Atkinson

'Our worst nightmare': Threats to Australian politicians were rising before MP hit by car

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq398rk4p3exo, 13 days ago

As increasingly frequent acts of violence against politicians have shocked the globe in recent years, Australia has watched on with a contradictory feeling: that attacks like that could not happen here, and that it was only a matter of time until they did.

Australians will tell you this is a largely peaceful society with a comparatively civil public discourse. Violence targeting politicians has been rare, the bungled assassination of Labor leader Arthur Calwell in 1966 now a distant and fleeting memory.

But MPs and public figures – backed by experts – have been warning of a volcano of threats against them as social cohesion cracks, polarisation intensifies and the tone of debate grows hotter.

And on Monday, their worst fears appear to have been realised.

Independent MP Helen Haines was struck by a car and severely injured outside her office in the regional Victorian town of Wangaratta.

Police say a 43-year-old man was arrested at the scene, and a knife seized, but they have not said Haines was hit deliberately.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, however, swiftly described the incident as an apparent attack.

He was briefed by federal police – whose counter-terror squad is helping state officers investigate – and told the national broadcaster: "This wasn't an accident. There was a deliberate act, it would appear."

Witnesses saw the suspect do a U-turn before striking the MP and then reversing to ram her again, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has said.

Though he stressed no motive had been confirmed, Albanese has been emotional when he has spoken about the growing fear amongst MPs that they would end up targets.

Earlier this year Albanese himself was evacuated from his official residence over a bomb threat. As of August, about 20 cases in which people were accused of making violent threats against him were winding their way through courts around the country.

In recent years, politicians here have been mailed bullets. Female MPs – and in some cases their children – have been threatened with sexual violence. A Jewish MP's office has been firebombed, a Sydney mayor's car has been torched and countless other politicians have had their workplaces vandalised.

Just last week Small Business Minister Anne Aly said she had received a wave of death threats after a politician from the opposition said she should be "shamed and stoned in the square" over a tax policy.

According to government statistics, there were 1,067 reports of "harassing and threatening behaviour" against "high office holders" in the year to June: an increase on last year.

"We tend to bury our head in the sand and say, 'Not here', but this has been happening now for well over a decade," Josh Roose, a Deakin University Professor on violent extremism, tells the BBC.

Socioeconomic strain, growing mental health problems in the community, "grifters" who benefit politically or financially from whipping up further discontent, and a "carcinogenic" online environment are drivers of the trend, he says, which has dramatically escalated since the pandemic.

But the political class must also take responsibility for their role, he adds.

"We've seen a willingness to cross previously sacred terrain - you know, not targeting individuals, not targeting their families - but we now see that this is part and parcel of Australian political life.

"This is occurring at both ends of the political spectrum."

And experts like him warn it is not just politicians who are vulnerable: it is members of the media, academics, court officials and other public figures too.

Mike Burgess, the head of Australia's domestic spy agency Asio, has warned for years that the spectre of political violence is looming in Australia.

"Just as climate change increases the likelihood of extreme weather but does not forecast specific storms, politically motivated violence, including acts of terrorism, is more likely even though we cannot predict a specific attack," he said in his annual threat assessment for 2026.

And the federal police have said it is not just ideology motivating cases in recent times. "Grievance" is radicalising people.

"They're feeling distanced, they're feeling alone, they're looking for something to attach to, to give them meaning and purpose," Commissioner Krissy Barrett told the ABC earlier this month.

In the wake of the attack, MPs with a range of political backgrounds have said the climate has them living in fear: wearing disguises in public, locking their office doors, and scanning every crowd for potential threats.

Women in politics are particularly scared, said Victorian state MP Georgie Purcell, who shares part of her electorate with Haines.

"Being a woman in politics changes the way you move through the world. We consider where we park our cars, the route we drive home, if we hold public events," she said in a statement.

"For many of us, the news coming out of Wangaratta… is our worst nightmare".

Coalition Senator James Paterson told News24: "I'd like to say that I was surprised… but I'm not at all surprised."

There have been frustrated rumblings in Canberra from some MPs who say security arrangements have not changed to match the threat and – if a political motivation for this incident is confirmed – one of the greatest tenets of the nation's political culture could now be at risk.

It is not abnormal for you to run into your local member at the shops, or chat to them at the footy, and many open up their offices for constituents who want to raise concerns or share ideas.

Haines is particularly renowned and respected for that, Albanese said on Monday night.

"Here in Australia, it is a good thing that politicians are able to go about their community and engage with people," he said.

"I don't want to see a political system in which you can't have conversations with people at the supermarket, in the street, at street meetings, public forums – that's an important part of our democracy."

Australian sunscreen brands face stricter rules after safety scandal

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm89zkdq1dkno, 6 days ago

Australian sunscreen manufacturers will be subject to stricter rules in the wake of a safety scandal that saw popular brands pulled off shelves.

The reforms, announced by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) on Tuesday, include stronger testing and quality requirements for specific ingredients.

This comes after a bombshell report last year by consumer advocacy group Choice which found that some popular sunscreens did not provide the level of protection their manufacturers claimed.

The new proposed regulations are "about making SPF claims more reliable" and giving the agency "faster access to evidence when concerns arise", Robyn Langham, the TGA's chief medical adviser, tells the BBC.

"Australians expect the SPF on the label to be backed by robust evidence," she said in a statement over email.

"These proposed reforms put that expectation at the centre of sunscreen regulation, with stronger testing requirements for the finished product consumers buy and repeat testing throughout its time on the market."

Under the new regulations proposed by the TGA, cosmetic sunscreen brands will also be limited in the skin protection factor (SPF) claims they can make.

This is to ensure "clear distinction for consumers" between sunscreens that are mainly made for UV protection and cosmetic products where UV protection is a secondary function.

Suppliers would also be required to provide their SPF testing data to the TGA when they list a sunscreen, and keep periodically testing the product throughout its shelf life.

Under current regulations, it's not mandatory for sunscreen manufacturers to provide testing data to the TGA unless requested.

The TGA said the reforms would be "implemented in stages, with further consultation where required".

The Choice report, published in June 2025, found that 16 of 20 tested sunscreens - including several premium, expensive brands - failed to live up to their advertised SPF rating.

One product, Ultra Violette's Lean Screen Skinscreen, which was voluntarily recalled last year, was marketed as having an SPF of 50+ but was found to offer only SPF 4.

The scandal sparked massive backlash in Australia, which has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world.

More than a dozen products were pulled from shelves or had their sales suspended as a result of the scandal.

The TGA proposed sweeping reforms to the sunscreen industry earlier this year, which included plans to make sunscreen labelling simpler and more oversight at testing labs.

Its statement on Tuesday said that changes to labelling would be made after further review and consultation.

Choice welcomed the reforms, saying in a statement on Tuesday that it was "pleased to see" the stricter rules proposed by the TGA.

However, the group pointed out that the TGA has not proposed to "routinely monitor and evaluate test results".

Choice also argued that that sunscreen test results should not be provided only to the TGA - as proposed by the regulator - but rather made publicly available and routinely monitored, "in the interest of transparency and public safety".

Additional reporting by Tiffanie Turnbull

Meghan to co-host Junior MasterChef Australia

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crgqwg3ll1v1o, 6 days ago

The Duchess of Sussex has been confirmed as a co-host of the new season of Junior MasterChef Australia.

Meghan will join the 2027 series as a "special guest" with fellow host Poh Ling Yeow, according to Australia's Channel 10.

The duchess said she "can't wait" to take part in the programme after an appearance as a guest judge on MasterChef Australia last year. It was the show's largest Sunday audience since 2023, according to the statement from Paramount ANZ.

The announcement comes as Meghan faces increased scrutiny due to her father Thomas Markle being accused of child sexual abuse. He denies the allegations.

The BBC understands Meghan broke contact with her father last year, telling him she and authorities knew he had abused young girls.

Markle has strongly rejected the accusations as "lies" which are being used to destroy his reputation.

Meghan's return to Australia follows a four-day tour of the country she and Prince Harry undertook in April.

Meghan's MasterChef debut was announced on the second day of the tour, a Wednesday on which the duchess had been notably absent from public-facing appearances. That evening, it was revealed she had been filming an episode of the programme.

It is understood she was not paid for her appearance. Australia's Network 10, which airs the series as part of Paramount ANZ, did not respond to a question from the BBC about whether Meghan would be paid for co-hosting the Junior MasterChef season.

"I love cooking with my own kids, so seeing what these young stars create in the kitchen is going to be a lot of fun," Meghan said in a statement.

In August, the Sussexes announced they were moving back to the UK from California. The couple left the UK and stepped back from their royal duties in early 2020, before settling in California in March that year.

They embarked on media careers which included a high-profile interview with Oprah Winfrey and a deal with Netflix and Spotify.

Meghan's lifestyle and cookery show on Netflix, With Love, Meghan, ran for two series and a Christmas special but did not perform well with audiences.

She also launched lifestyle brand As Ever, which includes a food range, but in March it ended its partnership with the streaming platform.

Last year her trademark was registered in more than a dozen product categories in Australia, including cookware and table linen.

Australian murderer loses bid to eat Vegemite in prison

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvwy7wz9x12go, 7 days ago

A convicted murderer serving a life sentence in Australia has lost his bid to overturn a ban on prisoners consuming Vegemite - the salty yeast-based spread that has become a national symbol.

Andre McKechnie argued that the ban, in place since 2006, denied him the right to "enjoy his culture as an Australian".

Authorities in the state of Victoria say inmates may use the strong-smelling paste to disguise contraband substances or to brew alcohol behind bars.

And on Monday, a Supreme Court judge rejected McKechnie's appeal, saying the prisoner's "cultural rights are limited primarily by the fact he has been sentenced to a term of imprisonment".

In his lawsuit against Victoria's Department of Justice and Corrections, the agency which manages the state's prisons, McKechnie, 54, said the ban on the spread breached law requiring prisons to provide food that allowed inmates to maintain their health and well-being but the judge said that had not been proven.

McKechnie was handed a life sentence for stabbing a property developer to death in Queensland in the 1990s. He served part of his sentence in Queensland before being transferred to Victoria.

During the hearing, the court heard evidence from Corrections Victoria that the smell of Vegemite can distract sniffer dogs trying to detect drugs being brought into prison.

The product is also banned in jails in Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania.

A much-loved breakfast spread for some, Vegemite has acquired controversial accolades since it first hit shop shelves in Australia in 1923.

The thick, brown spread was invented in the Victorian capital of Melbourne more than a century ago as an alternative to the British spread Marmite.

It sparked an international dispute in April last year when an Australian cafe owner in Canada was told to remove jars of the condiment from his shelves as it did not comply with local health regulations.

Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese intervened in the row, saying it was "rather odd" that Canada allowed the sale of Vegemite's "rubbish" rival product Marmite. The cafe owner was later allowed to continue selling the spread.

How the downfall of Serbia's Vučiċ mirrored that of Hungary's Orbán

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c893z699q401o, yesterday

When they met in northern Serbia last November, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučiċ and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán could hardly have guessed they would both be out of power within a year.

Both were ousted by popular movements - Orbán fell first, in April, defeated by Péter Magyar's Tisza party. Then last Sunday a student movement less than two years old won Serbia's parliamentary elections by a landslide.

The Tisza party in Hungary and the Student List in Serbia look very different - Tisza is centred on the personality and energy of its leader, while the students in Serbia insist they have no leadership.

But the huge turnout - 79% in Hungary and 69% in Serbia, was driven by tech-savvy young people in both countries. They used AI tools to crunch numbers, identify threats to the vote, and mobilise tens of thousands of election monitors to prevent intimidation and electoral fraud by the governing parties.

Mobilisation of voters, and the role of election monitors, played a big role in the opposition victory in both countries.

Last weekend, the DE civic action group in Hungary sent 70 election monitors to Serbia, to work with students' movement representatives, visiting polling stations in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina.

During the summer, even before the election was called, they held workshops to share their experience and methods from the Hungarian election with the Serbian students.

A key technique was to identify "infected" polling districts in advance - places where the surprisingly high number of votes for the governing party at previous elections suggested that voter intimidation or "chain voting" techniques were used.

"From around 16:00 on election day, we noticed groups of masked hooligans - Vučiċ supporters - gathering near voting stations," Péter Klemm, a student activist from Subotica, told the BBC. "So we sent mobile teams, and started filming everything."

Combined with the "stationary" monitors already in place, 20 to 30 volunteers at each threatened polling station acted as a strong deterrent, he believes, and prevented intimidation or fraud.

Orbán in Hungary, Vučiċ in Serbia, both looked invincible. Both were powerful leaders, in office for 16 and 14 years, who had taken over state institutions and established business empires overlapping the two countries.

Orban chose cheese, Vučiċ meat, when they sat down to a quick lunch of traditional burek pastries at a small, popular town centre bakery in Subotica almost a year ago.

They continued to a local winery, to talk about oil and other business deals - the planned Hungarian purchase of a controlling stake in Serbia's NIS oil company. The two nationalist leaders found much in common, in business and politics, not least their friendship with Vladimir Putin in Russia and Chinese President Xi Jinping, and their strong support for Milorad Dodik, the separatist leader of the Bosnian Serbs.

A high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest is being built with Chinese finance and know-how.

The parallels between the fall from power of the two men are extraordinary. Aleksandar Vučiċ admitted defeat at exactly 21:30 on Sunday evening, just as Viktor Orbán did on 12 April. Few observers expected either leader to concede peacefully.

There has been speculation this week that Vučiċ spoke to Orbán twice on Sunday night to ask his advice - once before he conceded, and again at 23:15. And that Orbán convinced his Serbian ally not to use force.

Vučiċ denies that he spoke to Orbán before he made his announcement, but acknowledges the later conversation. Viktor Orbán, contacted by the BBC, declined to comment.

An hour before polls closed in Serbia, masked and hooded vigilantes took up position in central Belgrade. During voting, similar groups were photographed at many polling stations, and blocked by election monitors.

There is another strange numerical similarity. The Student List will have 140 seats in the 250-seat Serbian parliament, the same number Péter Magyar's Tisza party won in the 199-seat Hungarian parliament.

Magyar was the only European leader to ring the students directly to congratulate them that evening - and probably the only one who had their number.

"It is always good to hear that the story of Tisza could provide an inspiration for other nations," the Hungarian prime minister told the BBC.

"The result of the Hungarian election clearly showed us that what we are doing here is right," the head of the Student List, Ilija Srdanoviċ, said on the eve of the vote.

Srdanoviċ was one of those Péter Magyar spoke to that Sunday evening.

Orbán, 63, and Vučiċ, 56, may now both face prosecution for corruption and abuse of power.

The judicial machinery in both countries is similar. Serbia's special prosecution service for organised crime, JTOK, and Hungary's brand new special prosecutors, known as NVVH, have similar powers. They could prove useful to each other.

Hungarian companies close to Orbán were also involved in the Novi Sad railway station construction project. The collapse of the station's canopy on 1 November 2024 - blamed on corruption, as well as negligence - killed 16 people, and acted as the catalyst for the Serbian student movement.

"There was a perception in Europe that the longer the Orbán and Vučiċ regimes stayed in office, the stronger they got," Áron Timar, founder of the DE civic action group in Hungary told the BBC.

"In fact they got weaker. And once society found its voice and rose up, there was no way of stopping it."

Cambridge scientist dies in Spanish train crash

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq5ynzvkn1d8o, today

A University of Cambridge scientist died in the Spanish train disaster which killed at least 69 people, a research institute has confirmed.

Dr Marta Shahbazi was travelling on one of the trains involved in the collision near Urda, south of Madrid, according to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in the city, where she led a group of researchers.

The University of Cambridge lists Dr Shahbazi as an affiliate associate professor.

The Spanish CiMUS institute paid tribute to the "brilliant young researcher" in a social media post.

The expert in cell biology, who runs the Shahbazi Laboratory at the LMB, based on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, was announced as the winner of a Spanish Society for Developmental Biology award for her contributions to the study of early human development.

She was due to be presented with the award during the society's conference in El Rompido, Andalusia, south-west Spain.

The LMB previously confirmed Dr Shahbazi was on one of the trains but said her whereabouts were "unknown".

In a social media post CiMUS, based in Santiago de Compostela said: "The CiMUS community would like to express its support and deepest sympathies to our dear PI María José Alonso, following the death of her niece, Marta Shahbazi, in the railway accident that occurred on 28 October.

"Marta was a brilliant young researcher, group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Affiliate Associate Professor at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge."

The institute said Dr Shahbazi's aunt worked at their centre.

Dr Shahbazi undertook her PhD at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, before joining the University of Cambridge as a post-doctoral fellow and then the LMB in 2020.

The collision happened when a state-operated Renfe high-speed train smashed into the back of a stationary train operated by the Iryo company.

It is one of the worst rail disasters in Europe's modern history, and Spain's worst crash since 2013.

Three days of national mourning were declared in the country.

More than 540 people were on board both trains.

Esther Padilla, spokesperson for the government of Castilla-La Mancha region, said one of the trains - managed by the Iryo company - was carrying 146 passengers plus one baby, while the Renfe-managed train had 397 passengers on board.

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Shops looted as German cost-of-living protests turn violent

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqj34gnd3n30o, today

Rioters looted shops in central Frankfurt late on Saturday as clashes erupted in German cities over the cost of living.

Besides Frankfurt - Germany's financial hub - there were incidents of violence in Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg, with police saying they used water cannon to disperse protesters who were targeting emergency workers with fireworks, stones and bottles.

Thousands joined largely peaceful demonstrations earlier in the day. They were organised by the campaign group Gen Z regelt - meaning "Gen Z takes charge" - to protest against underfunding in schools, the high cost of living, public spending cuts and military service.

The unrest in Germany follows similar youth-led mass protests in France, where more than 320,000 people also demonstrated on Saturday.

On Sunday, Germany's Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt told Bild newspaper that overnight police had prevented "violence like that seen in Paris" in recent weeks and called for "harsh punishments" for rioters and looters.

Overnight, a large section of Frankfurt's main shopping street was closed off by police. A police spokesperson said many arrests were made in the city.

Authorities in Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin reported as many as 18,000 protesters, roughly half of what the organisers had estimated on their website. German media say tens of thousands protested in German cities on Saturday.

Gen Z regelt spokesperson Lina Friedrich said the demonstrations were "to fight for peace and freedom, rather than for war and coercion".

She said: "What matters most to us is better support for the health and education systems. We are against compulsory military service and we are in favour of a fairer distribution of the burden."

On Saturday night Frankfurt police said "violent riots" were occurring in the city centre and that special police units had been deployed.

The windows of several shops had been smashed and molotov cocktails were thrown at emergency services, police said.

Officials said the windows of a gun shop were smashed and that they had seized two weapons after arresting a suspect. People also broke into other shops, stealing items like trainers.

Roman Poseck, interior minister of Hesse state, of which Frankfurt is the biggest city, said that "around 100 clearly identified left-wing extremists" had infiltrated the protest in the city. He added that it was "shameful" how the protests had ended.

"We all have those images from France in our minds - looting, burning houses, burning police vehicles, and attacks on police officers... France must not be held up as a model in this regard."

Police said the situation calmed down overnight into Sunday in the city.

Similar instances took place in other German cities, following largely peaceful demonstrations.

In Cologne, police said officers were attacked near the main train station, with bottles thrown and a bicycle launched.

Cologne's police chief Johannes Hermanns said it was "deeply saddening that young people who wanted to peacefully demonstrate for their future were infiltrated today by extremists who had nothing but violence in mind".

A smaller demonstration in the evening in Berlin - following larger protests in the day - resulted in 27 police officers being injured, and up to 56 people temporarily detained, Berlin police said.

In Hamburg, people dressed in black set off fireworks and set barricades on fire, with public broadcaster NDR reporting that 120 people were arrested.

The protests in Germany took place on the same day as other large-scale demonstrations in Europe.

In France, more than 320,000 people took part in a third consecutive weekend of largely peaceful protests in cities across the country, demanding action on the high cost of living and poor public services, especially in the education sector.

Thousands of police officers were deployed across the country, and officers fired tear gas at demonstrators in some cities.

There were more than 770 arrests across France during the demonstrations on Saturday, roughly half as many as the previous week's protests, the French interior ministry said.

French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said a police officer had been injured by a molotov cocktail and French prosecutors later launched an attempted murder probe.

Police in Paris said several hundred rioters had attacked security forces with projectiles.

French protest organisers, the Gilet Jaune, or Yellow Vests, have said dozens of protesters have been seriously injured during recent demonstrations across the country, with many hurt by "grenades".

Protests also took place in Italy, with some clashes between police and demonstrators in Rome and Turin.

In Portugal, police moved to clear a new tent camp that had been assembled after thousands marched to protest against a rental bill that they argue could worsen a housing crisis in the country, where house prices have more than doubled over the past decade.

Mostly young protesters have recently taken to the streets in a swathe of European nations: France, Belgium, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Serbia and Albania.

While the specific demands vary from country to country, the protesters have largely focused on cost-of-living issues, such as access to housing, the quality of education and cuts to public services.

Ukrainian evacuees reunite with family after years trapped in Russia-occupied city

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqx2818elrnzo, yesterday

There were raw emotional scenes as people evacuated from the devastated Russian-occupied city of Oleshky crossed from Belarus into the Ukrainian region of Chernihiv.

Families cried as they reunited with relatives they had not seen for years, with two sisters running and crying out as they embraced their father.

Some elderly residents were so weak they were carried on stretchers. They had been trapped in the frontline city without food, water and electricity, with many resorting to cooking garden weeds to survive.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked US First Lady Melania Trump for her efforts in brokering a local ceasefire that paved the way for their evacuation on Friday.

Upon their arrival, Dasha and Anya Palii sprinted across the tarmac screaming towards the bus carrying their father Mykhailo.

Their cries and their tears captured the sheer relief of three years of desperate worry, fearing they would never see him again.

Their mother Zhanna clasped Mykhailo's face and stroked his forehead again and again, as if checking he was the same man she had left behind. He promised her, finally, they will now get married.

Tetiana and Volodymyr, an older couple carrying their cat, told the BBC they no longer have a home, after it was burned down in the first year of the war. They have been living in the abandoned house of a neighbour.

They said they instantly took the decision to leave but feared their journey could be disrupted. Now they have to work out where to go next and how to rebuild their lives.

Ukrainian military positions lie just 5km (3.1 miles) from Oleshky, but evacuees first had to travel through Russian-occupied territory to southern Russia, where they flew to Belarus, before finally being driven across Ukraine's northern border on Saturday.

The oldest evacuee was 94 years old, while the youngest was one, according to Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine's human rights ombudsman.

Zelensky said in a post on X that "all of them will receive the assistance they need. It is important that government agencies and all the regional and local authorities involved work effectively and help our people adapt."

Many people bear the scars: the convoy includes as many ambulances as coaches. The impact of years caught between the frontlines is written on the weary faces of many of Oleshky's residents, some hobbling on crutches, others needing wheelchairs.

They have a lot to come to terms with, not least having left the place they call home.

A humanitarian ceasefire took effect across the frontline region of Kherson on Tuesday, providing the first few days of peace in the area in four years, following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Before the war, Oleshky was home to 24,000 people.

Conditions had become so desperate in the city that not only was getting supplies into the city extremely difficult, but escape was highly dangerous because the routes out had been mined and subject to drone attack.

Bridges across the nearby River Dnipro have been destroyed and sources say the riverbank has been mined and is dangerous.

One resident who fled the city three weeks earlier told the BBC he had walked through 24km (15 miles) of minefields to get to safety.

The ceasefire allowed the road out of the city to be cleared of mines and humanitarian aid to be delivered.

Ceasefire measures will remain in place until the end of Sunday 1 November.

Residents had a four-hour window to leave before a convoy of 25 buses, with space for 750 people, left the town on Friday afternoon - along with ambulances for people with limited mobility.

Several hundred people are understood to have decided to stay in the war-torn city, despite widespread devastation and the lack of gas, electricity and running water.

Some of the older generation did not want to leave, one relative told the BBC.

Lubinets said on Friday morning that those who decided to stay "will receive all the necessary humanitarian assistance".

He and his Russian counterpart Yana Lantratova travelled to Oleshky together on Friday, setting off from Armiansk, in the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula.

Lubinets is the first Ukrainian official since the start of the war to visit Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine.

Zelensky praised him and his team for helping move evacuees out to safety.

The Ukrainian president also thanked those who had helped bring attention to the "true humanitarian catastrophe in Ukrainian territory temporarily occupied by Russia".

The ceasefire has required close cooperation between Lubinets and Lantratova, which Lubinets said he carried out in the interests of saving lives.

But some in Ukraine have recoiled at the sight of him standing beside a representative of the Russian occupying power which has killed so many of the city's residents and made life unbearable for the rest.

Russia said on Thursday that it had prepared "dozens of tonnes" of aid for the residents who do not wish to leave, including food, medicine, hygiene products and fuel for generators.

Despite the ceasefire in Oleshky, the war has continued.

Zelensky said that Russia had attacked Ukrainian energy infrastructure, hitting electricity substations, thermal power plants and gas infrastructure.

Ukraine's military said it hit a major Russian producer of missile fuel in the Rostov region.

Negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the US are due to resume ceasefire talks in Abu Dhabi in early November after discussions were suspended earlier this year due to the Iran war.

Additional reporting by George Wright

Police deployed during stand-off over control of top Poland court

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crz9824d5e88o, 2 days ago

Riot police have been deployed at Poland's Constitutional Court amid an escalating stand-off between the government and the court's top judges.

The row pits the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk against his predecessors from the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS).

The police intervention came after Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek said he had requested stripping the court's President Bogdan Święczkowski and Vice-President Bartłomiej Sochański of their immunity from prosecution to bring criminal charges against them.

Tusk has vowed to depoliticise the judiciary, and on Friday defended the move as PiS supporters gathered outside the court premises in Warsaw in protest.

President Karol Nawrocki, who is backed by PiS, has now entered the constitutional court, according to his chief of staff.

Nawrocki cancelled a trip to Senegal mid-air in order to attend to the confrontation in Warsaw. He had been on his way to the Summer Youth Olympic Games in Dakar.

Riot police were deployed to prevent any demonstrators from entering the court building.

In a social media post, the Constitutional Court wrote that the two judges the government wants to prosecute were still the legally appointed senior justices of the court.

"All persons participating in these actions are committing the crime of a coup d'etat," it said.

In a social media post, Tusk wrote: "Restoring the rule of law is our duty. After years of Law and Justice's lawlessness, this is a difficult, sometimes painful process that requires decisive action. There is no other way."

The PiS-led government took office in 2015 and moved swiftly to appoint judges to the court to gain a majority there because the court has the power to decide on the legality of legislation.

Leading European courts - the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union - subsequently ruled the PiS majority had elected three of the judges improperly because they were duplicating positions that had been validly filled by the previous parliament.

The European courts ruled Poland's Constitutional Court was no longer an "independent and impartial tribunal", and Tusk's government has used those rulings as a basis to stop publishing the tribunal's rulings.

Tusk has failed to undo the PiS-era changes, partially because Nawrocki and his PiS-backed predecessor Andrzej Duda used their presidential vetoes to block his attempts.

Nawrocki has also refused to swear in five Constitutional Court judges elected by parliament since March on the grounds of alleged flaws in their selection procedure.

One of those judges, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, has now been placed in temporary charge of the court.

Earlier this month, the Council of Europe's advisory body on constitutional matters, the Venice Commission, said Nawrocki should swear-in the judges to allow them to sit on the court's bench.

Justice Minister Żurek said Święczkowski and his vice-president should face criminal charges for not allowing the judges to adjudicate.

Some of Tusk's supporters have accused him of failing to act decisively to reverse the PiS-era reforms.

Parliamentary elections are scheduled next year, and some see his move as an attempt to boost Tusk's popularity among those voters.

But his actions have been criticised. In September, Tusk put forward a politician, Maciej Berek, a lawyer who served as a minister in his cabinet, as a judge candidate to the court.

Lawyer Marcin Matczak, a critic of the PiS-era judicial reform who has stated he considers Święczkowski to be the court's worst president, said his suspension had no legal basis "for a million reasons".

"Today's action at the Constitutional Court, in my opinion, buries this body and the issue of the rule of law for two decades," Prof Matczak wrote on social media.

"Images of armed police and legal interpretations according to which the minister of justice can remove the president of the Constitutional Court by decree will have a powerful, anti-rule of law backlash for years to come," he added.

Spain train disaster clouds Sánchez chances of re-election

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmeweppr990qo, 2 days ago

The breaking news from Spain this week was shocking but also shockingly familiar: another collision on the high-speed rail line south from Madrid, with reports of dozens killed.

It is just nine months since two trains crashed near Cordoba, killing 46 people. Now 69 bodies have been recovered here in central Spain, from wreckage strewn over the tracks and down an embankment.

For the victims' families it is devastating; a personal tragedy.

But it is also a national disaster that has shattered confidence in the country's rail network and the Socialist-led government of Pedro Sánchez. It is playing out just weeks before the snap general election he called.

The formal investigation into the Toledo train disaster has only just been launched but the government has been quick to take control of the narrative.

From the first hours after the collision, Transport Minister Oscar Puente began suggesting "human error" was to blame, batting responsibility as far as possible from the cabinet.

On Friday, he appeared before the press for a second time to set out what he called the "objective facts" of the crash and counter a surge of criticism against the government.

The opposition People's Party (PP) is among those calling for his resignation as a "moral" and "ethical" move.

Instead after expressing "huge pain and sadness" for the victims, Puente went on the offensive.

He rejected talk of chronic underinvestment in infrastructure and insisted that Spain's high-speed signalling safety system, the LZB, was neither old nor inadequate: Germany and Austria use the same.

In Spain, it has already failed 170 times so far this year, he revealed, but called that "normal" and around the EU average.

The problem surrounds what happens next - when the system fails and control of the line shifts to manual.

In this case, the minister highlighted a series of human errors that proved catastrophic.

Crucially, at one point a controller instructed a stalled train to restart, clearing it to advance at up to 160km/h (100 mph) even though a second train was stuck on the line up ahead.

The impending collision was clear from audio calls and on big screens in the control centre in Madrid.

"They worked. We checked. They could see what was happening," Puente confirmed. But the advancing train was never ordered to stop.

"I'm no judge... But these are the facts."

So would he take personal and political responsibility anyway, and resign? Puente called it his "duty", rather, to remain as minister.

"I'll face up to things, explain, elucidate," he countered. "I'll think how to improve the system, and give confidence to those who want to travel by train and feel calm and safe."

But Spaniards will take a lot of persuading.

"This is not only a very serious accident, but the second in a very short time," Paco Camas of the pollster Ipsos points out.

An investigation into January's crash in Adamuz, near Cordoba, is still open, with initial reports suggesting there was a crack in the rails - very different to the latest collision.

But there is a similar impact.

"It destroys people's confidence not only in the railways but institutions in general," Camas warns. "And in Spain when such things happen, we know that people blame their government."

For Team Sánchez it is the latest in a spiral of crises.

Allegations of corruption against the prime minister's close relatives still persist, all denied.

Then there was a sudden influx of migrants from Morocco this summer to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta. That got right-wing opponents shouting about incompetence and underfunding.

Later, a video of a pensioner being forcibly evicted from her home went viral and sparked street protests.

That's when Sánchez called an early election.

His chances of winning the vote looked slim even before the train crash. Now they have plummeted.

Most recent polls showed the centre-right PP coming first and forming a coalition with the far-right Vox.

"They have this majority in almost 95% of the simulations we have done," Prof Pablo Simon of Madrid's Carlos III University explains.

But Sánchez had been running a positive campaign, trying to lure apathetic voters to the polls to vote socialist.

Suddenly, the tone has changed.

"They've totally lost control of the agenda and the emotion of this campaign," Simon says. "It's going to be extremely difficult now. There is this general mood of decay, of a country that's not working properly. A depression."

There is also anger.

There have already been small protests over the train crash led by far-right groups in Madrid and large numbers of police are on stand-by this weekend ahead of further potential clashes, organised online.

Here in Toledo, the mood is nervous.

"We all travelled in silence and really sad," Paloma told me at the city station, where she had just pulled in on a half empty train.

She admitted she's scared of the high-speed network now and angry at the government.

"This crash will change all of our votes, completely," Paloma said. "We'll shift from the left wing to the right. Because of everything that's happened."

Lucia takes the high-speed AVE into Madrid each day, and is scared too.

"This was human error. But there's been two accidents now with more than 100 dead," she says. "Things here are really bad. They have to change."

Producer Davide Ghiglione contributed to this report

'We came back from hell', say Ukrainians after years in Russia-occupied front-line city

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqglw3k7djp1o, yesterday

* Warning: This story contains graphic content.

Olha has one word to describe what life has been like in the front-line city of Oleshky over the past few years: "Horror".

Disembarking alongside her from a coach in the Ukrainian region of Chernihiv with their immediate family and dog, her husband Viacheslav put it this way: "We came back from hell."

The couple were among hundreds of residents evacuated from the Russian-occupied city who crossed into northern Ukraine via Belarus on Saturday, many reuniting with loved ones they had not seen for years.

Oleshky, seized by Russia during the first few days of its full-scale invasion in February 2022, is trapped on one side by the Dnipro River and on the other side by Russian forces.

Olha and Viacheslav had lived there with their son and daughter, both in their 30s. Even as the shelling around them intensified, they feared that trying to escape could be even more dangerous, with routes mined and subject to drone attack.

As supplies dwindled, the couple said they made an attempt to find food by crossing through minefields earlier this month. "People were stepping on mines, dying and being maimed, all just to survive," Olha told the BBC.

Those who were too afraid to go out in the city had resorted to cooking garden weeds to survive.

"We saw that the situation wasn't getting any better, so we realised we had to get out," Olha said.

That opportunity came earlier this week when a humanitarian ceasefire, brokered by US First Lady Melania Trump, took effect in the Kherson region, providing the first few days of peace in the area for four years and allowing Oleshky residents to evacuate.

Up to 6,000 people, including 200 children, were believed to still be living in Oleshky and its surrounding areas, with 1,700 in the city itself.

Residents had a four-hour window on Friday to leave, with a convoy of 25 buses brought in for up to 750 evacuees, along with ambulances for people with limited mobility.

After travelling through Russian-occupied territory to southern Russia, then flying to Belarus, evacuees arrived on buses to a military facility in Chernihiv on Saturday.

On the tarmac, where evacuees were processed before travelling onwards, some elderly residents were so weak they had to be carried on stretchers.

For many, there were emotional reunions.

As Mykhailo Palii arrived, his daughters Dasha and Anya, who thought they might never see him again, sprinted across the tarmac screaming and crying.

After an emotional embrace, Palii described a glimpse of life in Oleshky, although he said he had, until then, kept many of the details from his family.

"A hole was blown into the bathroom," he said. "There were drone attacks and missile strikes. It happened, but I didn't tell them about it because I knew they would worry."

Tetiana and Volodymyr, a couple carrying a cat when they arrived in Chernihiv, said their entire home was burned down three years ago, and they had been living in the abandoned house of a neighbour since.

For them, leaving as soon as it was safe to do so was an easy decision. "There's nothing for us to regret leaving. We don't have relatives there. Our children are married and don't live with us in the city," said Tetiana.

But those who managed to escape also worry about those left behind. "There are still a lot of people left there, living under those conditions," said Olha.

Now that the evacuees have left Oleshky, they will also face a new challenge - working out where to go next and how to rebuild their lives.

Palii said he would look for a job so he can provide for his family: "There's no job I can't handle. Digging, hoeing, planting, building. I can even do demolition work."

Olha said she and her family have no relatives elsewhere in Ukraine, and they will stay with some acquaintances for an extended period while they get back on their feet.

"If we managed to survive in hell, we'll survive here too."

Young athlete and former minister among victims of Spain train crash

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr78plp1p9yvo, 3 days ago

A 24-year-old athlete and a former government minister are among the victims of a deadly train crash that killed 69 people near Urda in central Spain on Wednesday morning.

The crash, between a high-speed Renfe train and a stationary Iryo train on the same track, also injured more than 100 people, many seriously.

The impact caused carriages to derail, and there are fears the death toll could still rise, with reports of family members searching for missing relatives in hospitals across the region.

The bodies of those killed have been taken to the main forensics institute in Toledo, where families have been giving DNA samples to help identify them.

The crash is the second rail disaster in Spain this year, and the worst in the country's history since 2013.

Who are the victims?

Julieta Gallego

Julieta Gallego, 24, was a Spanish long jumper who competed for Madrid athletics club, AD Sprint.

"The entire club is heartbroken," it wrote on Instagram.

The Royal Spanish Athletics Federation (RFEF) announced her death, expressing its condolences to her family, friends and teammates.

Gallego regularly competed in Spanish club championships, local media outlet ABC reported, and had a best jump of 5.9m (19ft 3in).

Raúl Chapado, president of RFEF, told the outlet that her death is a "blow that strikes at the very heart of the athletics family."

"Today, the sport mourns the passing of Julieta, a life ahead of her that has been unjustly extinguished".

Fátima Báñez

The death of former employment minister Fátima Báñez, 59, was confirmed by the Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (CEOE), which she chaired.

"Her warmth, generosity, and commitment leave an indelible mark on businesses and the entire CEOE team," it said in a statement.

Báñez served in the government under former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy from 2011 until 2018, and was the first woman to hold the role. In 2012, she introduced controversial labour reforms that made it easier for companies to fire people, sparking mass protests across the country.

Following news of her death, Madrid regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso paid tribute to her, saying she would be "deeply missed".

"Spain loses a great political figure," she said.

José Manuel Chacón

The Civil Guard confirmed the death of its officer José Manuel Chacón, 31, in a statement expressing its "deepest condolences" to his family, friends and colleagues.

Antonio Montero Domínguez

Finance and tax lawyer, Antonio Montero Domínguez, was remembered as a "meticulous professional" and "tireless worker" by legal news website, El Derecho.

His death was confirmed by Spain's tax authority, where he had been an inspector between 2012-2016.

Additional reporting by Sarah Rainsford, Madeleine Lake and Tom McArthur

What we know so far about deadly Spain train crash

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm8xz7pkd0jjo, 3 days ago

Two trains crashed south of the Spanish capital Madrid on Wednesday morning, on the high-speed line to Seville.

At least 69 people were killed and dozens injured in the collision, when a state-operated Renfe high-speed train smashed into the back of a stationary train operated by the Iryo company near the town of Urda.

It is one of the worst rail disasters in Europe's modern history, and Spain's worst crash since 2013. Three days of national mourning have been declared in the country.

Here is what we know about the crash so far.

Where and when did the crash happen?

The crash happened at 08:53 (07:53 GMT) between municipalities Mora and Orgaz, and about 140km (100 miles) south of Madrid, according to an account given by the Spanish government.

The privately run Iryo train was stationary on the state-run Renfe train barrelled into the back of it at high speed. Iryo said its train was "struck from behind" by a Renfe train "due to causes that are still unknown".

The crash caused some carriages to fall down an embankment.

All train traffic on the line was stopped at stations along the route.

Renfe said services between Madrid, Ciudad Real and Andalusia were suspended.

A passenger on board one of the trains told local media there was a heavy impact about 40 minutes into the journey.

What caused the crash?

Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente said a computer failure at about 08:30 on Wednesday morning led to the initial halt of six moving trains, including the two trains that subsequently collided.

"In the event of a system failure, the control centre takes over," he said, adding it was the control centre that decided to allow the trains to move again, without any speed restrictions.

That decision, Puente said, was made "under inexplicable circumstances". It resulted in the Renfe train crashing into the Iryo train, which was stationary on the tracks about 25km (15 miles) ahead.

Audio recordings obtained by Spanish media between train controllers working in Madrid for a rail infrastructure company in Adif in Madrid and the train drivers appear to show that one high-speed train was given clearance to move at 08:36 even though another one ahead had stalled.

In one recording, the controller tells the driver of the Renfe train to disconnect and reconnect the LZB mechanism that monitors train speeds, and then resume the journey at normal speed.

"Disconnect and reconnect LZB. Continue your journey and then proceed under [Lateral Signalling Block], at normal speed with normal operation," the control centre operator says to the driver.

The driver replies, "At normal speed?" To which the controller says: "Yes."

Under normal protocols, the driver would be expected to continue moving at a maximum of 40km/h according to their line of sight, and not at normal speed on a track designed for speeds of up to 200km/h.

The Lateral Signaling Block is a back-up or alternative train system used when the automatic signalling or data transmission system fails.

In a second audio recording between the driver of the Iryo train in front and the control centre, the driver says the train "is stationary in front of the entry signal at Urda". After some exchanges, the control centre operator tells the driver to "resume the journey" normally.

The Iryo driver then contacts the control centre again, according to a later recording, saying they cannot start the train. "The train won't allow me to control the [security] system. That's why I am still stopped in front of the entry signal," they say.

The latter recording suggests that the controller had been notified that the Iryo train remained stationary as the Renfe train approached.

How many passengers were on board?

More than 540 people were on board both trains.

Esther Padilla, spokesperson for the government of Castilla-La Mancha region, told TVE that one of the trains - managed by the Iryo company - was carrying 146 passengers plus one baby, while the Renfe-managed train had 397 passengers on board.

Julieta Gallego, a 24-year-old Spanish female long jumper, and former government minister Fátima Báñez, 59, were among those killed in the crash.

More than 100 people were treated for injuries, according to Spanish authorities, and by the next day 50 of them were still in hospital, 15 in a critical condition.

How have the authorities responded?

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has said "the whole of Spain is grieving" and that "lives have been shattered, families have been torn apart".

"The pain is immense," he said on a visit to the crash site.

The government was "trying to determine what was the origin of this tragedy, of this terrible accident," he added.

"We will get to the bottom of this, and if there has been any negligence, it will come to light.

"If there have been failures in the security system, they will be addressed with the utmost firmness."

Opposition conservative leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo, whose People's Party leads most opinion polls ahead of 29 November elections, said it was not the day to talk about political responsibility, but insisted "Spain has the right to know what is going on with its infrastructure".

Most Spanish politicians cancelled all public engagements on Wednesday and suspended their election campaign.

However, Santiago Abascal of the far-right Vox refused to take part in what his party described as attempts to "use mourning to silence criticism" of the country's rail infrastructure.

Three days of official mourning began on Thursday.

Spain's royal family posted on X that it was "shocked and concerned" and expressed condolences for the relatives of the deceased and those affected by the crash.

A spokesperson for the EU said the bloc was ready to help Spain if needed.

A huge emergency response was under way with fire crews and helicopters at the scene.

Hospitals in the area suspended planned surgeries as they deal with an influx of patients from the crash, Spanish media have reported.

A blood transfusion centre in Madrid appealed for "urgent" donations. In a post on X, Centro de Transfusión said it made the request "in the face of a possible sudden increase in care needs".

It reported that facilities in Toledo, Ciudad Real and Alcázar de San Juan had cancelled procedures as casualties from the crash begin to arrive.

The Spanish Civil Guard set up bureaus in Madrid, Toledo, Seville and Córdoba to investigate reports of missing persons.

"The top priority is the identification of the missing persons and the taking of DNA samples to be able to locate their relatives," the civil guard wrote in a post on X.

This is the second high-speed rail tragedy in Spain this year.

In January a high-speed train derailed in southern Spain, its rear carriages going into the path of a state-run Renfe train, claiming the lives of 46 people.

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Shock of rail tragedy gives way to sorrow and outrage in politically divided Spain

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckn9rq8204l0o, 4 days ago

The chaos and horror of Spain's second rail tragedy this year has been conveyed vividly by survivors of Wednesday's high-speed crash that has left at least 69 people dead.

But as Spain holds three days of mourning, revelations from leaked audio recordings of the apparent human error in a control room in the minutes before this disaster happened have given way to public disbelief and outrage, in a highly politicised climate, exactly a month before Spaniards go to the polls.

"You don't know what's happening, you don't know what has happened, you just know that you're being thrown around in a matter of seconds," said Iñaki García, 60.

He was on the stationary Iryo train that was rammed from behind by a Renfe train on the Madrid-Seville line near Urda, around 140km (87 miles) south of the capital.

"There were people injured, walking around, there were dead people," he said. "In the next carriage along there were a lot of dead people."

Recalling the horrific scenes around him, one young man told the BBC in a quivering voice: "I don't know if that's something I'll ever recover from."

Stories of tragedy have continued to emerge. A pharmacist from Urda was one of the first to reach the scene, bringing with him first aid supplies and medicine.

"One of [the passengers] was saying goodbye to his wife and children. His last words were 'God is good'," Antonio García told Spanish radio.

Similar scenes of grief played out only nine months ago in the southern village of Adamuz, when a collision on the same Madrid-Seville route killed 46 people.

Now, in the town of Urda, just like Adamuz, awful stories are combined with acts of kindness and solidarity.

Locals turned out to help the injured, bringing blankets, food and water to a nearby sports hall that was converted into a makeshift hospital for much of the day.

"We all started to turn out to help and we organised ourselves as best we could," said Rosa María Domínguez, a local woman, who described the scene as "a horror film".

However, the overriding sentiment that these two tragedies have generated is one of confusion and a failure to comprehend how this could have happened.

Not long ago, the speed, efficiency and safety of Spain's high-speed rail system, the largest in Europe, was the envy of its neighbours.

The Adamuz crash triggered a nationwide debate about whether the network was fit for purpose.

This latest incident intensifies pressure on the left-wing government of Pedro Sánchez, in the middle of an election campaign where his Socialist PSOE is behind the conservatives in most opinion polls.

On Wednesday night a demonstration protesting at the government's handling of the rail network saw far-right groups turn out and clash with police.

Although the main parties, other than the far-right Vox, have suspended campaigning, Sánchez has twice visited the scene of the crash and his People's Party rival Alberto Núñez Feijóo came to Urda on Thursday.

Sánchez's transport minister, Óscar Puente, made clear from the start that a computer failure followed by human error was the likely cause of the crash. By late evening, leaked audio recordings of a control-room operator talking to train drivers appeared to back that up.

Puente has long been a hate figure for the right, and with two of the worst rail tragedies in Spanish history taking place on his watch, the criticism is only going to increase.

Spain's biggest train drivers' union Semaf condemned the leak of audio recordings as irresponsible and slanted. The union had already called a strike for Thursday in a bid to ensure that "urgency to travel is never prioritised over safety".

One train driver, Vicente Almenar, told Spanish media: "They always look for the last link in the chain, where it's weakest, but here the entire procedure failed because we don't even know what our colleague was seeing on the screen," he told Spanish media.

Sánchez had not been expecting rail safety to dominate his campaign, but that now looks increasingly likely.

After two accidents and more than 100 deaths on the same high-speed line, Feijóo told reporters in Urda on Thursday: "The Spanish people need answers. They are wondering what is happening to high-speed rail in their country."

And he emphasised that politics was not about talking - it was about acting.

How a movement of students brought down Serbia's Vučić

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c574pvy82k0mo, 7 days ago

Theirs is a movement born from tragedy that began with students blockading streets and turned into almost daily protests and a national movement against corruption and government negligence.

In just under two years the students have succeeded in tearing up 14 years of political dominance under Aleksandar Vučić, who has seen support for his Serbian Progressive party (SNS) ebb away and ultimately fail in what became a referendum on the future of Serbia.

From Belgrade to Novi Sad and Niš, the mood was euphoric as supporters gathered in town centres or in front of Student List headquarters. In a post on social media, the students declared "Serbia is free".

Most symbolic of all was the demise of so-called Ćaciland, a pro-Vučić tent camp set up 18 months ago at Pioneers Park in central Belgrade in front of the Serbian parliament. Metal fences were torn down amid shouts of "Vučić is leaving".

How the students changed Serbia

They have no obvious leaders and have no grounding in politics, and yet the "Student List-Students Win" movement attracted anti-government voters across Serbian society.

They fielded candidates for all 250 parliamentary seats, and yet no students were among them.

As he joined the students marching towards Belgrade last week, lead candidate and cardiologist Ilija Srdanović said history was being rewritten: "The energy is unstoppable."

"We offer our citizens the core values of civilised society, which this previous regime has taken away from our citizens for the last time," he told the BBC.

It all began on 1 November 2024, when the concrete canopy collapsed outside Novi Sad train station, in Serbia's second biggest city, killing 16 people.

The tragedy was seen as emblematic of widespread corruption. Critics linked the station's fatally flawed renovation to a president who had closely associated himself with the project.

"When the canopy collapsed that served as the last straw," says Helena Ivanov of the think tank the Henry Jackson Society.

It was an emotional moment that triggered a spark and a national campaign of marches and events, she said, that captured the hearts and minds of Serbians in a way no opposition party had been able to do.

From protests to direct challenge to Vučić

What started as weekly student protests demanding justice on university campuses and city streets soon became a national movement, often at a local level, that encompassed far more sections of Serbian society, including farmers, actors and judges.

Vučić's SNS was clearly shaken and by January 2025 his prime minister had resigned "to defuse tensions". In March 2025 Belgrade saw Serbia's biggest ever anti-government protest and as the leaderless student movement increased in strength, they organised themselves through student assemblies or plenums.

By the time Vučić had announced snap elections last month, they were ready. "They have been able to take that emotional momentum into a proper organisation and have people learn how to protect fairness at polling stations," Helena Ivanov explained.

"The message was clear: the rule of law and not ruled by the law," said Gordana Delić, head of the Balkans programme at the German Marshall Fund of the US, who said Sunday's vote was in effect a referendum.

Initially Vučić sought to praise the protesters as "well-intentioned", but ahead of the elections he accused them of trying to "bring down" Serbia. Even after conceding victory on Sunday night he made the unfounded allegation that they had the support of unnamed "European countries and the American deep state".

Who will run Serbia now?

One thing is clear, it will not be the students, as they were not standing for election. That was a calculated decision as the electorate would probably not have voted for a list of candidates with little life experience.

Although their top candidate was Ilija Srdanović, a cardiology professor in Novi Sad, he is not really seen as a likely prime minister.

Few candidates stand out as potential leaders.

According to a final projection by independent polling groups CeSID and Ipsos, 141 people on the list have won seats in parliament. They include ex-basketball star Dejan Bodiroga (24th on the list), renowned actor Tihomir Stanić (8th), opera singer Nikola Mikić (46th), former National Bank of Serbia governor Dejan Šoškić (27th), and a rather large number of professors.

Šoškić's name has been mentioned in connection with the top post. He has spoken out about reforms he would make to the economy, and he has been widely criticised in pro-government media.

What is their programme?

The elected MPs will have the task of fulfilling what is in effect a manifesto.

In the words of the students themselves, they were looking for people who could enter institutions "do their jobs responsibly and not forget why they are there".

Under an 11-point programme, the student movement wants to:

* Eradicate corruption by forming a police unit to arrest those responsible for it

* Purge officials in the internal affairs ministry of anyone who broke rules on cracking down on protesters, or anyone linked to organised crime

* Reform Serbia's skewed media scene and free the public broadcaster of political control

* Stop recruiting party loyalists to head public enterprises

Vučić and the SNS party deny corruption and seeking to influence the media.

Will it still be a student movement, without students?

Although they have not been elected, it is the students who have made the promises to the Serbian people and they will come under pressure to follow through on their manifesto.

The ordinary Serbian citizens they chose to represent their movement have "been entrusted with transferring part of the struggle we have been waging on the streets for the past year into the institutions", the students say.

In his speech on Sunday evening, Vučić told party supporters that the students had destroyed two years of life in Serbia and they would be defeated "faster than they think".

Ukraine air raid app apparently hacked as users receive false radiation threat, Air Force says

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51kdy1ew7zvo, today

Ukraine's air raid alert app was apparently hacked on Sunday and for a short time said the capital Kyiv was subject to a radiation threat, the Ukrainian Air Force has said.

The Air Force message on Telegram read: "The Air Alarm application has probably been subjected to hostile interference. There is no radiation threat! Stay calm and follow our updates on our channel."

The Central Intelligence Agency said on Telegram that there had been a failure in the app, and urged people to use other sources of information to clarify the situation regarding the threat of air strikes.

The messages, in Ukrainian, started at approximately 22:47 local time (20:47 GMT), with the first reading: "Radiation threat. Radiation threat declared in Kyiv".

The next alert, written in Russian, came at 22:48, which read: "Hi! There will be a nuclear alert across Ukrainian. Don't worry, it's Oreshnik flying".

A third alert, at 22:49, again in Ukrainian, said "Chemical threat. There is a threat of a chemical attack on Kyiv. Don't go outside."

At 22:49, a fourth alert stated there was a "Street fighting threat. Street fighting is taking place in Kyiv. Don't go outside."

A series of all clear messages were then delivered to users' phones, which were connected to each of the previous alerts, individually declaring each threat clear.

In a separate post, the Central Intelligence Agency said that due to the Air Alert application, the Radiation Hazard signal was played on loudspeaker devices in the Lviv region, and added there was no threat of radiation hazard.

It advised the public to turn on notifications on your smartphone, pay attention to sirens, and to only read official sources.

The governor of Vinnytsia oblast, Natalya Zabolotna said there had been a cyberattack on the Air Alert app and posted a warning on Telegram not click on the link in the message.

The Air Alert app is supported by the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, and informs users instantly about the beginning and end of defence alerts.

This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.

You can receive Breaking News on a smartphone or tablet via the BBC News App. You can also follow @BBCBreaking on X to get the latest alerts.

El Salvador sends 2,000 troops to Haiti to rescue four missing soldiers

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck0e075n79j5o, 4 days ago

El Salvador has deployed more than 2,000 soldiers to Haiti as part of a mission to retrieve four nationals who went missing in the Caribbean country almost two weeks ago.

The "robust deployment" was communicated by El Salvador President Nayib Bukele to the Prime Minister of Haiti Alix Didier Fils-Aime earlier this week, the foreign ministry of El Salvador said in a statement on Wednesday.

Bukele said the soldiers would also assist ongoing "security efforts against gangs in Haiti", the statement continued.

Tensions between the two central American countries have escalated over the disappearance of the four air force technicians working as part of a UN-backed anti-gang organisation in Haiti.

The four soldiers with the Gang Suppression Force (GSF) were travelling back to their base in an armoured vehicle when they were ambushed in an area of the Caribbean island nation controlled by armed groups called Croix-des-Bouquets.

No gang has so far claimed responsibility.

The Salvadoran foreign ministry said the "large-scale operation" was "supported by various countries and international organisations".

Earlier this week, Haiti handed four bodies over to special forces claiming they belonged to those of the missing servicemen, but Bukele said they did not match.

He said one of the corpses was a child's and another was wearing a different country's military uniform.

Bukele threatened last week in an X post to wipe out Haiti's gangs, saying he will replicate action he has taken in El Salvador, if they did not release the Salvadorans.

In October last year, the UN Security Council approved expanded powers for the GSF to tackle worsening gang violence in Haiti.

The multinational force has struggled to penetrate areas where gangs hold sway. More than 5,700 people were killed in gang-related violence in Haiti this year, the UN says, and armed gangs control much of the capital.

Haiti has been ravaged by gang violence for years, but the situation has worsened in the political vacuum that followed the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.

Venezuela opposition leader María Machado calls for elections upon return

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck054d5mnzreo, 3 days ago

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado is calling for elections to be held next year.

During a news conference in Caracas on Thursday, the Nobel Peace Prize winner said the country's move toward democracy was "irreversible".

She also thanked the Trump administration for opening the "floodgate to freedom" by capturing her opponent, former President Nicolás Maduro.

The same day, Venezuela's interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, said elections would be held and that her government should oversee a "transition of this magnitude" - which Machado dismissed as illogical. Rodríguez, who was Maduro's vice-president, did not set a date for voting.

Machado said there would be elections in 2027, but also did not offer an exact timeline.

The transition in Venezuela would be "irreversible, organised, pacific", Machado said standing before a slogan which read "Let Us Be Free".

Her return to the country comes after she repeatedly made earlier efforts to re-enter Venezuela, and failed.

Last year Machado left Venezuela on a speedboat and in darkness to travel to Norway and accept the Nobel Peace Prize. Soon after, in January, the US seized Maduro.

The Trump administration then backed Rodríguez as leader. She was sworn in as interim president and later signed an oil deal that granted favourable terms to the US.

Although it remains unclear what Machado plans to do next, she has previously said she would run for president again if an election were held. Her ability to return to her country was contingent on approval from the Trump administration.

Speaking about her return, Machado said she had heard one word repeated by the thousands of supporters who thronged her route into the capital - freedom.

"I come to carry out a task and complete a mandate," she said.

The opposition leader said she had not received a message or invitation to meet from Rodríguez, and would not personally participate in election negotiations between opposition representatives and the government.

But she wished them well in their work, she said, in order to see the electoral body reformed so that every Venezuelan, inside the country and abroad, could vote.

Shortly before Machado's news conference, Rodríguez delivered a speech in a conciliatory tone, saying she had "instructed the security agencies that no one be detained without judicial order, except in cases of flagrant commission of crimes".

Rodríguez also spoke of "the doors being open" in Venezuela to returning exiles and talked of dialogue and building consensus.

Many Cubans voted for Trump - now they're turning on Republican immigration policies

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c574p7z1xm8wo, 3 days ago

Since the Trump administration launched its crackdown on undocumented immigrants two years ago, the waiting room of Cuban-born immigration lawyer, Ismael Labrador, in Miami is never empty. His appointment book is packed with relatives of detained immigrants trying to secure their release before they're deported back to their countries of origin.

Although business is booming, Labrador wishes it wasn't.

"We have relatives living in fear right now, we've had relatives who have been deported back to Cuba, unfortunately," he explains.

Cubans have traditionally enjoyed favoured immigration status in the United States under provisions enshrined in 1960s-era legislation called the Cuban Adjustment Act. But widespread arrests across Florida by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have left the Cuban American community more vulnerable in the US than they'd ever imagined, says Labrador.

"The way I put it is that if you don't have a Green Card in the United States, you may be a target."

Countless mobile phone videos have recorded such arrests in places previously considered off-limits: parents detained outside schoolyards, at bus stops, youth sporting events and even inside courthouses at pre-arranged immigration hearings.

Few have had the impact of the footage of 39-year-old Ecuadorean immigrant, Grace Calero, and her 19-year-old daughter, Giulianna Carriel, being arrested in a hospital ward.

Two months ago, the pair were driving to work in Kissimmee, central Florida when they were hit by another car and taken to hospital in an ambulance. While they were being treated for their injuries, ICE agents burst in and arrested them. They were deported back to Ecuador within days.

Labrador's cousin has also been caught up in the dragnet of ICE detentions. Despite his best efforts, the immigration lawyer was unable to prevent his own relative from being deported back to Cuba.

"It's hard when you're fighting against a lot of resources," he laments.

The Trump administration has repeatedly said the president was elected on a promise to deliver mass deportations and is delivering on that. "He stopped the invasion of our country and as a result of his policies more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the US," a White House spokeswoman told the BBC last week.

ICE, meanwhile, has said it is targeting anyone who has broken American immigration law and is in the country illegally.

Labrador was among the 68% of Cuban Americans in Florida who voted for Donald Trump two years ago, a decision he roundly regrets today.

Few could accuse Trump of hiding his plans on immigration. On the campaign trail in 2024, he touted his policy of mass deportations of undocumented migrants.

"On Day One, I will launch the largest deportation programme in American history", he said repeatedly at rallies, including in Florida.

Labrador – and many thousands of disillusioned Latino voters like him – thought the administration would only deport people with criminal records.

"I think we got blindsided by the administration," he argues.

"Personally, I voted for Trump because I wanted to get criminals out of the country," he says, alleging that "communists came in from Cuba under Biden."

"We wanted to have a safe America. We never thought that he was going to go after everybody."

"This isn't what I voted for," he insists.

Labrador is far from the only Cuban American in Florida to experience buyer's remorse over President Trump.

Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, who represents Florida's 27th Congressional district, recently released a video filmed outside the White House in which she distanced herself from his deportation policy saying it had gone "too far".

"The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today," she said, addressing President Trump.

Salazar is locked in a tight race against another Cuban American, the Democratic Party's candidate, Eliott Rodríguez. Her close association with Trump on immigration could potentially cost Salazar her congressional seat.

Florida remains a Trump stronghold. At a recent gathering of Cuban American entrepreneurs in Miami, the atmosphere remained staunchly pro-Trump. "Miami loves Trump, Cuban Americans love Trump," says real estate businessman, Juan Omar Sixto, motioning at the other guests behind him.

"They agree with Trump that anyone who crossed the border illegally should be out," he says, despite acknowledging he illegally entered the US himself six decades earlier.

A poll released on Thursday by Florida International University found that not all South Florida Cubans agree - 76% said they disapprove of the Trump administration's deportations of Cubans with no criminal record. But their support for the Republican Party remains steadfast, with 68% saying they plan to vote Republican in November.

In other parts of the country, support amongst Latinos is declining.

In the last election, Trump beat Kamala Harris by 56.1% to 43% - the biggest margin of victory for a candidate in the state since 1988 - in part because of the support of Latino communities. But a recent NBC News/Telemundo poll of 8,000 registered Latino voters showed nearly 60% favour seeing Congress come under Democratic Party control to just 35% wanting a Republican victory.

The high cost of living is a big factor for people's discontent, as residents feel supermarket and petrol prices are impossibly high for working families.

But for many Hispanics, it's also partly because of stories like Heydi Sanchez's.

Sanchez left Cuba in 2019 as the island spiralled into economic collapse and illegally crossed the border from Mexico into the US. After nine months in a detention centre, she was released under an i-220B Order of Supervision which grants the right to remain in the US but carries the constant threat of deportation.

Sanchez settled in Tampa where she worked with autistic children and the elderly. After a complex and expensive fertility struggle, she and her husband had a baby girl called Kailyn.

Most i-220B holders try to normalise their immigration status via 'humanitarian parole' and must check in with ICE agents at regular scheduled appointments. Last year, President Trump revoked temporary humanitarian parole to about 300,000 Cubans. Sanchez knew something was wrong in her case when her regular ICE meeting was brought forward without warning.

At the appointment, she was detained. Kailyn was taken from her arms and passed to her father, a US citizen. Within a day, Sanchez was on a deportation flight back to Havana in shackles with no recourse to appeal.

I met her in Cuba where she now lives in a one-bed apartment in Mayabeque, a rural province outside Havana.

"It's like the sky fell in and crushed me", she says of being separated from her daughter.

"When we have video calls, she says: 'Mummy, come home.' And I say: 'darling, Mummy is away working.' What else can I tell her? How can I explain it?'", Sanchez asks, unable to hold back the tears.

Despite expressions of support from several US politicians, including Maria Elvira Salazar, more than a year has passed since her deportation and Sanchez remains in limbo in Cuba.

In a statement, ICE said that "in this case, the parent stated they wanted to be removed without the child and left the child in the care of a safe relative in the United States".

While the Trump Administration has rolled back Cubans' special immigration privileges, it has sent thousands of people back to an island Washington itself describes as a "failed state". Cuba is in the grip of its worst ever energy crisis amid a months-long fuel blockade imposed by the US.

Since overwhelmingly voting for Trump in 2024, Cubans in Florida now realise they are just as vulnerable to deportation as any other diaspora. His Republican colleagues may feel the brunt of their frustration at the ballot box.

Flávio Bolsonaro calls himself 'leader of Brazil' after election loss

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3x2w4109pj8o, 4 days ago

The defeated candidate in Brazil's presidential election, Flávio Bolsonaro, has referred to himself as "leader of Brazil" in a letter he published on social media after leaving the country for the United States.

Bolsonaro lost to his left-wing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in the run-off on Sunday by a difference of 4.4 million votes, but has not conceded defeat.

In the letter, Bolsonaro alleges, without offering evidence, that he was the victim of "electoral fraud" and says that he will lead the opposition from the US.

He left Brazil on Tuesday after failing to comply with an order to surrender his passports, a decision which Lula described as "a shameful act".

Bolsonaro starts his letter, which he posted on his X account, saying "I address the Brazilian people and the international community as the leader of Brazil".

However, he had posted a previous version, that was later deleted, in which he wrote: "I address the Brazilian people and the international community as the rightful president of Brazil."

Both versions repeat the allegation that Bolsonaro first made on election night, that an extension of polling hours on Sunday had benefited his rival.

In the letter, he says it was "an electoral fraud unfolding before my eyes".

The extension was requested by both Lula's and Bolsonaro's campaign teams, and the head of Brazil's electoral authority has said that the vote proceeded normally and in full accordance with the country's laws and constitution.

An analysis of election data conducted by BBC Brazil and BBC Verify has also found that only around 34,000 people voted during the extended hours - far lower than the 4.4 million votes that separated Lula from Bolsonaro.

In his letter, Bolsonaro also addresses his departure from Brazil - which caused confusion after he disappeared for more than 24 hours.

It later emerged that he had gone across the land border to Argentina, and from there flew on to Florida, following a brief refuelling stop in Ecuador.

Bolsonaro left after failing to hand in his passports to police - in defiance of a Supreme Court order, which had been issued as part of an investigation into alleged money laundering.

He has not been charged as part of the money laundering probe and denies any wrongdoing, calling the investigation a "politically-motivated witch hunt".

Bolsonaro added that he had never intended to leave Brazil, but argued that he was the victim of "political persecution".

He ended the letter by saying: "I left Brazil but I haven't abandoned Brazilians".

While Flávio Bolsonaro said that he planned to lead the opposition from the US, it was not clear how he planned to do that.

His party recognised the election result and while some of its politicians have described Bolsonaro as a "political exile", his campaign manager, Rogério Marinho, stated on Wednesday that "there is no evidence" of the electoral fraud that Bolsonaro alleges took place.

It is also not yet clear where Bolsonaro intends to stay or for how long.

His younger brother, Eduardo, has been in self-imposed exile in the US since March 2025, saying he was the victim of political persecution. The two siblings posted a photo of themselves holding a Brazilian flag on Wednesday.

The Trump administration has provided visas for Flávio Bolsonaro and his family but did not say what kind of visas they were.

The US president did not explicitly endorse Bolsonaro in the run-up to the election and told reporters he "won't get involved" when asked about Bolsonaro's allegations of election fraud.

Earlier in the week, he had said that "it looked like another rigged election," without providing any evidence.

And on Thursday, Trump told reporters that "the election was a very great embarrassment to the people of Brazil".

Lula's comeback in Brazil dents Trump's ambitions for Latin America

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq62yg6rggj0o, 6 days ago

"Brazil will not accept being anyone's backyard," Brazil's left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared in his election victory speech, a message squarely aimed at Washington.

Domestic elections are rarely won on foreign policy, and this one was no different. But Lula's defiance against what he has described as US interference in Brazilian affairs evoked a patriotic spirit that proved an effective campaigning tool.

It also chimed with his wider brand of politics as a former union leader: standing up to powerful figures.

Paradoxically, it seems to have earned him President Donald Trump's respect. "I like Lula, we get along well," Trump said, responding to the result. "I didn't take sides," he added, before calling the election "terrible" and "rigged".

If that sounds muddled, it is because the relationship between the two men is not straightforward. Trump did not explicitly endorse Lula's rival Flávio Bolsonaro, who refused to recognise the result. But Trump was a close ally of Flávio's father, the former President Jair Bolsonaro.

When I spoke to Lula at his residence about a year ago, relations had hit rock bottom. He told me he had "no relationship" with Trump, that they had never spoken, and that he had no intention of picking up the phone. Trump had recently imposed punitive tariffs on Brazil, largely as a political response to Jair Bolsonaro's coup trial, which the US president called a "witch-hunt".

Rather than tiptoeing around Trump, as some US allies did, Lula fought back – and it paid off.

He made fiery speeches invoking Brazilian sovereignty, attacked US interference in the judicial process, and took to wearing a blue cap reading "Brazil belongs to Brazilians".

His approval ratings jumped.

He accused the Bolsonaro family, who had lobbied for the tariffs, of being unpatriotic – a blow to a political right that so often claims patriotism as its terrain.

Even some in the agricultural lobby, typically strong Bolsonaro supporters but reliant on US trade, thought Lula had a point.

The US eventually backed down and reduced the tariffs, although they have since risen again.

Relations then improved.

The two men spoke at the United Nations and later met in the Oval Office, where Trump called the talks "very good" and Lula said he left "very satisfied".

Another indication, perhaps, that Trump likes a strong leader.

So why might Trump be unhappy with the result?

Latin America has swung to the right, with Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, Argentina and Peru all electing presidents closely aligned with the Trump administration. Trump has sought to use these allies to establish US dominance in the Western Hemisphere, a strategy he has dubbed the "Donroe Doctrine".

Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, notes that Trump thought Brazil would be the "10th and biggest prize" after Flávio Bolsonaro won the first round.

Brazil is Latin America's largest economy, and the younger Bolsonaro was expected to join Trump's "Shield of Americas" coalition against narco-trafficking.

Brazil also holds the world's second-largest reserves of rare earth minerals after China, and the US had been eyeing preferential access.

The relationship has thawed, but with four more years ahead for Lula, several issues could reignite tensions.

Brazil accused the US earlier this year of trying to cast doubt on its electoral system and denied visas to two state department officials planning to visit.

The US called this "baseless" and revoked the Brazilian ambassador's visa in response.

If Trump keeps calling this result "rigged", further diplomatic fallout is likely.

Lula has also vehemently opposed US military action in the region, from the seizure of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela to the bombing of alleged drug-trafficking vessels.

He lambasted Washington for designating Brazil's two major gangs as terrorist organisations after lobbying from Flávio Bolsonaro, and warned of attacks on Brazilian sovereignty.

It is a sensitive subject for a political left that remembers the region's brutal 20th Century dictatorships, many backed by the CIA in the name of stopping communism.

Then there is US tech.

Lula's campaign accused Meta of favouring Flávio Bolsonaro.

Meta denied this but admitted moderation issues and technical errors had wrongly removed some posts or limited their reach.

Lula's supporters responded by sharing his messages through a 10-million-strong WhatsApp group to bypass the algorithms.

Separately, the Trump administration is unhappy with Pix, Brazil's instant payment system, which has boosted the economy, but which the US sees as taking business from Visa and Mastercard.

The relationship has exposed political divisions.

In the campaign, Bolsonaro supporters waved US flags at their rallies and, in one case, an inflatable saying "Trump Nuke Brazil", while Lula and his supporters accused Flávio Bolsonaro of protecting US interests over Brazil's.

Still, tensions can be overstated.

The US remains Brazil's second-biggest trading partner after China, and for now the two leaders get on.

Whether that lasts will depend on how far the US tries to intervene in Brazilian affairs, and how bullish Lula is in response.

Lula faces hostile congress and divided country after Brazil election win

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmvg7p001qj9o, 7 days ago

Brazil's veteran left-wing president has pulled off a surprise win - but his road to victory was not a smooth one and he faces the most challenging political landscape since first taking office in 2003.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated his right-wing rival Flávio Bolsonaro in a bitterly fought campaign by 4.4m votes.

Bolsonaro has told his supporters in Brasilia that he would seek the annulment of the election. But this has not stopped Lula and his supporters from celebrating what they describe as a "historic victory".

It was a dramatic comeback after the former metalworker, who has already served three terms as president, lost the first round of voting.

Many had not thought it possible for him to turn the result around in just three weeks. But Lula's campaign sprang back, driven by street demonstrations and a massive social media push.

His election win has bucked a wider trend in Latin America, where voters have punished incumbents and turned to the right. Across the region, large countries such as Argentina, Chile and Colombia all now have conservative leaders at their helm.

But his new term, set to begin on 5 January 2027, will start amid significant constraints at home and abroad, including animosity from US President Donald Trump.

While Trump did not endorse Lula's rival, Bolsonaro, directly – something he did with the right-wing candidates who went on to win presidential elections held in Colombia and Honduras – there is little doubt his administration would have preferred to see a conservative at the helm of this country of 213 million people.

The White House regards Latin America as an area of US influence with the Trump administration keen to have leaders in power who support its policies, including on defence, security and trade.

It is also keen to reduce China's influence in the Western Hemisphere.

Brazil, which is oil-rich and holds the world's second-largest reserves of rare earth minerals, is the only big country in South America not governed by a right-wing leader, with Lula largely seen as China-friendly.

Bolsonaro had promised to align Brazil more closely with Washington while Lula had warned the US not to interfere in the election and insisted that Brazil would "never fit into anyone's backyard".

But while there may be disappointment in the White House, Lula's victory will be welcomed by environmentalists who had feared that a win by Bolsonaro would have given Brazil's influential agribusiness and mining sectors more power.

They had pointed to record levels of deforestation and forest fires in the Amazon during the presidency of his father, Jair, arguing that under the younger Bolsonaro laxer environmental policies could again lead to destruction in this key ecosystem.

While Lula's supporters are ecstatic about his victory, the result shows that the country remains deeply divided, with more than 48% of voters choosing Bolsonaro.

In addition to the challenge of uniting such a deeply polarised country, Lula will have to govern alongside the most right-wing Congress in Brazil's democratic era.

Bolsonaro's Liberal Party (PL) was the party that made the biggest gains in the election.

And yet, Lula's Workers' Party managed to organise huge rallies ahead of the run-off, showing the strong grassroots support it commands.

Before the election, Lula had described the poll as "a parting of the waters for Brazil".

He promised to bridge the gap between Brazil's opposing political poles with "a new way of governing", adding in a WhatsApp livestream before the election that "this country will never be the same again".

While he provided little detail as to what the new way of governing would entail, he insisted he would "remain firm in the fight for a more just country, with opportunities for all and policies directed at the needs of the population".

With a largely hostile Congress, this fight just may prove much harder for the veteran leader - who will be 85 by the end of his fourth term - than in his three previous terms in office.

How 'Lula's Army' WhatsApp channel helped turn Brazil election around

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwz0vg4v3ndeo, 7 days ago

A WhatsApp channel created to support Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's re-election campaign is being credited by allies with helping deliver one of the most unlikely comebacks in recent Brazilian politics.

Brazil's left-wing president had been trailing right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro, but managed to turn the race around in just three weeks.

The rise of 'Lula's Army'

At a moment when many doubted Lula could reverse the result, a WhatsApp channel called Lula's Army emerged, and rapidly grew to 10.8 million followers.

Led by Congressman André Janones, the operation encouraged supporters to share videos, promote hashtags and recruit new voters.

Its dramatic growth between the two rounds was particularly notable because it appeared to reverse a long-standing imbalance in Brazilian politics.

For years, conservatives aligned with former President Jair Bolsonaro had been widely seen as dominating online political mobilisation, especially on platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram.

The emergence of Lula's Army convinced many supporters that Brazil's left had finally found a way to compete in a digital arena. The shift was particularly significant because social media has played a central role in Brazilian politics since Jair Bolsonaro's 2018 election victory, when WhatsApp networks became a defining feature of political campaigning.

Lula's Army messages often included ready-made templates for followers to share with friends and family. Each one assigned supporters a specific task aimed at boosting Lula's visibility on social media.

Janones frequently instructed his "troops" to "blow up" the latest campaign video or help a new hashtag "take off".

"Guys, urgent!", "Don't go to sleep yet", "No food before the mission!", and "I have one more task before you're dismissed", were some of the instructions.

On the eve of the election, the congressman also hosted a 24-hour live event - dubbed the "turnaround livestream" - even as polls continued to suggest a victory for Bolsonaro.

The tactic worked, despite worries by some members of the Workers' Party that Janones's often-confrontational style on social media could undermine the more moderate image they hoped to project for Lula.

In his victory speech, Lula referred to Janones as "our General" and thanked him for "raising the morale of our troops every day".

Social media's role in the comeback

Measuring the electoral impact of online mobilisation, however, is notoriously difficult.

While Lula's allies credit Lula's Army with helping fuel the comeback, political scientists caution that it is impossible to determine how many votes, if any, were directly influenced by the WhatsApp operation.

Political scientist Denilde Holzhacker argues that a shift in Lula's campaign strategy was key to his comeback.

Rather than relying solely on online engagement, she says the Workers' Party candidate succeeded in connecting digital campaigning with grassroots mobilisation on the ground.

According to Holzhacker, the campaign intensified local efforts and adapted its messaging - linking a Bolsonaro victory with concerns about potential changes to social programmes and the loss of rights.

"It was to Lula's credit that he recognised his own weakness and completely changed his style," she says. "And Janones managed to do something that had seemed unthinkable for Brazil's left - dominate social media."

By contrast, Holzhacker argues that Flávio Bolsonaro entered the run-off overly confident of victory and failed to communicate his message to his supporters as effectively.

Sociologist and political scientist Mayra Goulart, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, also cautions against attributing Lula's comeback solely to social media.

"It was a combination of social media and street-level mobilisation," she says. "The physical world enabled a form of mobilisation capable of reducing abstention and persuading undecided voters."

In her view, Lula's supporters succeeded in turning online enthusiasm into real-world political engagement.

"Those committed to Lula's victory worked to bring people together and persuade them to vote," Goulart says.

She argues that the effort not only helped increase turnout but could also prove valuable for Lula's next administration.

"I believe this collective effort was an important learning experience and will prove valuable for a government that still faces many battles ahead. It not only helped reduce abstention, but also converted a significant number of undecided voters."

Lula himself suggested that the mobilisation behind his comeback could shape the way he governs in the years ahead.

In his victory speech, he said the election had taught him many lessons and pledged to change the way Brazil is governed.

"We are going to give people a greater say in decision-making, and digital communication will play a much bigger role in my government."

Who is Lula? From ex-worker and prisoner to Brazil's president again

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c35yn2ye1x85o, 7 days ago

On the face of it, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has done the impossible one more time - within three weeks he overturned defeat in first-round voting to gain re-election as Brazil's president.

It was no mean achievement for a man who before his first successful run at the post in 2002 had tried three times unsuccessfully.

When he became president in 2003, he came to office as the first leftist leader of Brazil in nearly half a century.

Now aged 80 and with plenty of experience at governing as large a democracy as Brazil, he has bucked the trend of electoral victory for right-wing leaders in Latin America whose policies mirror that of US President Donald Trump.

Who is Lula and what are his policies?

Lula's first presidential victory in 2002 marked the end of an unprecedented journey from poverty.

The son of a poor, illiterate peasant family, Lula worked as a peanut seller and shoe-shine boy as a child, only learning to read when he was 10 years old.

He went on to train as a metalworker and found work in an industrial city near São Paulo, where he lost the little finger of his left hand in an accident in the 1960s.

Lula was not initially interested in politics, but threw himself into trade union activism.

Elected leader of the 100,000-strong Metalworkers' Union in 1975, he transformed trade union activism in Brazil by turning what had mostly been government-friendly organisations into a powerful independent movement.

In 1980, Lula brought together a combination of trade unionists, intellectuals, Trotskyites and Church activists to found the Workers' Party (PT), the first major socialist party in the country's history.

The PT went on to gradually replace its revolutionary commitment to changing the power structure in Brazil with a more pragmatic, social democratic platform.

Lula came to power promising major reforms to the country's political and economic system.

He vowed to eradicate hunger and create a self-confident, caring, outward-looking nation.

In his time in office, Lula pumped billions of dollars into social programmes and can reasonably claim to have helped reverse Brazil's historic inequalities.

By increasing the minimum wage well above the rate of inflation and broadening state help to the most impoverished with a family grant programme, the Bolsa Familia, he helped some 44 million people and cemented his support among the poor.

However, many commentators argue that the programme failed to address the structural problems that underpin poverty, such as a lack of education.

He left office eight years later, after serving two terms as president, enjoying exceptionally high popularity ratings for a retiring Latin American leader - 83% - having raised Brazil's profile on the international scene and presided over the longest period of economic growth in three decades.

Unable to run for a third term, Lula left the presidency and, shortly afterwards, was diagnosed with throat cancer. He even shaved his trademark beard during treatment. Doctors declared him cured of the disease in 2012.

Why was Lula previously jailed?

Under his chosen successor, progress stalled. The economic boom also gave way to recession, and the country's political scene was rocked by a huge investigation into top-level corruption, known as Operation Car Wash.

Lula was among those to get caught up in the scandal. In July 2017, he was convicted of corruption and sentenced to more than nine years in prison for accepting a beachside flat as a bribe from engineering firm OAS - a sentence increased on appeal to 12 years.

Lula was also jailed for 12 years and 11 months for corruption and money laundering for receiving bribes from two construction and engineering firms by way of funding improvements in a country house he and his family used.

He has always maintained his innocence, insisting accusations against him were politically motivated.

In 2019, he was released after having served just over 18 months, after a Supreme Court ruling that the incarceration had been illegal, having come before all appeals had been exhausted.

Those convictions were annulled in 2021, leaving Lula free to run for a third term in 2022, beating right-winger Jair Bolsonaro.

When he re-entered office in 2023, he vowed it would be his last term, and yet his party endorsed him as their candidate again this year, even though he will turn 81 on Tuesday.

Even backers of the PT will acknowledge that he achieved more in his first two terms - from January 2003 to December 2010 - than in his most recent four years in office.

And while his supporters described him ahead of the 2022 election as the "saviour of the Amazon", praising his commitment to protecting the rainforest, some environmentalists have been critical of some of his recent actions.

His support for exploratory oil drilling in offshore waters near the mouth of the Amazon in particular has drawn criticism.

Lula insists that he remains committed to eventually phasing out fossil fuels and argues that oil revenues are key to financing Brazil's transition to clean energy.

His government has also pointed to the reduction in deforestation in the Amazon - satellite data suggests the area deforested in the first half of 2026 was reduced to its lowest in the past decade - as proof that its policies were working.

What is Lula's relationship with Trump?

Lula's third term coincided with the return to office of Trump.

The two men represent different ends of the political spectrum and have found it impossible not to voice their differences in public.

The Brazilian leader told the BBC in September 2025 that he had no relationship with Trump.

Even though the US has a trade surplus with Brazil, Donald Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods in July that year, citing the trial on coup charges of Brazil's right-wing former president Jair Bolsonaro as a trigger. Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year jail sentence and it was his son, Flávio, who Lula beat in Sunday's election run-off.

Lula accused Trump of foreign interference and said "he's not emperor of the world". But their relationship improved after a White House in May this year, after which the two leaders exchanged public compliments - Trump called Lula "dynamic", while the Brazilian president said he left the meeting "very satisfied".

In July of this year, the US imposed 25% tariffs on most goods from Brazil.

The two governments still disagree on key issues such as crime, and Lula acknowledged they are especially far apart on trade.

Referring to what Trump has dubbed the "Donroe doctrine" - his administration's national security strategy which asserts that US dominance in the Western hemisphere should not be interfered with - Lula has insisted that "Brazil does not fit into anyone's backyard".

Is Lula close to China and Russia?

Lula has criticised the fact that five countries - the permanent members of the UN Security Council - have the power to veto decisions and argued that this tilted the balance in favour of those who won World War Two, excluding nations representing billions of people like Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan, as well as African countries.

Brazil is an active member of the Brics - a grouping that unites Brazil with Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Lula defends his continued alliances with Russia and China and sees the Brics as an emerging counterweight to the West.

He has defended his choice to continue to purchase Russian oil while Russia wages war in Ukraine.

Why the King's Caribbean tour could be 'biggest risk of his reign'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckzd6gvg1r2jo, 8 days ago

Royal tours are unpredictable beasts.

The planning is meticulous and dates back months, sometimes years, but there is always jeopardy.

King Charles III's visit to the Caribbean, which starts on Tuesday, takes him to three countries in nine days: the Bahamas, Guyana and finally Antigua and Barbuda for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm).

It also throws him directly into the heat of the debate over the payment of reparations - compensation from countries that took part in the slave trade - alongside questions of whether the King should be apologising for the UK's role in what he has previously described as an "appalling atrocity" that leaves an "indelible stain" on history.

"This is the biggest risk of his reign so far with so much just outside of his control," said author and historian Sir Anthony Seldon. "Questions about slavery, reparations and apologies mean the moral integrity of the monarchy is being questioned."

The King will make three significant speeches during the Caribbean trip and will follow government advice not to issue an official apology for Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade.

A senior royal aide said that the King would "not shy away from the darkest days of our past" but stressed that decisions over apologies and reparations were matters for government.

The current Burnham administration, like those before it, will not pay reparations.

Buckingham Palace says that acknowledging the wrongs of the past will be built into the King's programme in all three countries.

But apologies, reparations, and republicanism are rich pickings for campaigners and protests are likely.

This is the reality for the King and Buckingham Palace, and they are accepting of it.

Those who've worked on the planning of the trip view protests as part of the open debate in the region and security preparations include their possibility.

Lurking in the back of Royal Household minds will also be memories of the last tour by senior royals to the Caribbean in the early part of 2022.

Then, as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, William and Catherine found themselves facing criticism over the optics of the trip - images of the royal couple reaching out to touch the outstretched hands of Jamaican children through a wire fence looked clumsy. Engagements designed as tributes to past royal visits appeared outdated. And protests also caused the cancellation of a small part of the schedule.

Everything will have been done to avoid those kinds of missteps on the 2026 Caribbean tour.

The leadership in the Bahamas, Guyana and Antigua and Barbuda will celebrate the King and his work in protecting rainforests, creating cultural ties and reinforcing relationships around trade, energy, and agriculture.

But they do so against a backdrop of change.

The leaders of all three countries have voiced their support for reparatory justice.

In Antigua and Barbuda and the Bahamas, where the King is head of state, the conversation about becoming a republic has significant support.

Elected officials in the former no longer have to pledge allegiance to the King ending a 40-year tradition of swearing loyalty to the monarch.

"He pulled off an extraordinary triumph with President Trump in his US visit earlier this year and stood up to him and put him in his place in a way that no leader has done - while not incurring his wrath," said Sir Anthony. "If he can deal with the delicate nature of this trip for him personally, for the British monarchy, and the future of the Commonwealth, it could be an enormous success."

The Sussexes surprise return

Timing also matters for royal tours.

This Caribbean tour has to cut through a sea of royal distractions.

The King has spent much of the past three months in Scotland, where he is based over the summer.

It should have been a quieter time in the royal calendar, but it has been quite the opposite.

The surprise return of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to the UK has been noisy. The level of coverage Harry and Meghan get is unsettling and, at times, irritating for the Royal Family.

The King's youngest son has not yet seen his father in person, but they are said to have talked.

Then enter Earl Spencer, the King's former brother-in-law, with his memoir, Swan Song, criticising the King's response to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. It triggered a strong pushback from the Palace.

And in recent days, the serious claims made about Meghan's father, Thomas Markle, have drawn his daughter into a complex tale involving global police forces, sexual abuse allegations and further family trauma.

An impactful and successful Caribbean tour is a chance to switch focus.

But if royal stories back home are running hot, it can be hard to focus minds on the King's engagements over four thousand miles (6,437km) away.

Former Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who has strong family ties to the Caribbean, has accompanied the King on a number of trips outside the UK.

"He is our head of state. He is amongst some of the most recognisable figures in the world. For a small country like Guyana, the validation of a state visit is huge," said the Tottenham MP whose father came to the UK from what was then British Guiana and who also has relatives in Antigua and Barbuda. "My mother would forever recall the Queen's visit in 1996."

But there was also a recognition of that royal trip jeopardy.

"Knowing Guyana, Antigua and Barbuda as well as I do, he will be overwhelmingly received positively," Lammy said. "But these are lively democracies in which of course there will be some dissent."

A transatlantic flight, three countries over nine days and about 36 separate engagements when you're closing in on your 78th birthday is an intense schedule. It is also a reminder that the King is still dealing with a cancer diagnosis and having regular treatment. Buckingham Palace has reiterated its position that he is on a "positive trajectory".

Queen Camilla will only accompany the King on the Antigua and Barbuda leg of the visit for Chogm and a number of other engagements, including some around her own areas of interest – literacy and supporting efforts to end violence against women and girls.

The Queen, who will be 80 next July, is known to find the pace and hot conditions of some royal tours gruelling.

This is a trip that comes with potential pitfalls but also the possibility of great reward for the King.

"The King can be an extraordinarily empathetic and in tune figure," Sir Anthony said.

"He could play a blinder here."

Additional reporting by Felicity Baker

Opposition leader María Machado returns from exile to a Venezuela reshaped by Trump

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8vgx3pvdeq1o, 6 days ago

Driving down roads lined with jubilant supporters from the western state of Lara to the capital Caracas, María Corina Machado's return to Venezuela could hardly have been more different to her exit 10 months earlier.

Colourful, loud, open and defiant, it stood in stark contrast to the way the Venezuelan opposition leader slipped out of the country in the dead of night in December last year to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

She had been unable to make it back to her homeland until now, thwarted on several occasions by the Venezuelan government - and by the Trump administration, which insisted the "time wasn't right" for her return.

Now, it appears, it is.

"María Corina is the indisputable leader of Venezuela," says 20-year-old Gregory Noriega, wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the logo of the opposition movement Vente Venezuela. "Her return represents hope."

"This is a step forward in the electoral process which we've been waiting for since last year," echoes 18-year-old Hilary, who turned out onto the streets of the capital hoping to catch a glimpse of the opposition leader on her victory lap.

"She's returned after the double earthquakes when Venezuela needs her," adds her friend, Manuel. "The whole country is behind her to show that now Venezuela isn't scared."

Much has changed since Machado left Venezuelan soil to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Then-President Nicolás Maduro is no longer at the top of the Venezuelan government.

Maduro was forcibly removed from power by US troops on 3 January, and whisked to New York where he faces drugs, weapons and torture charges – to which he's pleaded not guilty.

He was replaced by his former vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, who has turned the page with Washington in ways few could have imagined.

The bilateral relationship is today unrecognisable from the years of mutual animosity during the reigns of President Hugo Chávez and then his handpicked successor, Maduro.

The new circumstances throw up some interesting conundrums for both sides.

When Machado left Venezuela, she had long been considered Washington's favoured alternative to Maduro. She returns to find the Trump administration perfectly happy with the one they've got – at least for the time being.

The Trump administration recently signed a major oil deal with Venezuela which gave the US a 100-year concession over a staggering 65bn barrels of Venezuelan crude oil.

The deal was reached in conjunction with a Venezuelan private company called North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP) run by a businessman with a chequered past, Alejandro Betancourt.

Machado has openly criticised the deal which the Rodríguez government reached with the US, albeit careful to direct her criticism at Caracas and at Betancourt rather than President Trump, to whom she gave her peace prize and whose trust and support she craves to move forward.

President Trump has repeatedly said how satisfied he is with Delcy Rodríguez, calling her "wonderful" and "a terrific person". This was the vice-president of an administration he previously described as made up of "narco-communists".

But the outpouring of jubilation for Machado's caravan into the capital shows she can still count on significant support on the streets, says Venezuelan political analyst Beningno Alarcón.

"The return of María Corina Machado, in my personal view, is the most significant [political] event since 3rd January," says Alarcón. "It means the most important political leader in Venezuela is back in the country."

"The reception for her return shows that her ability to mobilise her support remains intact, which means the opposition in Venezuela now has something very solid: a leadership which is present on the ground as opposed to solely in exile," he says.

Alarcón provides some evidence that the opposition – and the public at large – feel more emboldened since 3 January, a situation he believes will become only more pronounced with Machado's reappearance.

For instance, a joint study by the political think tanks Polis and Nexo suggests that Venezuela saw three times as many street protests in the first nine months of this year as in all of 2025, with demonstrations spanning a range of issues, from politics and working conditions to water supply.

Furthermore, there's evidence that the repression of such protests has reduced by more than half.

In such an environment, the return of a figurehead like Machado can galvanise an electorate that has spent years fearful of the consequences of speaking out.

Her return also needs to be seen within the context of the wider talks brokered by Washington between the Venezuelan government and the opposition towards a negotiated political solution.

Certainly, the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, was quick to say her "safe return" to Venezuela was "the direct result of the US-supported reconciliation talks".

The Nobel Peace Prize winner still faces charges in Venezuela ranging from treason to conspiracy of insurrection. For years, she and her supporters have dismissed the charges as politically motivated and baseless.

Having made at least eight attempts to return to Venezuela by air and by sea before the Trump administration gave her the green light, Machado now knows she has Trump's blessing to be back on home soil – a position Delcy Rodríguez is both unwilling and unlikely to challenge.

She called Machado's return a "show" and the entire cross-country event, which was livestreamed by her supporters over the weekend, was studiously ignored by state television outlets.

But Rodríguez, too, needs a harmonious relationship with Washington if she is to avoid a fate similar to that of her predecessor and indicated she might be prepared to hold talks with Machado.

For as much as Trump has complimented Rodríguez, he has also made it clear that Washington expects nothing less than her full submission and malleability on key issues like energy.

Some reports have even suggested all major decision-making in the oil-rich nation is being largely dictated by Secretary Rubio via regular WhatsApp calls to the interim president.

The young supporters gathered in droves in Caracas to cheer María Corina Machado home say their fears of criticising their government or demanding change are vanishing.

Her return marked an irreversible political transition in Venezuela, they insist, one which they could barely fathom when she left for Oslo just a year ago.

Additional reporting by Vanessa Silva in Caracas.

Syrians struggle with soaring prices as crisis challenges post-Assad recovery

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmn4egvez1yzo, 3 days ago

Last month, protests erupted in squares and streets across Syria. People burned tyres, blocked roads and chanted slogans, angry at the government's decision to raise fuel prices again. It was the largest show of discontent yet since President Ahmed al-Sharaa came to power two years ago.

Speaking on a Syrian TV channel, a man said he still supported the authorities but that his situation had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer afford to buy bread. "Honestly," another said, "we have begun to fear what kind of new decision each morning will bring".

The increase was the latest in a series of measures people blame for a growing cost-of-living crisis. For many Syrians, life, financially, has worsened since rebels led by Sharaa ousted President Bashar al-Assad, ending five decades of his family's brutal rule and more than 13 years of a devastating civil war.

Catapulted to the presidency, Sharaa has, since then, led Syria's transition and efforts to revive a broken economy after a long period of mismanagement, isolation and conflict.

There was never any doubt about how challenging this would be. But as they celebrated Assad's overthrow and their new freedoms, Syrians, perhaps unrealistically, hoped things would quickly improve. That, however, has not materialised, and the handling of the economy has frustrated many here.

From essential bills to basic items, the cost of virtually everything has gone up. And many saw a further and unexpected rise in fuel prices as a sign of a government out of touch with its country. "We don't want roundabouts. Every day they build a new roundabout. People stood by you and are still with you," another protester said, addressing Sharaa, "but this will [make] things explode".

Days later, amid calls for further demonstrations, the increase was revoked.

In a suburb of Damascus, I joined Fatima Saleh Eid at an open-air market for her weekly shop. At 50, she works as a cleaner to help support her family. "We've suffered a lot," she said. Her husband had recently been hired by a ceramic factory after a year unemployed. He is among the lucky ones, as many are struggling to find work. In some streets, men gather in the hope of meeting someone offering a day job; often, they wait in vain.

Since coming to power, the government has slashed long-held subsidies as part of an austerity drive. The price of bread, a Syrian staple, has increased tenfold. Fuel prices are now in line with the international average, which has put pressure on farmers and made transportation more expensive, while the cost of electricity has gone up several hundred per cent for some.

The authorities, in response, have adjusted public sector wages, including pensions; unsurprisingly, the effect of the additional pay for people has been lost as prices keep rising.

"We eat more sparingly now. We can't afford chicken anymore nor meat. We only eat vegetables but even [that is] expensive," Fatima said. "Inshallah [God willing] things will get cheaper."

As she spoke, around a dozen people, of all ages, gathered around us. Nobody disagreed. One elderly man also said he had stopped eating meat. Another, in his 20s, told me his family were no longer able to pay the medicine for his father, who had a heart condition. One young woman said she and her four children could only afford to have a proper meal every two days.

Marwan Bashour, a 68-year-old pensioner, said his monthly pay was around $90 (£70), which is the public sector minimum wage. "It's not enough at all," he said.

The United Nations Development Programme said 90% of Syrians were in poverty last year. Marwan told me how he made ends meet. "Sometimes I borrow money, sometimes I sell things from my house," he said, "like an old pot or plates that we never used, gifts that were given to us. I've even had to sell furniture".

There have been other pressures too. Like many Syrians, Marwan used to rely on help from aid agencies. But, for him, that has stopped, as organisations have been forced to cut back services because of funding cuts. Syria has also not been immune to the impact of the US-Iran war. The government said the fuel increase that led to the protests was, in part, due to the pressure on energy markets because of the conflict.

I met another pensioner, Nabil al-Remhein, who is 63. None of his four adult children could find work. "We're now having only one meal a day. It's tragic," he said. His face looked tired. "It isn't only me. It's the entire population. We're all hungry... We're suffocating under rising costs."

Nabil took me to his house, in a poor area of narrow alleys and modest buildings. There, I met his wife. She was doing her chores in the dark. "I'm afraid of the electricity bill," Nabil said. "We've cut back on lighting up the house and we [also] turn off the fridge for about five hours a day". Still, their latest bill was about a third of the family's income. He has not paid it.

Dr Haid Haid, a Syrian columnist and consulting fellow at the London-based think tank Chatham House, said a "significant portion of the population" was worse off than before Assad's fall. The economic crisis, he told me, was "one of the most dangerous issues" for the government, and that some of it was of its own making.

"Part of [the crisis] is related to the lack of [financial] resources and the legacy left by the former regime," he said. "But it's also the direct impact of the new policies that are moving [Syria] towards a liberal and free-market sort of economy, which don't take into account the impact on people".

A spokesman for the Syrian economy and industry ministry told me no-one was available for an interview.

Sharaa has, of course, scored some important gains. International sanctions imposed in the Assad-era have been lifted, and the US has removed the country from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Security remains volatile and a source of concern, but the country feels more stable.

And the president continues to consolidate his power and, earlier this year, retook the resource-rich north-east from a Kurdish-led militia. (The Druze still control areas in the south, where they want to create an autonomous state; Israel occupies parts of the south-west.)

But real economic recovery is yet to happen. Large parts of Syria remain in ruins after a war that killed half a million people and displaced half of the population. Unable to afford rent, many families live in partially destroyed buildings. The World Bank says reconstruction costs are estimated at $216bn and, without foreign help and investment, it will be impossible for Syrians to rebuild.

Samir Aita, a Syrian economist who heads the Circle of Arab Economists, a Paris-based independent think-tank, said the crisis was a "combination of policies with the [government] not managing expectations and creating unrealistic hopes". When I asked him about how he felt about the future, he said: "It's unsustainable. If they don't change, I fear chaos."

Exhausted after years of conflict, Syrians, left with almost no choice, remain hopeful. Abu Mahmoud, a cab driver, told me: "They inherited the country bankrupt, so people need to be patient. Things don't happen overnight."

Additional reporting by Lana Antaki, Samantha Granville and Neha Sharma

How could Israel break election deadlock? Here are four scenarios

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm62y46d97wwo, 4 days ago

Israel looks to be in political deadlock.

With more than 97% of votes counted after Tuesday's election, neither the incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition, nor the bloc of his key challenger Gadi Eisenkot look set to win a majority.

In order to a form a government, it looks likely one of the leading parties would have to break their campaign promises - meaning the most probable outcome may well be new elections.

Here are four possible scenarios.

National unity government led by Netanyahu

Could Netanyahu persuade Eisenkot to join him in a national unity government?

Eisenkot would have to abandon his key platform to do so. He's framed himself as the only alternative to Netanyahu, and built his campaign on ousting him from power.

On election night, he took to the stage at his campaign HQ and called on Netanyahu to "announce his retirement from political life today," telling the crowd that Israelis are fed up with Netanyahu's "culture of lies", "division and incitement".

But that was before one of the main exit polls - which had initially projected a lead for Eisenkot's bloc - was revised, and he was overtaken by Netanyahu.

Netanyahu could try to persuade Eisenkot's Yashar Party to join his Likud Party in a unity government by ditching the far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties he is currently in coalition with. But last night at Likud HQ he thanked his "loyal partners" and called for a "strong right-wing government" - remarks some have interpreted as meaning he intends to preserve his alliance with them.

One thing that could make a unity government more likely is a renewed conflict with Iran, which could place serious pressure on party leaders to put aside their political differences and work together. In the days prior to the election, Israeli and US media reported that Netanyahu was pushing for fresh strikes on the country, and had pressed Donald Trump to approve US involvement.

This would no-doubt be framed by Netanyahu's critics as an attempt to save his own political skin by entering another regional conflict.

Eisenkot-led coalition with Arab parties

This would be a seismic shift for Israeli politics. Only one independent Arab party has ever formally been part of a coalition, in 2021, and it didn't last long.

Eisenkot and every other Jewish party in his bloc bar one have already ruled out entering government with them. But right now, it's the opposition's only path to a majority.

The Arab parties were the story of election night. They look to have defied expectations and could gain a record 19 seats - helped by an unprecedented turnout from Israel's Arab population, who account for about one-fifth of the country and often describe themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel.

For years, many boycotted Israeli elections, saying voting would legitimise a system that they say treats them as second-class citizens. But their turnout last night was inspired by a desire to oust the most right-wing governing coalition in Israel's history.

The United Arab list, who are currently projected to win eight seats, have said they'd join an opposition government, while The Joint List, who are projected to win 11 seats, have said they'd support one from outside.

However, the only Jewish leader advocating this scenario right now is The Democrats' Yair Golan. And a coalition like this would be very fragile, especially on issues like Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

The fact there is such a unified front from the Jewish parties against Arab participation points to Israel's deep divisions.

Netanyahu-led majority, with right-wingers from opposition

Could Netanyahu persuade the right-wing parties in Eisenkot's bloc to break away and join his coalition?

The two most likely candidates for this are Naftali Bennett - joint-leader of the Beyachad political alliance - and Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu party. They are both right-wingers who are hardline on security, and share some political ground with Netanyahu.

But both campaigned explicitly to oust him, and to extend military conscription to the ultra-Orthodox - bringing them into direct conflict with the two ultra-Orthodox parties already part of Netanyahu's government. So it's difficult to see them joining forces.

Some have suggested Bennett and Lieberman's parties could replace the ultra-Orthodox parties, but current electoral math suggests that grouping may not have the seats needed for a majority.

New elections

If none of the above scenarios can be negotiated, the default outcome would be new elections.

Many would see this as a tacit win for Netanyahu, who would remain as caretaker PM until the new elections take place - and he may believe he has a better chance of winning them.

Some analysts think the high Arab turnout would not be repeated - especially if their record representation in parliament led to no change. And it could also mobilise more right-wing voters in a second poll.

Netanyahu may also bet that the estimated 70,000 Israelis who flew home from abroad to vote, and are thought to skew against him, wouldn't do so again.

Additionally, several right-wing parties who failed to pass the electoral threshold of 3.25% may attract fewer votes or may not even run, thereby bringing more votes to Likud and its allies.

Between 2019 and 2022, Israel held five separate elections as Netanyahu and his rivals struggled time and again to co-operate.

Israel's election deadlock is a sign of the country's deep divisions

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqz0ve94ygpjo, 5 days ago

"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried." So said Winston Churchill in the House of Commons in 1947.

His aphorism came to mind as Israel's election results filtered through on Tuesday night - exit polls blending with ballots that were cast to dash or fulfil people's hopes and fears.

This election has, in some ways, been a celebration of democracy. Voters turning out in record numbers, Jews and Arabs alike. Many spent thousands to fly in from abroad to cast their ballot.

At polling stations across the country, we saw the passion of campaigners, as they used every minute to try to change that last mind and win that last vote.

President Isaac Herzog said the election was a "badge of honour" for Israeli society. "It is remarkable to see how deep the desire for democracy is in Israel," he exclaimed.

Yet this election left the most established democracy in the Middle East without a clear path to a new government. It produced an inconclusive result where neither opposing bloc will have a majority in parliament.

Some might say this was business as usual.

Israel has never had a one-party government. Its fragmented, proportional representation system is almost designed to govern by coalition.

Yet many commentators warned this election had revealed the fundamental and perhaps growing divisions that scar this nation. This was not a plebiscite in which an electorate united around a single cause.

Some of these fissures are not new. There were divisions over judicial reforms that led to mass demonstrations in the early years of this government.

There were also divisions over how to respond to the deadly 7 October 2023 attacks - whether to save hostages or destroy Hamas. The casualties suffered by Israeli reservists in the fighting in Gaza that followed deepened tensions over the exemption of ultra-Orthodox young men from military service.

But has this election put in even sharper contrast the deep fault-lines that lie within Israeli society?

There are the tensions between the religious and the secular, divides not just of faith but of society.

Should Israel's government subsidise religious study? Should some parents sacrifice their sons and daughters to defend Israel when others do not? The ultra-Orthodox now make up almost 15% of the population. Their world-view is poles apart from that of denizens of high-tech, modern neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv.

There are divisions over fundamental politics.

Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party suffered significant losses, but is still on track to be the largest in the Knesset. All this for a prime minister accused of corruption, which he denies; a leader also accused of failing to protect Israel before 7 October, something he will not allow to be investigated.

Some 10% of voters backed the Jewish supremacist far-right: politicians like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who even as results were being announced was promising to establish Jewish settlements in Gaza.

The Arab parties, which represent about a fifth of Israeli citizens, made huge gains, winning some 15% of the vote, potentially giving them seats numbering in the high teens.

And then there was the opposition bloc, a mix of centre, left and right led by Gadi Eisenkot who fell short of winning the change they wanted - change that many believed was existential for the future of this country.

How these vastly diverging views coalesce into some form of government is now the unenviable task facing Israel's body politic - the choices and compromises they may have to make could involve fundamental decisions about the country's future.

Would Netanyahu be ready to abandon his religious allies and form a coalition with right-wingers from the opposition bloc? Would they be ready to swallow their hostility towards the prime minister and sit in his government?

Is the opposition bloc ready to abandon much of its campaign promises and co-operate with Arab parties to force Netanyahu out of office? Are the Arab parties ready to risk joining a government that could fall within months?

Yair Golan, the left-wing Democrat leader, urged the opposition bloc to form a partnership with Arab parties. "We must no longer accept Netanyahu's racist division between Jewish votes and Arab votes," he said.

But are the people of Israel ready for such a reality?

Amit Segal, an Israeli commentator sympathetic towards Netanyahu, said the high turnout among Arab Israeli voters "reminded Jews on both sides that, after years of division, they may have to learn to sit together after all".

The risk is that this election, instead of putting Israel on a new path, has instead raised further doubts about what it is that unites its citizens. What are the common factors that bind this complex, varied collection of peoples into one polity?

Autocratic governments, which are growing in number, have long criticised democracies for producing weak and temporary governments, often fragile coalitions that struggle to hold together, let alone deliver what the people wanted.

Israel may now struggle for months to form a government. It might even fail and have to hold another election.

President Herzog acknowledged this risk head on as he prepared to open coalition negotiations: "We must do everything we can, certainly after yesterday, to avoid another round of elections."

For years, Israel has focused on defending itself against its external enemies. But must it also now be ready to defend itself from perils within, if the divisions writ large by this election become unmanageable?

In another speech, Churchill once said democracy was not just "insurance against dangers from abroad". It was also, he added, "insurance against dangers scarcely less grave and much more near and constant which threaten us here at home".

Can Israel's democracy live up to this challenge?

Democratic senator blames Egypt press crackdown on US military aid decision

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c63r529wn2vzo, 3 days ago

A top Democratic senator has blamed a crackdown on independent journalism in Egypt on a decision by the Trump administration to waive human rights conditions on US military funding to the country.

Chris Murphy, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, accused the US government of "abandoning" the Egyptian people after it lifted restrictions relating to more than $300m of defence assistance.

Over the last month a series of arrests has taken place of journalists at two of the few remaining independent news outlets in Egypt, where newspapers and TV stations are closely controlled by the authorities.

The US State Department told the BBC it waived conditions on a portion of military aid to Egypt in September due to the country's "importance to US national security interests".

Murphy, speaking at the Middle East Institute (MEI) in Washington this week, said he was in no doubt the two were linked.

"The minute that money was released, the crackdown began in an absolutely devastating way," he said.

On Tuesday a court in Cairo ordered the closure of the news website Mada Masr and fined its editor-in-chief Lina Attalah in what Amnesty International called "a crushing blow to press freedom".

Earlier this month, authorities arrested six journalists at the independent fact-checking platform Matsda2sh and charged them with belonging to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

The Egyptian Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Cairo has remained a close regional ally of the US despite what human rights groups say are widespread abuses under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's government, including torture and enforced disappearances.

Sisi denies there are political prisoners in Egypt. He has previously said stability and security are paramount, adding authorities have promoted rights by trying to provide basic needs such as jobs and housing.

Washington sends Egypt £1.3bn ($1.73bn) per year, making it one of the world's biggest recipients of US military assistance.

US law allows up to £320m of the funding to be withheld, conditioned on Egypt meeting democracy and human rights requirements. But these restrictions can be waived by the administration on national security grounds.

In September, Secretary of State Marco Rubio waived human rights conditions on $320m of military aid in light of Egypt's role since the launch of the US war with Iran, according to a letter addressed to various Congressional committees. Egypt assisted negotiations between the US and Iran.

Exercising the waiver authority was "essential" for the US-Egypt relationship, "particularly in light of Egypt's helpful role following Operation Epic Fury," according to the September 4 memo seen by Reuters which bore Rubio's signature.

Asked by the BBC about the move in light of this month's arrests of journalists, the State Department said the waiver was "due to Egypt's importance to US national security interests, the concrete security cooperation Egypt provides to the United States, and the need to maintain that cooperation to address regional security challenges".

It added it maintained dialogue with Cairo on a "full range of issues" but would "not comment on private diplomatic conversations".

Rubio's move followed a similar decision by the Biden administration in 2024, when then Secretary of State Anthony Blinken waived human rights conditions to grant the full military aid allocation to Egypt as the US sought Cairo's role in mediating between Israel and Hamas in the war in Gaza.

Under Biden prior to 2024, the US withheld portions of the annual military allocation over Egypt's human rights record.

Murphy, who chairs a congressional committee on the Middle East and counterterrorism, said he had been a critic of both the Biden and Trump administrations over the issue.

"To the extent that there was any glimmer left of political speech in Egypt, it is gone for one proximate reason: The United States government abandoned the people of Egypt and decided to remove all conditions on our funding," Murphy told the MEI.

"Any hope of a true, meaningful political opposition rebirthing in Egypt has been shattered by this decision," he added.

US military aid to Cairo began after the 1978 Camp David Accords and the peace treaty that followed between Egypt and Israel. Successive administrations have viewed the world's most populous Arab country as a critical US ally in the region.

The group Reporters Without Borders describes Egypt as one of the world's biggest jailers of journalists.

The conviction of Lina Attalah and the closure of Mada Masr marked an unprecedented escalation in repression of press freedoms in Egypt, according to Timothy E Kaldas, Deputy Director of The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, a Washington DC-based think tank.

He said both the US and European Union had been prioritising their strategic relations with Egypt over human rights and the rule of law in the country.

"It's been fostering a sense of impunity on the part of the Egyptian authorities that we're seeing play out," he told the BBC.

"Egypt is getting signals from both sides of the Atlantic that human rights and the rule of law are no longer a priority, and they're testing the limits of that."

He added: "The fact that they're not getting more robust pushback reinforces the wrong message."

Israeli opposition accuses Netanyahu of trying to 'delegitimise' election

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckdd8qdl9e0eo, 3 days ago

The main Israeli opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot and Arab-led party leaders have denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleging foreign interference following the election which saw his coalition lose its majority.

Netanyahu's Likud accused Israel's Arab-led parties of "stealing" the election. Home security agency Shin Bet is investigating whether they received illegal funding from Qatar and Turkey.

Qatar's foreign ministry denied the "ridiculous and dangerous" allegations and accused Israeli politicians of conducting a disinformation campaign against Doha.

Final results confirmed that neither Netanyahu's bloc nor the Jewish opposition had won a majority in parliament.

The two Arab party lists - The Joint List and the Ra'am - defied expectations to win a record 19 seats in the 120-seat Knesset following a surge in turnout among Arab voters.

That positions them as potential kingmakers, with Netanyahu's bloc winning 53 seats and his rival Gadi Eisenkot's bloc securing 48.

According to protocol, the president will appoint a party leader whom he believes has the best chance to form a majority government. That leader has up to 42 days to achieve this, before the task passes to a second nominee who is given 28 days. If that nominee is unsuccessful, a period of 14 days is granted to a third candidate, after which, if no government has been formed, new elections will be called.

On Thursday Likud alleged that voters had been "bribed" to vote for Arab parties, after the head of the Central Elections Committee (CEC) asked the Shin Bet security service to investigate "serious suspicions" of foreign interference.

Both Arab parties strongly rejected the claim, with the Arab-majority Joint List alliance saying it was baseless.

The row is being seen by Netanyahu's critics as an attempt to delegitimise the Arab parties, thereby making it politically impossible for Eisenkot to join forces with them - which is currently his bloc's only route to power.

Israeli media reported that the CEC had been presented with a claim that Qatar had provided funding aimed at increasing voter turnout in Arab communities. Qatar's Foreign Ministry "categorically" denied the claims.

Netanyahu and his Likud Party framed the allegations as a "political earthquake" and an "an attack on democracy", aimed at removing their right-wing government.

But the Shin Bet later clarified that their investigation did not implicate an entire community who had voted legally, while acting CEC Director General Dean Livne said there was "no basis for allegations of systematic violations of election integrity."

Eisenkot, who was briefed on the investigation, said "it is too early to determine what happened, or if anything happened at all," and accused Netanyahu of running "an orchestrated and organized campaign to delegitimize the election results".

Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh, who is part of the Joint List, dismissed the allegation, saying: "The losing side is constructing a racist blood libel and calling on the security agencies to use force in order to overturn the election results."

Netanyahu's attacks on Arab voters and parties have been ongoing for days. He spent much of election day posting on social media that high Arab turnout is an "emergency" and a "matter of life or death" for the Israeli right. He also shared AI-generated images of Arab voters at polling stations, in an attempt to encourage right-wingers to get out and vote.

Arab Israelis, many of whom refer to themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel, make up about one fifth of the country.

For years, many boycotted Israeli elections, saying voting would legitimise a system that they say treats them as second-class citizens. But their turnout on Tuesday was inspired by a desire to oust the most right-wing governing coalition in Israel's history, led by Netanyahu.

The final results offer only three plausible options for a government to be formed: a national unity government involving Netanyahu and Eisenkot, a right-wing coalition involving Netanyahu and defectors from Eisenkot's bloc, or an Eisenkot-led government supported by the Arab parties.

Eisenkot and every member of his bloc bar one has previously refused to enter government with Arab parties, but speculation has swirled in recent days that an agreement could yet be reached.

A snap poll conducted by Hebrew University showed that the most popular option for voters from every party in the opposition bloc was for Eisenkot to form a minority government with Ra'am, and supported from outside by the Joint List.

Netanyahu and Eisenkot face difficult paths to power as neither set to win majority

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjy561y4pl56o, 5 days ago

With results still trickling in, it currently appears that Israel's veteran Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has done better than was widely predicted, with his Likud emerging as the largest single party.

His existing bloc with ultra-nationalist and ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties appear to be just short of a 61-seat majority in the 120-seat parliament. However, analysts caution that this is subject to change because the early count was skewed towards areas known to have strong right-wing support.

A dramatic deadlock had been widely forecast as Israelis surged to the polls – with turnout reaching more than 77%.

In Israel's fragmented political system, the signs are that Netanyahu's main rival, the former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, would struggle to command a parliamentary majority without parties led by Israel's Arab minority. According to partial results, they have equalled or gained on their previous record number of seats.

On the campaign trail, most Jewish opposition parties pledged not to work with Arab-majority lists, citing a lack of shared values.

However, Israel's Arab-led parties could emerge as kingmakers if others were prepared to join forces with them. In this election, Arab Israelis – who often identify as Palestinian citizens of Israel and represent one-fifth of the population – appeared to turn out in unprecedented numbers.

Netanyahu, on the other hand, would need to convince one of the smaller opposition parties to join his coalition, if he is to secure a majority at this point.

Many saw this as a make-or-break election to defeat Israel's most right-wing-ever government, accusing it of stoking racism and hatred.

A huge caveat in all of the current analysis is that the high number of as-yet-uncounted absentee ballots – mostly representing the votes of Israeli soldiers – mean that we are not expecting to have a clear idea of the final results for another day or two.

Overnight, both Netanyahu and Eisenkot addressed their supporters, pledging to form the next government.

"The right-wing bloc has a clear, decisive majority among the Zionist public, among the Jewish public and all those who support the Jewish state. That is what has become clear. A decisive majority," the PM told his celebrating supporters – although he stopped short of declaring victory.

"We must form a strong, national, right-wing government. That is what must be done," he added.

"The public has chosen change," Eisenkot told his Yashar party after exit polls came out – most of which were initially more favourable to the opposition. "The coalition of failure has lost the people's trust. The Israeli public voted against Benjamin Netanyahu continuing as prime minister."

"I will work with my partners to ensure that the people's decision is translated into a Zionist government: stable and good for all of Israeli's citizens. And quickly – because that is what this moment demands, and because the country needs to be brought back together."

There are deep divisions in Israeli society which have been underscored by this and previous elections. They have served not just as referenda on Netanyahu's leadership – as he faces a corruption trial on charges he denies – but also as votes on what kind of country Israel should be.

The PM and his current coalition partners have taken the country on a hardline religious, nationalist trajectory over the past four years. There were mass protests over their plan for a judicial overhaul prior to the unprecedented Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023 which triggered a series of wars – in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

Many Israelis want to see their country more firmly anchored in liberal and secular values.

Remarkably, the past four turbulent years do not appear to have significantly changed voting patterns.

"We see in the polls, that the relative weight of the two main sides: pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu is about the same," Professor Tamar Hermann, a pollster at the Israeli Democracy Institute told me, just prior to the election. "People expected that after October 7th, Netanyahu will be down the drain or even toppled but it didn't happen."

Already, overnight, the main Israeli parties will have begun their intense political wrangling to try to form a new coalition government.

"Each side will try to pull over defectors, or will try to see if they can make a minority government and will try all these different political kinds of wizardry," is how veteran Israeli journalist and author, Yaakov Katz described the process to me. "But it might not work, and it could take weeks or months to see if someone is actually capable of forming a government."

The leaders of the bigger parties typically try to win over smaller ones with promises of cabinet positions, budgets or specific policies.

Short of pursuing a unity government, this might be the only option for Netanyahu - but the opposition parties fought this election on a platform of "anyone but Netanyahu".

It is key now to see if those in the main opposition "change bloc" are ready to break a taboo by seeking a political deal with the Arab parties.

On the campaign trail, one of the bloc's leaders, right-wing politician Avigdor Lieberman, went as far as to say that he would not sit in a minority government that relied on their support. It was a sign of the increased mistrust and hostility towards Arab citizens since the 7 October assault.

When I recently met Mansour Abbas, head of Ra'am – the smaller of the two Arab lists – he told me that having been part of the diverse coalition that temporarily unseated Netanyahu between 2021 and 2022, he wanted to join the next government. He believed that potential partners would be more open to an alliance after the election.

"These are familiar and well-known party-political considerations. All politicians in Israel say one thing before elections and speak a different language after elections," he said. "We have experienced this before, and it does not concern us."

Meanwhile, Netanyahu and his allies have already begun an intense campaign of delegitimising the Arab parties – casting their fellow citizens as a threat from within.

So what are the next steps?

After the final results are presented to Israel's largely ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, next week, he will consult all the leaders of elected parties and ask the candidate who appears most likely to form a coalition to do so.

If that candidate is unable to pull together a majority within a maximum of six weeks, then others could be allowed to try.

If, after all the haggling, no-one is able to form a governing coalition, a new election will be held in the following months, and the entire process will be repeated.

In the meantime, Netanyahu's government stays on in a caretaker role but without the authority to enact major policy changes.

Serbian shot dead after attacking officer outside Israeli embassy, minister says

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck5ynj4eeyj2o, 5 days ago

Serbian police shot dead a young man outside the Israeli embassy in Belgrade in the early hours of Wednesday after what authorities called a "terrorist attack".

The country's interior minister, Ivica Dacic, said the attacker had rushed at a police officer with two knives while shouting the phrase "Allahu Akbar". The officer sustained a minor knife wound to the face and shot the attacker.

Dacic said the suspect has not been identified, but he was a minor and Serbian citizen who was being monitored by security services as he was "known to be a supporter of the Islamic State".

Speaking to reporters outside the embassy, Dacic said an investigation is ongoing, but security services said the suspect had posted a picture of the Islamic State flag on his Instagram.

Dacic raised the country's terrorism threat level to "red alert" - the highest threat level – meaning stricter security checks and increased police presence at places like infrastructure facilities and areas where large crowds gather.

The interior minister said he had visited the injured police officer, who was reportedly doing well and did not need hospital care for his wounds.

Armed security personnel were seen standing guard outside the Israeli embassy on Wednesday morning.

Israel's foreign ministry confirmed in a social media post that no embassy personnel were injured and the mission was closed at the time of the incident.

This is the second such attack on Belgrade's Israeli embassy in less than three years; in June 2024, a man shot a police officer in the neck with a crossbow.

The officer who was shot survived the attack and shot dead the assailant, identified as a Serbian man who had converted to Islam.

Wednesday's attack comes just one day after elections in Israel.

Egypt court fines journalist Lina Attalah and orders news site's closure

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw8rz14k1jvxo, 6 days ago

The editor-in-chief of the independent Egyptian news outlet Mada Masr was detained for several hours after a court convicted her of managing an unlicensed website and ordered its closure, her lawyers say.

Mada Masr said Lina Attalah was released once it paid the fine of 3m Egyptian pounds ($53,500; £40,100) also handed down to her by the New Cairo Misdemeanours Court. It was the maximum possible penalty for the charge, which she had rejected.

Amnesty International said the verdict represented "a crushing blow to press freedom".

It comes only weeks after six journalists working for the independent fact-checking platform Matsda2sh were charged with belonging to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt is among the top jailers of journalists globally, with 25 currently behind bars, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi has overseen what human rights groups say is an unprecedented crackdown on dissent since he led the military's overthrow of his predecessor, Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi, in 2013.

Tens of thousands of people have been detained, mainly Brotherhood officials and supporters but also leading secular and liberal activists, media workers and academics.

The CPJ said Mada Masr, which was founded in 2013, was a vital source of critical reporting in Egypt and that it had long faced pressure from authorities over its journalism.

The site had repeatedly sought an operating licence from the Supreme Media Regulatory Council (SMRC) since a new media law was passed in 2018, but that its applications were either rejected or left unanswered, the media watchdog added.

Amnesty International said Lina Attalah had also faced "years of harassment and intimidation", including six criminal investigations over Mada Masr's reporting.

Last week, prosecutors summoned her for questioning over allegations of publishing "false news" and operating a website without a licence.

Mada Masr's lawyer said the investigation included a recent report that the website had published about a wave of protests in prisons across the country, as well as a letter from the SMRC regarding its legal status.

Attalah was released on bail and later referred to trial before the New Cairo Misdemeanours Court on the charge of operating a website without a licence.

During Tuesday's hearing, Judge Mohammed Mubarak ordered the courtroom to be cleared of everyone except Attalah, her eight-person defence team, and Hossam Bahgat, head of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), an independent human rights group.

Bahgat told AFP news agency that security personnel then filed in before the judge announced that the court was denying several procedural requests made by the defence and appointing its own lawyer for Attalah.

"In a move that astonished all those present, the judge recorded in the official court minutes that the court had appointed a lawyer from the Lawyers' Syndicate to represent the defence," he said. "Lina herself spoke up to object to this lawyer being appointed to represent her, which the judge refused to record in the court minutes.

"In an even more shocking turn, the judge proceeded to dictate motions on behalf of this lawyer - who had not uttered a single word - and entered them into the official record," he added.

The judge then announced the fine for Attalah and ordered Mada Masr's closure "amid shouts and protests from the defence", before she was detained, according to Bahgat.

On Tuesday evening, Mada Masr said it had paid the full fine to the court and that Attalah was released after several hours in custody.

"During the release procedures, Attalah learned of a one-year prison sentence issued against her in absentia in 2024, on charges of publishing false news and managing an unlicensed website," it added.

"Her lawyers took steps to challenge the ruling, with a hearing in a retrial of the case scheduled for 11 November."

Amnesty International warned that the court's verdict marked "a dark day for independent journalism" in Egypt and demanded that it be overturned.

"This draconian ruling is the culmination of years of relentless harassment and unjust proceedings designed to shut down one of the country's last remaining independent media voices," said the group's senior director for regional impact, Yasmine Ahmed.

"Lina Attalah should never have been prosecuted for exercising her right to freedom of expression and doing her journalistic job."

CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah said: "If Egypt can put in custody one of its most respected editors and shut down her newsroom, no independent journalist in the country is safe. Attalah must be released immediately, and Mada Masr must be allowed to keep reporting."

Jordan carries out deadly strike in Syria in retaliation for church attack

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq8ezg6dy6xlo, 6 days ago

Jordan has struck what its military says were "terrorist organisations" in Syria in retaliation for an attack on a Christian funeral last week that killed nine people.

Syrian health officials told state media that five people, including women, children and an elderly man, were killed in the strike on a village in the southern Daraa province. Jordan said its fighter jets had killed and wounded "several terrorists", without giving further details.

Jordan said it had co-ordinated with the Syrian government, but Syria said it had not been notified of Monday's attack.

It comes after nine people were killed and 34 injured in a shooting at a funeral in a Greek Orthodox church in Karak on Friday.

In response to the strike, Syria said it had closed a border crossing with Jordan.

"The decision includes the complete suspension of passenger and commercial traffic in both directions, to ensure the safety of travellers and workers at the crossing," Syrian authorities said in a statement carried by state media.

It added that it had "opened direct channels of communication" with Jordanian officials and had launched "comprehensive investigations to establish the full circumstances of the targeting".

Nassib is the only passenger and commercial border crossing between Jordan and Syria.

Earlier on Monday, senior government security officials said Jordanian security forces had arrested two brothers and their brother-in-law over the church attack.

The Public Security Directorate (PSD) said the unnamed "terrorists" were found hiding in an abandoned house in Karak before dawn.

Jordan's Interior Minister Mazen al-Faraya told state-affiliated TV the attackers were all Jordanians and "had been holed up in a building in one of the villages near the site of the attack".

How do Israel's elections work and who are the main contenders?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx8dz75633vjo, 8 days ago

Israel heads to the polls on Tuesday for what many view as one of the most pivotal elections in the country's history.

It's the first election since the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel and its subsequent wars and conflicts across the region - in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

Who are the main contenders?

Polling published on Friday puts incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu in a tight race with Gadi Eisenkot, a former head of the Israel Defense Forces, to become prime minister.

Eisenkot's popularity stems partly from his military credentials and his status as a relative political newcomer, having formed his Yashar Party only last year.

He lost his son, a soldier, in the first months of the Gaza war, and served in Israel's war cabinet under Netanyahu until resigning in 2024 over his handling of the conflict. He has built his campaign on calls for accountability over the security failures that led to 7 October.

Other opposition leaders include former prime minister Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman - both right-wingers who take hardline positions on security - and Yair Golan, a left-leaning former general. Despite their differences, they could work with Eisenkot to oust Netanyahu.

Netanyahu's current government is the most right-wing in Israel's history. In order to remain in power, he will likely have to rely on the support of some of his existing far-right coalition partners. Some hold ultra-nationalist positions, such as calling for Israel to annex the West Bank and for the "migration" of Palestinians from Gaza, which could amount to the forced displacement of civilians. Some members of Netanyahu's own Likud party have also called for Palestinian "migration" from the territory.

There are two Arab party blocs in the running too, as about one-fifth of Israel's population is Arab - many of whom describe themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel. In theory, they could prove kingmakers. But all but one of the leading Jewish parties have ruled out working with them.

How do the elections work?

Israel's parliament - known as the Knesset - has 120 seats, meaning a government must hold 61 seats to command a majority.

Israel uses a proportional representation voting system, so governments have always been coalitions of multiple parties.

Friday's polling suggests neither Eisenkot or Netanyahu's blocs will reach a majority, meaning there may be weeks or months of political wrangling to come.

If no bloc can form a majority, it is possible that a minority government could take power. And failing that, new elections could be called, with Netanyahu to remain as interim PM until then.

What are the main issues?

The dominating topic has been security, with the challengers to Netanyahu all heavily criticising the security failures that led to the 7 October attacks, in which nearly 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken back to Gaza as hostages. Nevertheless, Netanyahu has once again framed himself as "Mr Security", pointing to strategic victories in Israel's wars since 2023.

Conscription is also a major topic. Historically, ultra-Orthodox Jewish men in full-time religious study have been exempt from military service, but since war broke out this has become an increasingly divisive policy.

Judicial reform has also featured heavily during the campaign. Netanyahu's government is still pursuing contentious plans for reforms to the judicial system, which led to mass protests before 7 October. Critics say the plans would compromise the independence of the judiciary and threaten democracy.

As in many countries, cost of living is another key issue. Food and housing costs have grown steadily in recent years.

What does it mean for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank?

A year on from the ceasefire in Gaza, Israel continues to carry out near-daily strikes on the territory - saying it is targeting Hamas operatives - and maintains control of more than half of it.

More than 74,000 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since 7 October 2023, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN.

In the occupied West Bank, attacks by Jewish settlers are at an all-time high, according to UN records, while Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law, are rapidly expanding.

So for Palestinians, the shape of Israel's government is a major factor in their lives.

On Gaza, Eisenkot does not differ hugely from Netanyahu. He recently pledged to end Hamas rule in the territory within 18 months, through a US-led peace plan or, if necessary, military means.

In the West Bank, Netanyahu's camp largely wants to continue with its policy of rapid settlement expansion.

Eisenkot supports Israeli settlements in general, but opposes proceeding with the controversial E1 settlement project which would, in effect, split the West Bank in two. He also wants to crack down on extremist Jewish settlers, and has spoken about creating the conditions for "autonomy or a state-minus" for Palestinians - under ultimate Israeli security control.

For decades, many mainstream Israeli politicians advocated for a two-state solution - the creation of an independent Palestinian state in peaceful coexistence alongside Israel. But support for the idea has been declining for years. In this election, none of the leading Jewish parties are campaigning on it, and many have outright rejected it. Netanyahu has long vowed to block the idea.

When will we know the results?

At 22:00 local time (20:00 GMT) on election day, Israeli broadcasters will publish exit polls. These will give some indication of the direction of voting, but can vary significantly and Friday's polling suggests a clear projected winner is unlikely.

Preliminary results are expected the next day, with official results scheduled to be published on 4 November.

After consulting with party leaders, President Isaac Herzog will then invite whichever leader he believes has the best chance of forming a government to do so.

This process can take more than a month, and if it fails the president may ask another leader to try. If that also fails, Knesset members can ask the president to allow a third leader to try. And if that fails, new elections will be called.

Between 2019 and 2022, Israel held five separate elections as parties struggled time and again to co-operate.

The bitter row over military service that could shape Israel's future

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmvg7w0x742do, 8 days ago

Furious protesters are denouncing Israeli security forces as "Nazis" - but this is not a scene from a pro-Palestinian rally on the streets of London or Paris. This clash is in the heart of Israel, in which hundreds of ultra-Orthodox men in white shirts, black fedoras and long black frock coats face off against the military police.

The flashpoint is a building in the city of Modi'in, midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where a young ultra-Orthodox Jewish (or Haredi) man lives. The police have come to arrest him after he failed to report for military service.

The clash in early October, seen by the BBC in a video, is one of many in recent months in which one of the deepest schisms in Israeli society has become ever more exposed.

This widening fault line is playing out against the backdrop of the wars Israel is currently fighting, including the unresolved conflict against Hamas in Gaza - as well as increasing violence by extremist settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Once a tiny minority, the ultra-Orthodox remain a group apart even as their numbers expand year by year. Currently, they are estimated to make up about 14% of the population, and the birth rate within the community remains far higher than among other Israelis. If their numbers continue to grow at a similar rate, they could make up one-third of the Jewish Israeli population by 2050.

As the ultra-Orthodox community becomes bigger, so has the debate around the expense of supporting them with stipends so they can devote themselves to full-time religious study. Subsidies to the group are estimated to cost the government 35bn shekels (£8.4bn) per year and, until recently, they were exempted from military service.

Now they're no longer an insignificant minority, they're facing pressure to engage more with wider Israeli society.

National security and the economy are two of the key issues this election. That means the division between the ultra-Orthodox and the majority of Israelis who believe they are not contributing their fair share to either is starker than ever.

With no outright majority likely for any current political alliance, and the future of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in doubt, the role of smaller parties - including Haredi parties - will once again be crucial in deciding who will govern Israel.

To have any chance of staying in power, Netanyahu needs to keep the ultra-Orthodox parties on side, however much pressure there is within Israel for their special status to be diminished.

A group apart

From the ultra-Orthodox perspective, their social contract with the Israeli state is increasingly coming under pressure. Their all but exclusive focus on the study of Judaism's religious texts - such as the Torah, the Jewish Bible - means their education system is separate and many Haredim are not part of Israel's workforce.

For the ultra-Orthodox, the biggest issue of all is holding on to the exemption from serving in the IDF for students at traditional religious - or yeshiva - institutions. This dates back to the earliest days of the Israeli state when the Haredim were a minuscule community of survivors struggling to rebuild from the near extinction of the Holocaust.

But as Israel has become more embattled after the attacks of October 7, fighting wars on several fronts, their near complete absence from the country's conscription army has become more controversial.

Religious students and their rabbis believe that if young ultra-Orthodox men enter the military, they will be exposed to influences and behaviours that may decisively turn them away from their community. Beyond that, they believe that their staying true to the traditions of their community is vital for the very survival not only of Israel but the Jewish people.

When asked not long after October 7 why the ultra-Orthodox didn't contribute more to the military in such an emergency, one of the community's most senior leaders, Rabbi Dov Landau, said that not only should religious students not serve in the army, but they shouldn't even visit the wounded or attend the funerals of soldiers.

The rabbi said that in a time of such danger, only Torah students could protect Israel spiritually. "Salvation only comes through Torah learning, orderly Torah learning. And any neglect of or disruption to Torah learning, woe and alas for what will happen… The more Torah learners multiply, the more Torah learners increase their learning, the better. They protect us."

It would be a considerable understatement to say that this view is not shared by wider Israeli society. Polls have shown public support for conscripting the ultra-Orthodox surge throughout the war in Gaza. Many see it as a dereliction of responsibility by the Haredi community, made all the more galling by the fact that such a stance comes at the expense of taxpayers. The IDF has bemoaned a deficit in manpower, while many Israelis have had to serve hundreds of days in the past three years.

Dahlia Scheindlin is a leading political consultant and pollster in Israel. She says this issue is critical for Netanyahu and is key to understanding this moment in Israeli society against the backdrop of the war in Gaza, particularly among the political right. "Really the most burning, more immediate issue is the right-wing communities who are furious at the government for protecting the blanket exemption from the IDF at a time when, especially among the right, but really everybody in the Jewish community in Israel, is serving and many dying in these wars."

Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the exemption for ultra-Orthodox men from serving in the military was effectively null and void. That could have meant that those dedicated to full-time religious study would now be drafted.

The reaction from the Haredi community was one of fury. Hundreds of thousands of Haredim held protests, blocking the main highways. And as with the incident in Modi'in, they tried to prevent the arrest of religious students for evading conscription. Protests have continued off and on, and densely-populated Haredi areas are often the backdrops for confrontation with the security forces.

Consequences at the polls

This is a row that is playing out in the election.

There are two parties that have traditionally represented the Haredi community. One is United Torah Judaism – or UTJ – and represents Ashkenazi Jews, or Jews of European origin. The other is Shas, which was formed later and represents the Sephardi and Mizrahi – Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. They share a core agenda, which puts religious study above all else, including any questions around relations with the Palestinians.

Both UTJ and Shas have been part of Netanyahu's coalition - and they used their political clout to find ways to try to block enforcement of the Supreme Court ruling. On several occasions, they threatened to pull out of the alliance and bring the government down. UTJ acted on this but continued to support the government from outside, while Shas remained within the coalition.

Centre-right politician Gadi Eisenkot, who's shaped up as Netanyahu's main rival in this month's election, does not support their stance. He has made clear his belief that the idea of the ultra-Orthodox constituting a separate state within Israel with its own rules has become increasingly toxic. "A country that sends its best sons and daughters to fight and sacrifice their lives cannot tolerate a reality in which a state within a state exists," he said.

All this has meant that the issue of conscription exemption for ultra-Orthodox men is the number one priority on the electoral agenda of both Shas and UTJ.

A recent remark by a UTJ parliamentary candidate, Eliakim Stark, has raised the temperature further. He compared the plight of ultra-Orthodox men evading the military draft to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. It triggered furious rebukes from opposition leaders from across the political spectrum.

Daniel Goldman, an activist who specialises in Haredi issues, says that the two main Haredi parties feel increasingly embattled and less open to compromise.

He says the ultra-Orthodox don't believe that the state really needs their boys to bolster numbers. "It's at least partly down to the fact that the Haredi parties see the state as wanting to take their boys out of the community and change them from ultra-Orthodox to either regular religious or secular, God forbid, as they perceive it," he says. "And so in that environment of tension, they've actually hardened their positions."

Yitzhak Goldknopf from the UTJ, a former minister, has gone so far as to issue an ultimatum: "The Haredim will not change their way of life because there is an army and a war... If there is no choice and they must leave the country, they will leave."

But this is having a clear impact on the electoral fortunes of the Netanyahu coalition - of which Shas in particular has long been a key part. Without them, Netanyahu's alliance would fall short of the more than 60 seats needed for a majority in the Knesset.

Dahlia Scheindlin, the Israeli pollster, says that the refusal to give up the draft exemption by Shas and UTJ is damaging Netanyahu's coalition. "It is one of the main reasons why the coalition is unable to win back the kind of support that they had in 2022 when they won 64 seats," she says. "They're currently polling at about 50 to 52 seats."

All Netanyahu's challengers advocate for ending the ultra-Orthodox exemption and cutting funds to institutions or individuals who refuse the draft. On the left, Yair Golan has called for an immediate mobilisation of those who are eligible.

So, despite statements from Shas and UTJ that they would switch allegiance from Netanyahu if he were to dilute his support, there seems for now nowhere else for them to go.

Anshel Pfeffer has been a leading commentator on the Israeli political scene for years - now mainly as the Economist's correspondent in Israel. He says Netanyahu's position looks shaky. "There are two things that are bringing together the current opposition bloc," he says. "One is obviously they want to replace Netanyahu and the other is they are capitalising on this really hostile environment nowadays towards the ultra-Orthodox, mainly over the issue of the draft to the army.

"Netanyahu has been willing for many years, to basically give the ultra-Orthodox whatever they want. They're not going to get that from the opposition."

A potential compromise?

Into this arena of resentment and intransigence, a new Haredi party has emerged this year, presenting itself as a break with the traditional mindset of Shas and UTJ.

Essentially, the Haredi Public Party is offering a compromise in which the ultra-Orthodox would contribute more to Israel as a whole while maintaining the core of their identity.

For the first time in the ultra-Orthodox community, it is also fielding two female candidates.

One of them, Ziva Ginz, explained to the BBC her party's position on the military draft. Key to it is men serving being allowed to remain culturally Haredi. "Anyone whose life is genuinely devoted to full-time Torah study should be able to continue learning. Everyone who isn't sitting and studying for a full day should serve alongside the rest of Israeli youth, in frameworks where a young man can enter as a Haredi and finish as a Haredi," she says.

But it may be too soon for such efforts at compromise to make an impact this election.

Anshel Pfeffer says that it's difficult to sway the base vote in the ultra-Orthodox community, where most still essentially follow what their rabbi says they should do.

"And once people are voting for other parties, they won't necessarily do so for another Haredi party," Pfeffer explains. "That's why we're seeing people like [far-right leader and National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir making inroads in the Haredi community, because he's the only non-Haredi party leader who actually talks to young Haredi. Basically, every other party in Israel doesn't even try."

This is reflected in the polls, which show his Jewish Power party is making gains.

If Ben Gvir's actions are increasingly seen as tainting Israel's international image with his support for policies such as annexing the occupied West Bank, his hard-right message is attracting a bigger core of support within the country. His ultra-nationalist ethos is not one that traditionally overlaps with policies of the Haredi parties, but they share a position on the right of Israeli politics.

So for some ultra-Orthodox voters looking for a new political home, Ben Gvir represents the nearest alternative. His self-portrayal as a strong man unafraid to take an extreme position against those he perceives as Israel's enemies in the face of international condemnation may attract some already leaning to the far right in the Haredi community.

No alliance appears close to achieving a majority, however, so there is bound to be a lot of horse trading to secure a workable coalition after the vote.

Netanyahu will naturally apply his exceptional political skills to trying to find one way or another to stay in power.

As ever, that leaves the smaller parties with the ability to play the role of kingmaker. That's a role that the ultra-Orthodox parties have been known for in the past. But this time they may not be the decisive factor.

"The truth is, any small party can become a kingmaker," Dahlia Scheindlin says. "I don't think it would take too much to lure the Haredi parties away from Netanyahu... The thing is, though, I don't think the opposition parties will want to lure them in unless they have some promise that they're really prepared to make serious concessions on the draft. The opposition parties are absolutely staking their platforms and their promise to the voters on that issue."

This time, rather than being the kingmakers, it may turn out that the ultra-Orthodox parties help bring down the king.

Lead image: AFP via Getty

How Arab parties could hold critical balance of power in Israeli election

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx8dzrp768j8o, 11 days ago

At rush hour in Nazareth, the largest Arab-majority city in Israel, students are handing out leaflets by the roadside urging motorists to vote in next week's closely fought, general election. Polls indicate that Arab parties could be left holding a critical balance of power.

Disaffection has often driven down past turnout among Arab Israelis - who account for about a fifth of the population and often describe themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel. But this election, there is a strong push to get rid of the most right-wing governing coalition in the country's history - an alliance between veteran Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties.

"I see it as our duty to bring down this extremist government. They treat us as second-class," says Arkan Badran, 23, who is with the students giving out flyers. "I call on all young men and women to vote for Arab lists, which represent us, because this is our future."

Most opinion polls indicate that neither Netanyahu and his partners nor the main "Change Bloc", led by centre-right former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, has a clear path to a parliamentary majority.

If they are right, after the election anti-Netanyahu parties wanting to form a governing coalition would either have to go back on pledges not to work with the prime minister or make a deal with Arab-majority lists.

A major sticking point is that Eisenkot has so far ruled out forming a government with Arab parties, citing a lack of shared values.

Israel's politics and society have been changed by the deadly, unprecedented Hamas-led assault on the country on 7 October 2023, and subsequent war in Gaza. There is increased mistrust of and hostility towards the country's Arab minority.

"After October 7, we were treated as enemies of this country," says Suha Salman Mousa of the Mossawa Centre in Nazareth, which advocates for equal rights for Arab citizens. "There was shrinking space for freedom of speech. There were major arrests, there was also firing of people from their workplaces because they put something on social media or they went out against the war on Gaza."

Salman Mousa accuses ministers of "systematic discrimination and incitement" against Arab Israelis. Civil society groups say they have disproportionately cut budgets for Arab communities. The government says reductions are needed to fund wartime defence and security spending.

There have also been politicised campaigns against Arab physicians working in Israeli hospitals and racially motivated attacks on Arab bus drivers by Jewish Israelis.

Some electioneering has sought to capitalise by deepening social divisions. The far-right Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has vowed to "Judaise" parts of the northern Galilee and southern Negev regions where most Arabs live, likening this to expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The majority of Arab Israelis are descendants of Palestinians who remained within what became Israel during the war that surrounded the creation of the state in 1948, when hundreds of thousands were forced from or fled their homes. Israel's current government often frames them as a threat to the state's Jewish identity. Recently, the prime minister has claimed that his rivals plan to team up with Arabs and form a "dangerous government".

To make this point, his campaign has put up billboards, including one at a road junction at the main entrance to Nazareth. They suggest a choice between: "Right or Palestine" - with pictures of main opposition figures, including right-wingers, depicted as representing the latter not the former. The Netanyahu campaign has also used AI-generated videos to present his opponents embracing Arab leaders.

At Radio Nas, a popular Arabic-language station in Nazareth, I meet news anchor Mohammed Magadli, who is also an analyst for Israel's Channel 12. His father, Raleb Magadli, served as Israel's first Muslim minister between 2007 and 2009, representing the Labour party.

I ask the younger Magadli what he makes of Change Bloc leaders refusing to join forces with Arab parties.

"In a word it's racism. But if we're trying to explain why, it's because of the political interests of Benjamin Netanyahu," he says. "He's trying all the time to pull the legitimacy of the Arab parties - because they're Arab, because they're Palestinian. This is affecting the majority of the Jewish parties in Israel."

Polls this week have suggested that both Eisenkot's bloc and Netanyahu's religious-nationalist bloc could each win around 50 seats of the 120 in Israel's parliament while 13 or 14 seats in total could go to Arab-majority groupings.

These are the Joint Arab List, a coalition of Hadash, Balad and Taal, and the smaller United Arab List, an Islamist party headed by politician Mansour Abbas.

While Abbas's party was originally created as part of the Islamic Movement in Israel - which has socially conservative values - he has become known for joining with Jewish partners. He prioritises solving the problems of Arab Israelis and speaks relatively little of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Abbas has had a taste of power. In 2021, he became a minister in a previous, short-lived Israeli government led by Naftali Bennett - now a right-wing member of Eisenkot's bloc.

For this election, he has taken the surprise step of giving the number two position on his slate to a Jewish former police official and centrist member of parliament, Yoav Segalovitz. Abbas believes Eisenkot and others will be more open to an alliance with his party after the election and insists he wants to join the next government.

"We've reached the conclusion that parliamentary representation is not enough to serve Arab society. We decided to take responsibility, to become part of the solution to our problems and to offer hope to both Arabs and Jews," he tells me.

"That's why our approach has been driven by a desire to reach a position of influence, not merely representation."

Meanwhile, the Joint List - which is made up of secular parties and advocates for equal rights for Arab Israelis, an end to Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories, and a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - aims to wield a position of influence within the opposition.

It talks of providing an electoral "safety net" to those who could replace the Netanyahu government, in return for support on important policies.

A main issue in this election for Arab Israelis is rampant gang crime.

In September, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute think tank found that this was the most important factor for 53.5% of Arab citizens when deciding which party to vote for.

Murders within the community reached a record high of 252 last year – about five times higher than the number of Jewish Israelis who were killed, according to the Abraham Initiatives, a Jewish-Arab organisation that promotes coexistence.

In Jaffa, a mixed Arab-Jewish neighbourhood which is now joined to Tel Aviv, Ziad Samouni shows me where his son, Hussein, was shot dead by two gunmen on a motorcycle near his home last November.

No arrests have been made in his case. With a low percentage of cases solved, Arab-Israelis accuse the government of inaction.

"It seems they're interested in making sure we reach a situation where the killer is never caught, allowing Arabs in Arab society to keep killing one another," says Samouni, who is now part of a support group, Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace.

The Israeli police told the BBC its investigation into Hussein's murder remained active, adding that it took "every case of violence and crime with the utmost seriousness."

"As a father who's lost a son, of course, I want this bloodshed to end," Samouni tells me. "I wish every Arab citizen who believes there needs to be a change sees that this is a time to go to vote."

This month, Israel's Supreme Court overruled a decision by the Central Elections Committee to disqualify the United Arab List and the Joint List as well as two of their members.

The committee, which is dominated by the governing coalition, argued that they broke a law banning candidates who deny the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. The parties and their representatives strongly denied it.

With just days to go before voting, back in Nazareth, some motorists display flags for their preferred party on their cars.

The stakes are high in this election: Arab citizens could yet decide who wields power in Israel, and they also see this vote as key to their own future in the country.

Newborn twins fight for survival as conflict fuels Yemen's hunger crisis

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr5ynl63v0pyo, 11 days ago

From the day they were born, just seven weeks ago, twins Raghad Hassan and her brother Raad have been battling for survival.

They came into the world prematurely, as fighting surged in Yemen's long-running civil war between Houthi rebel fighters and government forces.

When the Houthis reached their village in the Kahboub mountains in south-west Yemen, their family of seven was forced to flee amid bombs, missiles, and drone attacks – the twins protected only by blankets.

What followed was three days on foot heading for the port city of Aden.

"It was very difficult," says their father, Bajash Ali Sagir Hassan, a softly spoken shepherd. "We didn't find cars or transportation. One kind person brought us here [on the fourth day] while others refused."

As the family walked, the twins got weaker, according to their mother Lina. "They were exhausted… there was cold and dust. Their vomiting and diarrhoea got worse."

By the time the newly homeless family arrived at al-Sadaqah hospital in Aden, the twins were barely clinging to life. "Just skin and bone," said a doctor, shaking his head, as he looked at their wasted limbs.

Raad was the sicker of the two - his ribs visible and his chest heaving as he took rapid, shallow breaths. He was barely bigger than the hands of the nurse who carried him gently to be weighed and measured.

Bajash looked on, worry etched on his face. He told us the twins were fed twice a day, but sometimes he could only give them water - after the war drove up the price of baby milk.

The diagnosis came quickly - severe acute malnutrition. That can be as deadly as a bullet.

Malnutrition in Yemen is a crisis within a crisis - another frontline in a devastating civil war. Hunger did not arrive with conflict, but it's spreading with the latest bloodshed.

The United Nations says around 800,000 people can no longer receive lifesaving aid and more than 250,000 have been displaced, after an informal ceasefire collapsed in the summer.

Since then the Houthis have made a lightning advance along the Red Sea coast, and they have now completely cut off Yemen's third largest city, Taiz.

The UN says civilians there are "at grave risk" and lacking food due to soaring prices.

The internationally-recognised government is fighting back against the Houthis - or trying to - with the help of Saudi air strikes.

Caught in the middle of all this are fathers like Bajash, fighting to get help for their children. We saw another mother with a malnourished baby being turned away.

We followed Bajash as he rushed through the corridors, trying to get the all-important admissions slip. He found an ally, a forceful supervising nurse, Aisha Ragab, who had run from the war herself, back in 2018.

"I feel for them," she said, "because I have already lived through the situation myself."

Two beds could not be found, but Aisha was undeterred.

"I will settle this by having the twins share a bed... so that we can save them. By God, I will convince them [the doctors]."

Within an hour the twins were lying on a single bed, their tiny bodies taking up little space.

Lina was feeding them sips of fortified milk from a tiny bottle, but Raad could not keep it down. He was cradled in her arms - his eyes wide and his cheeks sunken. Asked if she thought her twins would recover, Lina replied quietly, "God willing."

As we walked through the unit with its pink walls, some doors were padlocked shut.

There are 22 beds, but staff told us only 13 patients were admitted at a time - the most critical cases - due to the lack of international funding, staff, and equipment.

That's a bitter pill to swallow for Dr Noor Mohammed, a harried young doctor.

"It's sad to say, but we lose patients [because of the conditions]," she says.

"We don't have good equipment like ventilation machines, and oxygen bottles," she adds. "There are no good resources. A lot of laboratory investigations... it's very hard to do them."

A recent flare-up in fighting has left civilians in the firing line.

Even before the latest escalation, the UN calculated that half a million Yemeni children would suffer from severe acute malnutrition this year.

The malnutrition unit in al-Sadaqah hospital is a conveyor belt of suffering. As one severely ill baby leaves, another arrives. And some of those discharged are back all too soon.

"Sometimes a child comes back to us after a week, or two days," says Dr Mohammed. "Sometimes it is the same day. They come back and we admit them and the story begins again."

They return because parents cannot afford proper nutrition or vitamins or antibiotics.

"Every child here, his parents came because they don't have anything," she tells me. "They don't have money or insurance. They are here because they can't afford a private hospital."

She does her best for them, she says, and she cries for them.

Many parents - like Bajash - are trying to outrun both war, and poverty. He is now a shepherd without a flock. When he fled, he had to leave 10 sheep behind. They were his only livelihood.

As doctors monitored his twins, he cared for his three older children - all aged under five. They lingered on a bench in hospital reception without toys, bedding or baggage of any kind. But they could not sleep there.

So, they spent the night outside, on the street - one more family with war wounds that cannot be seen but will disfigure a generation.

Additional reporting by Wietske Burema, Lee Durant and Suaad Al Salahi

Israel's far right find fertile ground among first-time voters

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmvg632xgndeo, 13 days ago

When Israel's far-right National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, reached voting age, he was rejected from Israel's army for being too politically extreme.

His views have not changed much in the 30 years since then - but Israel has. Once shunned by the political establishment, he is now part of the government's inner sanctum of ministers.

On the campaign trail ahead of Israel's general elections next week, Ben Gvir is often surrounded by a jubilant pack of fresh-faced young fans, waving huge party flags over the heads of his numerous security guards.

At the covered market in Ramle - a mixed city of Jewish and Arab Israelis - he told us his message to young voters was to get out and vote.

"We see the support, we see the love [and] we want to win!" he said.

More than half a million first-time voters will cast their ballots in this election, which many Israelis see as existential for Israel's future security and identity.

Polls suggest it will be a tight race, and the new young voters could help decide the result.

More than 16% are planning to support far-right parties - either Ben Gvir's Jewish Power or the Religious Zionism party of his far-right ally Bezalel Smotrich - according to a poll for one of Israel's most popular newspapers, Yedioth Ahronoth.

And almost three-quarters see themselves as "right or centre-right", according to another survey for Israel's leading Channel 12 television network.

"Itamar Ben Gvir gives me a sense of security," said 20-year-old Mordechai, one of the young fans accompanying the politician to Ramle.

"Like everyone in history, from Trump to Moses, there are slips of the tongue that are a bit less good. So what? 90% of the things by Itamar are amazing."

"Itamar will give us safety, and when we go to the army, someone will have our backs and be behind us," said 18-year-old Nadav.

"I think he's trying to show that we're a strong country. For many years, we couldn't show we're strong in our beliefs. We couldn't express our ideology."

Meir Schreiber, an ultra-Orthodox 23-year-old who grew up in London, said the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel, which triggered the Gaza war, also convinced him that Ben Gvir was the right choice.

"Young people understand that peace isn't something we can do," he told me, "because what happens to you when you're young shapes your personality - we saw October 7."

Ben Gvir is a divisive candidate in a divided nation: his political positions include annexation of the occupied West Bank, Jewish settlement of Gaza, and the "voluntary emigration" of Palestinians - positions and rhetoric that are widely condemned by liberal Israelis.

Several Western countries have imposed sanctions or travel bans on Ben Gvir and Smotrich for incitement against Palestinians. Both men are powerful ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's governing coalition.

As he and his entourage pushed their way between the stalls, some shopkeepers threw sweets; others, dark looks.

"I don't like him, he sows discord," one stallholder said. "Ramle is a mixed city - Jews and Arabs. There's no problem here, even after 7 October, but his message preys on young uneducated people."

The fact that he appears more popular with 18 to 22-year-olds than with their parents' generation is often put down, at least partly, to the impact of the 7 October attacks.

But political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin, who previously ran many Israeli political campaigns, said it was more than that.

"For about the last 20 years, we've seen young Israeli Jews are more right wing than average, and significantly more right-wing on many measures than the 55+ group," she told me.

"They have grown up under a series of wars with no personal experience of efforts to achieve peace. But for the most part, they have been socialised into the most extreme terms of the debate [as] legitimate to discuss: annexation, settlement expansion and - after 7 October - annexation of Gaza. And now they're voting for the first time."

A series of classroom debates filmed by Israeli satirist Lior Schleien recently highlighted the extreme views of some young Israelis.

The debates, in which he challenges racist or extreme views, drew a lot of attention in Israel, and included one exchange in which a student advocates killing all Arab citizens of Israel. That particular video has since been removed from Schleien's website.

Surveys suggest that first-time voters here are highly motivated to cast their ballots, with more than 80% saying they are likely to do so. But the same research suggests they are also more sceptical about democratic institutions and less engaged by political protests or petitions.

In a race that is largely deadlocked between two stable blocs of pro-government and anti-government supporters, getting new voters to the polling stations could make all the difference.

Opposition parties have been engaging younger voters with warnings about threats to democracy, new social media videos and younger candidates.

"In 2022 [in the last election], only 59% of the citizens living in Tel Aviv voted - in the most liberal city in the whole Middle East! In places where they voted for Ben Gvir, they voted at around 90%," said Yonatan Shalev, a 24-year-old candidate with the centre-right opposition party, Beyachad ("Together"), led by former prime minister Naftali Bennett.

He told me that Ben Gvir had understood the power of social media faster than other politicians.

"The liberal politicians didn't believe in TikTok, didn't believe in Instagram, and he took advantage of that arena."

Shalev said he had pushed his own party to reach young voters through social media.

"Three months ago, Ben Gvir was still the politician with the most amount of views on TikToks, the most amount of likes on TikTok, and Instagram as well," he explained. "Right now, Naftali Bennett is leading [that]."

His boss's Instagram page now features videos of the former prime minister lifting weights to rap music, or chatting with Shalev in the street. Even Netanyahu has joined in with a fast-paced militaristic social media video set to heavy beats.

"Younger people don't watch the news in Israel, [they] don't read the newspapers. The younger generation is getting all its details from TikTok and Instagram".

Yahlee Reske and Mika Magal, both 21 years old, rushed out of a nearby bar when they saw Shalev walk past.

"I love him," Mika told me.

"Yes," agreed Yahlee. "He's our age, he's so young and knows so much. It's hard to listen to people who are old and saying the same things over and over again."

Yahlee said she was doing national military service when the 7 October attacks unfolded.

"I don't think I ever looked at politics until then," she said. "But maybe if the government had been different on 7 October, things would have been better."

The same poll suggesting 16% of first-time voters would back a far-right party also suggested that Beyachad alone would take almost 9% of their votes, as would the centre-right Yashar party of Gadi Eisenkot.

At a student event in Tel Aviv last weekend, Ben Gvir was interrupted by protesters shouting, "Fascism will not pass", and forced off the stage.

Israel's young voters may be moving to the right, but they are still as divided as their country, over who they believe is the guardian of Israel's security and identity, and who is an existential threat.

Additional reporting by Morgan Gisholt Minard and Gidi Kleiman

Netanyahu's bloc leading Israel election but short of majority, partial results show

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmdx3knq1xexo, 4 days ago

Partial results from Israel's general election show veteran Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu marginally ahead of his rival, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, but still short of a majority in parliament.

With 99% of ballots counted, Netanyahu's Likud party and its far-right and ultra-Orthodox Jewish allies were on track to win 53 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. Eisenkot's Yashar party and three other Jewish opposition parties in his bloc were set for 48.

Both leaders have said they will try to form a governing coalition.

Arab-led parties, which are on course to win an unprecedented 19 seats, could emerge as kingmakers. But all but one of the Jewish parties have pledged not to work with them.

On Thursday, officials began counting as many as 480,000 absentee ballots from groups including soldiers, diplomats and hospital patients, who could not get to polling stations.

These votes may change the final number of seats allotted to each party under Israel's proportional representation system.

Once the results are confirmed, President Isaac Herzog will hold consultations with all the political factions and invite the leader whom he believes has the best chance of success to form a government - a process that could take weeks.

If they fail, then ultimately there would have to be another election.

During a meeting at his residence in Jerusalem on Wednesday, Herzog praised the 77.7% turnout in the previous day's election, which was the highest in more than two decades.

"It is a badge of honour for Israeli society, and it was remarkable to see how deep the desire for democracy is in Israel," he said.

He added that he expected to receive the official results next week, after which he would begin discussions with every faction.

"We must do everything we can, certainly after yesterday, to avoid another round of elections. So, I expect everyone who comes here to come with an open mind."

Both the prime minister and his main rival have insisted that they should be tasked with forming a governing coalition.

Eisenkot declared that the public had "spoken in favour of change", after initial exit polls published by three Israeli broadcasters projected that his "Change Bloc" would emerge with between 52 and 53 seats in the Knesset, compared to 50 seats for Netanyahu's bloc.

"The coalition of failure has lost the people's trust," he told supporters at Yashar's election headquarters in Tel Aviv. "I will work with my partners to ensure that the people's decision is translated into a Zionist government."

Later, the broadcasters updated their exit polls, with two projecting that the rival blocs would be tied on 51 seats and one giving Netanyahu's bloc a narrow three-seat lead.

Netanyahu then appeared at Likud's headquarters in Jerusalem and declared that his right-wing bloc had won a "great majority".

"We must put in place a strong right-wing national government," he said. "It is forbidden, simply forbidden, to endanger Israel by forming a government that relies on anti-Zionist Arab parties."

As the votes were counted, it emerged that his bloc had done better than the exit polls predicted and was on course to win 53 seats. However, that figure is 15 seats fewer than it had once controlled in the last Knesset.

Tuesday's election was the first since the deadly Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the wars that followed in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

It was also seen by Israelis as one of the most consequential in the country's history, because it could decide not just their leadership but whether the country continues on its current hard-line, religious-nationalist trajectory.

Key campaign issues included accountability for the security failures that led to the 7 October attacks, the conduct of regional wars, conscripting ultra-Orthodox Jewish men into the military, judicial reforms and Israel's international standing.

Avigail Levine from Kfar Saba, who voted for former prime minister Naftali Bennett's opposition Beyachad party, told the BBC that she was disappointed with the election results.

"I was hoping for new leadership. I feel we need it as a nation," she said. "The people in power on 7 October should not be in power now."

She said people were frustrated that Netanyahu had not shouldered responsibility for what happened three years ago, when about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage. Her husband's grandmother was among those who died in Kibbutz Be'eri.

Gal from Ramat Gan said he voted for Netanyahu because Israelis "cannot relax and live in peace with neighbours when all they want is to erase us from the map".

He also said he was "afraid of the strengthening of the Arab political parties".

The two Arab parties - the United Arab List and the Joint List - are set to almost double their representation because of a surge in turnout among Arab Israelis, who account for about a fifth of the population and often describe themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Mahdi Kabaha, who lives in a village near Haifa and campaigned to get out the Arab vote, described the result as "historic".

"Arab citizens came out and said clearly: we want a real say in this country," he said.

The head of the Joint List, Yousef Jabareen, told the BBC that Arab voters had been motivated in part by the opportunity to remove far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir from office, whom he accused of racism and "provocation against our community".

Ben-Gvir, the leader of the Jewish Power party, has called for the annexation of the occupied West Bank, Jewish settlement of Gaza, and the "voluntary emigration" of Palestinians. Several Western countries have imposed sanctions on him for incitement against Palestinians.

United Arab List leader Mansour Abbas, who served in a short-lived governing coalition formed after the 2021 elections, said on Tuesday night that he hoped "the numbers will work out and we, the Change Bloc and the UAL, can ensure that there are 61 Knesset seats".

The leader of the left-wing Democrats party, Yair Golan, told his partners in Eisenkot's bloc that there was an "opportunity to form a change government in partnership" with the Arab parties and replace Netanyahu's coalition.

"We have no future here if we don't stop being afraid. And if we don't put an end to racism," he wrote on X.

Eisenkot has previously raised objections or attached conditions to that kind of alliance, including recognising Israel as Jewish and democratic, and Hamas as a terrorist organisation that must be destroyed. The right-wing parties in his bloc, meanwhile, have flatly rejected it.

"The opposition parties cannot dictate any conditions," Jabareen said. "If the opposition in Israel are willing to afford real and substantive change, and an alternative for the dangerous, extreme-right-wing government... they will have to negotiate with us."

Netanyahu's Likud party has accused the Arab parties of "stealing" the election.

It complained to the Central Elections Committee (CEC) on Wednesday that they had resorted to "bribery, threats, violence, fraud and the use of prohibited software to encourage voters", without providing any evidence. The CEC said it would examine the allegations as part of a comprehensive post-election review.

On Thursday, CEC chairman Justice Noam Sohlberg instructed the Shin Bet domestic security service to investigate what he described as "serious suspicions" regarding "improper influence through foreign funding by external actors operating against Israeli interests".

He gave no further details, but the Haaretz newspaper cited a source as saying the committee had been presented with a claim that the Gulf state of Qatar had provided funding aimed at increasing voter turnout in Arab communities.

"This is an attack on democracy aimed at enabling foreign control of the Knesset, the Islamization of Israel, and the removal of the right-wing government," Likud said.

But Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh, who is part of the Joint List, dismissed the allegation, saying: "The losing side is constructing a racist blood libel and calling on the security agencies to use force in order to overturn the election results."

Qatar's foreign ministry spokesman, Majed al-Ansari, denied that it had interfered in Israeli elections or funded any activities intended to influence their outcome. "The accusations are ridiculous and dangerous in equal measure," he warned.

Israeli exit polls suggest no clear winner in pivotal general election

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq1kdgxw302zo, 5 days ago

Exit polls suggest there is no clear winner of Israel's pivotal general election, with neither veteran Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor former military chief Gadi Eisenkot on track to secure a majority.

Two Israeli broadcasters projected that Eisenkot's Yashar party and three other Jewish opposition parties in his "Change Bloc" would win 51 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, as would Netanyahu's Likud party and its far-right and ultra-Orthodox Jewish allies. A third broadcaster's poll gave Netanyahu a lead of three seats.

Much will depend on the role played by the two Arab parties, which were projected to win a record 18 or 19 seats.

Voter turnout on Tuesday was the highest in decades.

It stood at 77.7% when polls closed at 22:00 local time (20:00 GMT), which was the highest at that hour since 1999, the Central Elections Committee said.

Official results will start to be published overnight, but an estimated 600,000 absentee ballots cast mostly by military personnel - around 10% of the total number of votes - will not be fully counted until Thursday.

Once the final results are confirmed, and following consultations with all the political factions, Israel's president will invite the party leader whom he believes has the best chance of success to form a governing coalition - a process that could take weeks.

If they fail, then ultimately there would have to be another election.

At the headquarters of Eisenkot's Yashar party in Tel Aviv, his supporters cheered and chanted "Bibi, go home!" after the initial exit polls published by public broadcaster Kan, Channel 12 and Channel 13 projected that his bloc would emerge as the biggest in the Knesset, with between 52 and 53 seats, compared to 50 seats for Netanyahu's governing coalition.

Eisenkot said they had "made history" and promised to "ensure that the people's decision is translated into a Zionist government: stable and good for all of Israel's citizens".

His ally in the Beyachad party, former prime minister Yair Lapid, said Netanyahu's bloc had suffered a "crushing defeat".

However, there was no sign of surrender at the Jerusalem headquarters of Netanyahu's Likud party, which was projected to be the largest party in parliament.

Supporters there told the BBC that they were nervous. "It's not over until it's over, but I'm sweating," Itzik said.

Netanyahu's ally, Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, said celebrations on the left were "premature", while National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told supporters of his far-right Jewish Power party to pray that the final results would lead to a "full-on right-wing government".

In the early hours of Wednesday, the broadcasters updated their exit polls. Kan and Channel 13's projections showed the blocs tied on 51 seats, while Channel 12 gave Netanyahu's bloc 52 seats and Eisenkot's 49.

Later, Netanyahu appeared at Likud's headquarters and declared in a speech that his right-wing bloc had a "great majority". He also called for the formation of "a strong, right-wing national government".

The two Arab parties - the United Arab List and the Joint List - were projected to win several extra seats in parliament following a reportedly strong turnout among Arab Israelis, who account for about a fifth of the population and often describe themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel.

They are emerging as the kingmakers in the election, but only one party has openly backed working with them in government.

"I hope that the numbers will work out and we, the Change Bloc and the UAL, can ensure that there are 61 Knesset seats," United Arab List leader Mansour Abbas said.

After the 2021 elections, Abbas's party was part of a governing coalition led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, which lasted a year before collapsing.

The chairman of the Joint List, Yousef Jabareen, warned that the grouping "cannot be ignored under any political scenario".

Tuesday's election was the first since the deadly Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the wars that followed in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

Key campaign issues included accountability for the security failures that led to the 7 October attacks, the conduct of regional wars, how to share the growing burden of military service, judicial reforms, and Israel's international standing.

Outside a polling station in an opposition stronghold in northern Tel Aviv, campaigners young and old were out in force, using every last moment to win that extra vote.

Zivit Abramson, 88, told the BBC that she had voted for Eisenkot because Netanyahu was "ruining this country". "He's all about himself, only about himself," she added.

Elsewhere, Claire Tugendhaft said she had voted for Netanyahu "because I think he's the best man in the country to lead the country towards the outside world".

The prime minister and his government allies urged their supporters to head to the polls with warnings about a surge in turnout among left-wing and Arab voters.

"If you don't vote, we'll wake up tomorrow with a left-wing government, Arab parties, extreme Islam, and we'll lose the country," Netanyahu was filmed saying.

Likud and several other right-wing parties asked for voting hours to be extended beyond 22:00 local time - a move many of their opponents saw as a sign of growing desperation.

The Central Elections Committee ultimately rejected their request, saying that "the current circumstances do not justify an extension" and that the high turnout "reflects strong public engagement in the democratic process".

Europe's youth is on the march - but does anything actually unite them?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2ke80nd929o, 4 days ago

From Milan, to Marseille, to Madrid and in so many other cities across Europe, streets have erupted in colourful, passionate protests in recent weeks. While most started peacefully, a large number ended in shocking scenes of violence and looting. There have been allegations of radical left-wing groups sparking riots intentionally and reports of police heavy-handedness.

We've seen thousands rallying in Rome and Florence. Hundreds of thousands across France. In Madrid, an encampment of tents has occupied a city-centre square since late September. In Lisbon, tens of thousands of mostly young people marched earlier this month. Tear gas and water cannon were used on protesters in Brussels, after young men dressed in black, their faces covered to hide their identities, threw rocks and firecrackers at police. In Albania, demonstrators alleging government corruption are demanding that their Prime Minister Edi Rama - already 13 years in power - stand down.

This continent feels volatile, socially and politically.

I've spent years in Europe reporting from a multitude of demonstrations, both peaceful and violent. I remember well the ardent Catalan pro-independence marches of 2017, the desperation and Molotov cocktails flying through Athens' streets during the 2015 Greek debt crisis, and various outbreaks of violence in France during President Emmanuel Macron's first term in office, sparked by fuel tax and pension reform proposals.

But this feels different. Protests are exploding simultaneously across Europe and the majority of demonstrators - both peaceful and violent - are young. Some really young. Among those arrested, there's an eyebrow-raising number of minors. Over half of those detained in Barcelona scuffles last weekend were under 18. Minors were among those apprehended by police in Milan after clashes, according to Italy's LaPresse news agency.

Europe's governments, for the most part, have been careful to distinguish between looters and rioters on the one hand, and loud but peaceful, legally organised demonstrations on the other. The latter tend to focus around a particular cause. In the current protest wave, placards and chants mainly take aim at education grievances, social inequalities and the rising cost of living - though each country also comes with its own unique set of complaints.

What has triggered this public fury in Europe's youth, seemingly so quickly? Are all these demonstrations in some way interwoven? And with major European elections on the horizon, how will governments choose to respond - listening to protesters' concerns, or playing the law and order card to win support from older voters?

Protest 'TikTokisation'

Students have taken to the streets in France, Belgium, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Serbia and Albania - a more than 1,000-mile span of the continent.

Demonstrations are often organised in an ad hoc way via TikTok or Instagram. Belgium's interior minister has complained about what he calls the "TikTokisation" of protests.

Student unions play a role in organising marches, but they are also inspired by the actions of peers in other countries, even other continents. Think of the so-called Cockroach student movement in India - a Gen Z social and political protest movement that emerged in May this year, starting with criticism of the Indian education system.

France, where the current wave of student protests kicked off in late September, fuelled by student complaints over staff shortages and dilapidated buildings, is a stand-out catalyst in Europe. There's a saying in neighbouring Belgium: whenever it pours in Paris, it at least drizzles in Brussels. The Belgian capital and the town of Liège have also now seen weeks of protesting youngsters.

In Barcelona this weekend, students were encouraged to demonstrate under the social media hashtag #InstitutsIndignats, echoing the French slogan, Lycées Indignés (Outraged High Schools).

In Athens, 17-year-old Greek school pupil Yiannis Papanikolaou told AFP: "School buildings are terrible and poorly maintained… I think something might change, because of what France is doing, France will spur Greece."

Stagnation and affordability fears

There's a continent-wide sense of economic malaise felt by large numbers of young people – and it goes far beyond education. They worry about the environment, and fret that AI will rob them of job opportunities. They fear the spiralling cost of living could prevent them from finishing their education and stop them buying or renting a home big enough to start a family.

In Madrid and in Lisbon, frustration has focused on the prohibitive price tag attached to housing. Portuguese Instagram-linked campaigns stated "enough is enough" and called on people to take to the streets as peers had done in Spain.

In Lisbon, Carolina ⁠Cruz, 26, a PhD student and biology researcher, said she faces losing her home as her rental contract nears expiry. "I'm the first person in my family to enter a doctoral programme and even with all the studying I've done, I still can't make it," she told Reuters.

It's an anger shared by 22-year-old Riccardo, a protester in Italy's financial capital, Milan. "Even if we don't manage to throw the country into chaos like in France or block every road like in Spain, the aim is at least people will start talking about these issues again," he told AFP.

And it's certainly not just young people on the left of politics who are angry. At the presidential campaign launch of French nationalist Marine Le Pen last weekend, young supporters described different concerns to me. Calling themselves the "silent majority" - not (yet) out demonstrating - they say they also worry deeply about "uncontrolled immigration" and safety on France's streets, as well as the cost of living.

Overlapping crises

The outpouring of discontent has spread beyond young people to include trade unions, France's disparate Yellow Jacket movement that protested against the cost of living crisis during Macron's first term, and other citizens' initiatives. This weekend, Kent in coastal southern England saw two protests, one for and one against immigration.

This miscellaneous mix of protests can seem confusing.

Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council of Foreign Relations, speaks of a build-up of cascading, competing crises in Europe, none of which have ever been properly resolved, he says. That sense of pent-up anger is now bubbling over onto the streets.

"One crisis layers on top of the other," he told me. "The financial crisis of 2007-8, the migrant crisis of 2015, the environmental crisis, Covid, inflation after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and now again with the war in the Gulf."

Leonard says different "tribes" have emerged out of these crises. Social media consumption and algorithms harden their differing perspectives, leading to a real sense of polarisation in Europe.

"We've already seen this in the US," says Leonard. "A sense of 'my crisis is more important than your crisis'."

Nathalie Tocci, a former Italian government adviser who is now a politics professor at Johns Hopkins University, tells me we shouldn't be so taken aback by the protests, or the youth engagement in them.

"We tend to think of youngsters as politically switched off and disinterested. We think they don't bother to go out to vote etc, but they are truly engaged," she told me, "just in a different, more grassroots way. Think of the "Fridays for the Future [environmental movement] across Europe a few years ago, or the demonstrations against Israel's actions in Gaza after 7 October.

She points to the student-led protest movement in Serbia, which recently defeated long-standing leader Aleksandar Vučić in parliamentary elections. "It's quite something. They kept going and going, for more than two years. What sticking power will these new European street demos have? That's not yet clear."

And what about the looting and the violence?

Intelligence services in France and Belgium have described looting on the edges of legally approved protests as mainly opportunistic.

The rioting, they suggest, is a mixture of "mindless violence" - also identified by the Spanish authorities in Barcelona to describe clashes there at the weekend - plus mayhem intentionally orchestrated by youth from ultra-left radical groups.

Tocci reminded me that, in Italy, you can hear the word "maranza" being used by some Italians upset by the perpetrators of destruction seemingly for the sake of it: smashing or burning cars or public bins, for example.

In France, rioters are often described as "casseurs" - people who break things. But in private, some use a more politically charged term - "racaille". Like "maranza" in Italy, it's pejorative slang, generally used to describe disaffected, rowdy urban youths frequently from working-class and/or immigrant backgrounds. It was used in October 2005 by then-French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, to describe young delinquents and rioters during a tense visit to the housing projects of Paris suburb Argenteuil.

French media has also asked whether there's been an alliance of convenience, however informal or incidental, between two groups of youths: ultra-left activists and young people from France's disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Like the anti-capitalist left, youth from public housing projects on the outskirts of French cities (known as the banlieues) often feel discriminated against, and complain of police heavy handedness towards them.

The political right and centre in France, including Macron, blame left-wing radical groups and "delinquents" for planning the riots. In contrast to Le Pen's National Rally Party, they have not mentioned a link with past or current immigration to France.

Critics accuse anti-immigration parties in Europe of trying to capitalise from the riots to score political points. In Belgium, the anti-immigration opposition Flemish nationalist party, Vlaams Belang, appeared to blame migrants for violence in Liège and Brussels, describing the riots as "imported" and blaming a failure of integration and of open borders. Belgium's Interior Minister Bernard Quentin has pointed the finger at ultra-left groups.

An ongoing movement?

Fresh mass demonstrations have been planned over the next days in France and in Italy.

Governments are trying to crack down on the violence. There have been thousands of arrests, and Italy and France have promised to impose a "you break it, you pay for it" policy for rioters.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is also making parents of minors liable for damage caused by their kids, including deducting welfare support received by the family. The Civil Code in France already holds parents who live with their children liable for damage they cause.

But some of these European governments may not be in power for long. All the big EU countries have been holding, or will hold, key elections in the coming months. France's presidential vote is considered the most pivotal for Europe. Le Pen is consistently polling far ahead of her rivals. It's assumed the unrest on French streets is helping her, thanks to her party's law and order message.

In Spain, Italy, Germany and Poland, nationalist, tough-on-immigration parties are also polling well. These parties promise to restore order and national pride. Leonard believes populist or non-traditional parties on the left and the right have become "crisis entrepreneurs", using the turbulent situation in Europe to attract disaffected voters.

Meanwhile, Europe's political mainstream faces a crisis of leadership, says Grégoire Roos, director of Europe at the Chatham House think tank.

I would argue they also face a crisis of legitimacy. The fact that so many people - the young and not so young - are out protesting indicates they have failed to get on top of things.

But it's not at all clear that new elections will resolve public frustration. France is so polarised, for example, that if Le Pen were to become president, many predict her opponents would fill French streets in anger.

Modern Europe is built on an assumption that citizens pay taxes and obey laws. In exchange, they get good public services, like education and healthcare, personal safety and a stable society that follows certain rules and regulations.

But this "social contract" has clearly eroded, says Roos.

Looking at the ferment on Europe's streets, this moment of protest looks likely to continue.

Top image credit: Getty.

Between quick wins and big dreams lies Burnham's biggest test

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwq6n09qpy90o, 9 days ago

Giving the north of England a crack at hosting the globe's biggest sports event might seem about as Brand Burnham as it gets.

Seven million pounds of taxpayers' cash is a teeny drop in the context of the overall Budget, to pay for the government to take a closer look at possible plans. But the idea is sure to get tongues wagging - and headline writers scribbling.

A "Northern Games" in 2040 or beyond just might create a massive sense of national feel-good, jobs and development, as the Olympics in east London did more than a decade ago.

But it's a promise of a possibility at least a decade away. And what could be more in tune with the Manchester-loving prime minister and his proud Yorkshireman chancellor than a sporting plan fixed firmly on the top geographical chunk of the country?

It's Brand Burnham alright, popular with most of the Labour backbenches, just add the Twiglets and the pint in the stands.

The prime minister and his team are proud of a distinct feature of their government so far, focusing on small things that might make a big difference: fines for blaring out music on your phone on the bus, cracking down on "rip-off" parking charges, investing a small amount of cash in a big ambition for a sporting event in future.

It's what some ministers call "the politics of trying" – putting time and effort into ideas that you don't pretend are revolutionary, but give direction, and a sense of sympathy to the public.

It's an echo, deliberate or not, of another Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who sent memos to his cabinet in 1974 demanding "little things that mean a lot".

He ended up with a list of plans including nationalising small breweries to stop them being gulped up by big firms (paging Andy Burnham), freezing phone installation charges for pensioners, and plans for empty office blocks.

But the next few days could bring an end to that "politics of trying" phase, with one senior official describing the coming Budget as "the first proper moment for the government, which will then be in the pipeline for the 10-year plan, then a very difficult spending review".

An influential Labour MP told me: "The Budget has to be the beginning of the future story."

A fancy way of saying, beyond the short-term announcements and clear long-term aspirations, what is this government actually going to do?

"Steady as she goes," is what one well-connected senior MP predicts, and how expectations of the Budget are being managed across Westminster. They tell me: "Not doing a lot might be more reassuring to people than promising the earth with whose money?"

The boss of one well-known high street business told me they are even hoping there won't be any big bazookas. "Just do no harm," they implored the Chancellor John Healey.

"The hole is too big that they are trying to fill, so my view is don't try and do anything big to help because you don't have the money, but don't do anything to harm us either."

After all, the chancellor is bound by Labour's manifesto promises not to fiddle with the main taxes – income tax, VAT, National Insurance for workers. And you don't need me to remind you that public spending, borrowing and tax are all at historic highs.

Chuck in prices jacking up again because of war in the Middle East and there isn't much money to spray around. In fact, some big cuts to public spending are already pencilled in for the later years of this parliament.

But the widespread suggestion that you'll be able to blink and miss the Budget has got some hackles up in the Treasury. A budget, by its very nature, can never be a small event - it sets billions upon billions of taxes and spending decisions.

And there are likely to be extra taxes on banks, vows to sweep away some business regulation, particularly for small business, more powers passing to local leaders under the guise of devolution and more action on energy bills which are heading back up again.

John Healey has made it clear publicly and to staff, that he wants to encourage people with the guts and drive to start a business. One source said: "If you are taking on John's mantra about talking up Britain then you can't say, 'Nothing to see here'."

Whatever else the chancellor brings to Parliament in his red box, do not expect him to arrive with all the solutions to the country's very well-documented problems, whether that's getting the economy growing more convincingly, sorting out gaps in defence cash, welfare, social care, or new ways to pay off the country's groaning debts more quickly.

One former minister suggests even if Healey and Burnham had stumbled upon all the answers in a few months, it's just not possible to fix everything at the same time because of the constraints on the economy.

They wondered: "Is he going to invest in growth? Is he going to put everything he has into the challenges people will face this winter? Is he going to throw it at defence? There is just not enough to tackle all these problems simultaneously - ministers are going to be exposed to the cold light of day."

Burnham and Healey have to find a way of maintaining the balance in an unusually happy Labour Party.

MPs talk of ministers and Burnham himself being more visible and approachable in Parliament, knocking around with colleagues in the evening, fewer "golden slips" doled out when ministers were excused from voting alongside colleagues so they could get on with their important jobs.

One minister told me they'd had to tell their private office not to arrange for them to be "slipped" , from going to the Commons in the evening to see backbenchers.

It's paying off in the mood among MPs. One told me: "You're not feeling like the only way you can ever have a chat with a minister is by arranging an appointment for three months down the line – the soft touches really matter."

A party that feels the boss has their back is more likely to be receptive to hard decisions, that's simple psychology, and guess what? Politicians are humans too.

But the equilibrium is fragile. One source involved in the Budget prep told me the government "is like a seesaw".

"It's John and James on the right (Healey and Purnell, Burnham's chief of staff), Lou (Haigh) on the left, and Andy balancing it in the middle," adding that "Andy is not as on the left as many of his supporters want to believe".

That balance could be more strained in the coming weeks as choices over immigration and welfare reform loom after the Budget. And how the numbers stack up on Wednesday matters intensely too.

The Labour left will be looking keenly to see if people who are really struggling financially receive meaningful support.

Those on the right will be scouring the statement for measures that display a tight control on spending and help businesses grow. Even small moves could upset the seesaw.

One former minister doubts there will be anything major enough to upset the delicate balance, not because of an abundance of caution but they suggest, "John has been struggling a bit - he hasn't gone into this with a philosophical direction".

There is also a risk that by deferring big decisions until the Spending Review next year - which sets out longer-term spending than an annual budget - it looks like the government is just putting off the hard stuff.

Another acknowledges the danger of looking like it's a budget on the never-never, delaying decisions on "welfare, defence and social care – Andy goes in with political stock quite high – he needs to spend it on difficult stuff and there isn't much sign of it yet".

In an interview with The Times, Andy Haldane, a former chief economist at the Bank of England and an ally of Burnham, said he feared the government would deliver a "mañana budget" that deferred difficult decisions on public spending and "doesn't speak to the urgency of now".

With friends like these…

It's a good bet that the opposition parties will pile in on this angle, accusing Healey and Burnham of ignoring the long-term pressures next week. One prominent opposition politician said: "This Budget can only be postponing, you have to assume that's cynical because you are going to have an early election, or you are storing up a car crash for next year (the Spending Review)."

Downing Street sources counter that argument with Burnham's decision to unpick the expensive triple lock to pay, at least in part, for future social care. Or his bolder approach to potentially ask to re-enter the EU, or certainly pursue much closer ties.

And remember that list of small things that could make a big difference? They have made political decisions that the polls suggest voters have noticed.

Even some of Burnham's backers admit quietly that he is aware his first job in office was clear: to show action, to cheer up his party, and that seems to have had a positive effect in the polls.

His long-term view of the UK he wants is well known – with devolution, a national care service, and greater public involvement in the economy.

But the middle bit?

One official says: "Unless the prime minister has said something quite specific about something everyone is scrambling around trying to work out what he wants to do."

Another well-connected source says: "The challenge has always been with this project, how do people feel in the medium term – it's huge."

Burnham and his chancellor's start in office has been broadly successful if you look at the polling, or read the mood inside the Labour party.

Their dreams of future glories, long-term plans and policies, and gold medals on UK soil could point ahead to many years time.

But neither deal with the issues that need to be confronted in the middle.

The chancellor was working late in his Downing Street flat last night, finishing off his plans after having fish pie for tea, conscious his first Budget starts the between times - and they're almost here.

Lead image: Future Publishing via Getty

The real reasons there are so few young politicians in the US

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmde8rr2d6eno, 11 days ago

Not many US politicians have endured for as long as Hal Rogers, who will go into November's midterm elections seeking his 24th term in the House of Representatives.

The 88-year-old Republican has represented Kentucky's 5th congressional district since 1981, making him the longest serving member of the House of Representatives. He was elected on the same night Ronald Reagan won his first presidential term under the slogan "Let's make America great again", a phrase later revived by Donald Trump.

Among the challengers Rogers beat to win the nomination this year was one 60 years his junior. But Rogers, born in the 1930s, is far from the only senior US politician to have stuck at the job into their 80s.

Others to have done so include US President Donald Trump, 80; Trump's predecessor Joe Biden, who left office at 82; and Nancy Pelosi, who stepped down as the Democratic leader in the House at the same age. Chuck Grassley, 93, is still a senator. He entered politics in 1958, before Alaska and Hawaii were even US states.

The age and health of some politicians has raised widespread concern within both Republican and Democratic circles, however, reigniting questions about whether age limits or health checks should be imposed.

The US is well known for its "gerontocracy", a government ruled by people who are significantly older than most of the adult population.

At the other end of the age spectrum, the US has one of the lowest proportions of lawmakers under the age of 45 among comparable democracies, according to research from the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

So why are so few young people becoming politicians? And for those who do enter politics, can they make a success of it?

No country for young men?

Twenty-seven-year-old Republican Riley Owen is one of the few candidates from Gen Z - aged in their early teens to late 20s - from either party running for Congress on 3 November.

Owen is running in a newly created district in Utah that experts say may lean towards the Democrats. He has championed issues including paid maternity leave, restrictions on congressional stock trading and environmental action - all issues that may appeal to Democratic supporters.

When he was confirmed as his party's candidate in the state's 1st congressional district, he walked on stage to Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, and argued that his generation needed to help renew the American Dream.

The gerontocracy is "a bipartisan issue", he says. "We've got people who have become career politicians, and they spend their lives in Congress." He says this is indicative of a system that is not delivering for Americans.

Owen says the big challenge he faces is the fact that money really talks in US politics. Research suggests campaign donors tend to prefer incumbent candidates.

Indeed, the campaign of his rival Ben McAdams - a 51-year-old Democrat who has previously served in Congress - has so far raised much more cash than Owen's. By mid-October, McAdams had raised over $2.6m (£1.9m), compared with $150,000 raised by Owen, according to records on the Federal Election Commission website.

Owen argues that his generation is uniquely well-placed to understand contemporary political issues, such as the challenges posed by tech. He also disputes any suggestion that a younger candidate necessarily lacks relevant experience - pointing to his own background as a military officer and a White House policy analyst. "I think in politics, just like in industry, we need what's called disruptive innovation," he says.

The age of America's top politicians has long been a talking point. In 1984 Reagan - who was then America's oldest president at age 73 - deflected scrutiny with a quip about the "youth and inexperience" of his opponent Walter Mondale, who was a sprightly 56.

In the US, individual states also have their own legislatures, with a Senate and a House, where many politicians make their start. Many current members of Congress spent years in state politics before running for a seat in Washington.

But the median age of Congress members has ticked upwards over time. Congressional records show that the lowest median ages in the House and Senate were both recorded in the early 1980s - at 48 and 52 respectively.

The average ages of a House member and a senator at the start of the current Congress were 58 and 65 respectively, according to analysis by the Pew Research Center. The median age of a US citizen is 39.

There is now also a sharper focus on the health and acuity of some of the nation's oldest politicians. Joe Biden's age became a major issue while he was in office. To a lesser extent Trump has faced questions too.

So too has Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, 84, with increasing regularity, after a months-long absence from Congress to undergo medical treatment. Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Maxine Waters, 88, faces a leadership challenge as the lead Democrat on the powerful House Financial Services Committee, with her age considered by some to be a factor counting against her.

Age versus issues

Some of the most vocal critics of this so-called gerontocracy have been candidates who identify as democratic socialists, meaning that their political views are further to the left than those of the Democratic Party mainstream. These candidates tend to campaign heavily on the cost of living and other issues that cut through to Millennials and Gen Z, and their supporters skew younger too.

The demographic profile of people who vote tends to skew older, like the elected officials themselves. Pew research highlights that the proportion of non-voters who are young (aged 18 to 29) has been increasing. In the 2020 US election, 25% of non-voters belonged to that age category, according to Pew. Four years later, it had risen to 30%.

Pew adds that voters under 30 were underrepresented in 2024. Voters in that age category made up 20% of the voting-eligible population, though accounted for only 15% of all the votes that were actually cast.

Campaigners argue that these demographic trends matter because they leave some issues underrepresented.

"Yes, that might result in older people being elected, but I think it really skews, too, what issues are important; what issues politicians are incentivised to talk about and to take care of," says Grace Mausser, the co-chair of the New York City wing of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Mausser campaigned for Zohran Mamdani in his winning bid last year to become, at age 34, New York City's youngest mayor since 1892. Mamdani was held up as an example of a rare youthful success story, but his ally Mausser is less concerned with a politician's age than with their outlook.

Mausser says it is not necessarily a problem if someone has been in politics for a long time. Rather, the problem can be what may result from that: "You become so used to the language and the ideas of the political establishment that anything else - any new ideas, whether they come from young people or old people - seem crazy."

She invokes left-wing Democratic senator Bernie Sanders, 85, as an example of an older politician with a long tenure on Capitol Hill who has embraced change and had ideas that have resonated across generations.

Disaffected youth

In the US, older people hold politicians in far higher esteem than younger people - even more so than in many other countries, according to a Pew survey from spring 2025. Some 62% of 18-34-year-olds were likely to say few or none of their elected officials are honest, compared with 45% of people aged over 50. Of the 25 countries surveyed by Pew, only Greece's young adults had a more pessimistic view of the honesty of politicians.

For one expert who studies political engagement on both sides of the Atlantic, disaffection among young people helps to explain their unwillingness to participate in politics. The issue is not helped by the fact Congress has minimum age requirements for members, he says. Candidates must be 30 to serve as a senator, and 25 to be a representative.

"The one leads to another," remarks James Sloam from Royal Holloway, University of London. "If you don't have enough young people engaged in politics generally, then they won't become representatives."

What is more, Sloam says, young people in the US and the UK alike are alert to the fact that power does not just lie in politics. They are aware there are many other areas of work in which they can wield influence - including over elected officials.

For those young people who do end up in high-profile political positions, the next question is whether they can make a success of it, especially when it comes to parenthood. Over the summer, the stories of two high-profile young women working in Washington raised fresh questions around compatibility of the job with motherhood.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 37, a Democratic congresswoman who took office aged 29, announced that she had started the process of freezing her eggs.

Later the same week in August, Karoline Leavitt, 29, who was appointed the youngest ever White House press secretary almost two years earlier, said she would leave the Trump administration to spend more time with her family, including her newborn baby. She explained: "I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy and attention required of [being] the White House press secretary."

Only a handful of women have given birth while elected to Congress, while a few dozen lawmakers are mothers to children under the age of 18. The federal government, like many US employers, does not offer paid parental leave.

JD Vance, 42, one of the youngest vice-presidents in US history, recently acknowledged that having young children might impact on his own decision to run for the White House in 2028, saying: "We've got four little kids."

Two-horse races

America's two-party system is cited as another barrier to young people getting involved with politics.

Sloam, the London academic, says this is because only a relatively narrow range of views are represented. He highlights research that indicates young people are more energised by social movements or issue-based campaigns than by party politics.

And within party politics, he notes the example of Mamdani and others on the political left who appear to be galvanising youth support outside the Democratic Party mainstream. But he cautions that "it's a little bit sporadic at the moment".

The Republican Party has been through its own splintering over the last decade with the advent of Trump's MAGA movement, which appealed to a swathe of young men in the 2024 presidential election.

Some European democracies show a more pluralistic political environment can increase youth engagement, Sloam says. Scandinavian countries, for example, which are more likely to be multi-party, provide a clear counter example because the parties of government in those countries "work with those social movements to try and bring them into the political systems". Citing countries such as Norway, Sloam suggests there is a cycle whereby stronger youth turnout and youth trust in the political system leads to more involvement in politics.

Looking ahead

It is true that some lawmakers should know when to call it a day, some experts argue, but equally, voters should not lose sight of the qualities of age. Nor should they confuse age with competency.

"Age alone is a very poor predictor of anything," says Tracey Gendron, a professor of gerontology at Virginia Commonwealth University whose research challenges the presumption that ageing is always linked to decline.

"You can have a 45-year-old who is experiencing depression or substance abuse who may not have the cognition necessary for the job," she says. And equally: "You can have an 85-year-old with incredible integrity and political judgement and wisdom who is fully capable of doing the job."

Gendron accepts the point that US politicians are not representative of the nation's age profile, but says this just shows that there are many ways in which Congress could afford to diversify.

"It's funny when we call it a gerontocracy and we focus just on age alone," she says. "When you look at most other aspects of representation - gender, sexuality, religion, race - we're not representative there either."

Owen, the Republican, fancies his chances in Utah, despite his opponent's much larger war chest.

Discussing what energises him as a Gen Z candidate, he identifies issues including the role of tech in public life, immigration and cost-of-living concerns. "I'm on the front end of starting my own family and looking at the costs and [asking] how am I going to make it work?" he says.

Asked if he sees any similarities between his campaign and the campaigns of young political candidates on the opposite side of the political spectrum, he says: "I'd break down the 'us versus them' framework, and maybe discard that a little bit… [there is] a bipartisan message that a lot of Americans on both sides of the aisle are feeling: that Washington isn't working for them."

He takes a similar view to Mausser, the democratic socialist in New York, that voters should not necessarily pick a candidate because they are young: what matters is their ideas.

"For me, it's much more about what you support, what you're who you're fighting for, than what year you were born," she says.

Lead image: Getty

A bust-up between mathematicians is fuelling fears that AI could undermine science

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6gelgxjwzdzo, 5 days ago

A bank of white freezers hums away at a former watch factory in central London. Inside: dozens of small boxes with barcoded glass tubes, collectively containing one hundred billion genes. Just two boxes may hold 10 times more information than all the text on the internet, says Dr Oliver Vince, the facility's co-founder.

His firm, Basecamp Research, plans to collect as much DNA as possible to create an artificial intelligence that can speak the language of biology, in the same way that US and Chinese tech firms have hoovered up written material online to create Large Language Models (LLMs), the basis of current AI systems.

Vince, like many in business and academic research, believes AI will supercharge scientific research. But increasingly, it also comes with controversy.

Last month, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, said it had solved one of maths' great unsolved problems, relating to the famous Navier–Stokes equations. The company said its AI agents had cracked it in 88 hours. The body that runs a prize for whoever can solve the problem said it had "apparently been settled", but that its review would take time.

But hours before the announcement, Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at New York University, went public with concerns. He formed an independent team with Levent Alpöge, a mathematician employed by day by the rival company Anthropic.

They had been working towards the same goal, and kept their drafts in OpenAI's coding tool, Codex. Buckmaster said that his co-researcher was tipped off that news of their progress had "reached" OpenAI, though he did not specify how. He asked whether his research, stored in Codex, could have fed into OpenAI's own work, though he stressed he was "not accusing anyone of anything".

OpenAI said that nobody at the company, human or AI, saw the other teams' work before it was published. Initially it said that while unlikely, it could not "rule out" that anonymised data from use of its products may have helped improve its models. Days later, it said Buckmaster's Codex prompts from the two months before the announcement "could not have influenced the system in any way".

It's a complicated story; we still don't fully know what happened. But it highlights a growing issue about the use of AI in science. Usually, those words make us conjure up images of robots building terrible genetically-engineered viruses, or chemical weapons, to wipe out humanity. But there's a more subtle problem that hasn't attracted the same headline-grabbing attention: that AI could undermine faith in the scientific process, raising questions about the novelty and accuracy of research.

And there's another concern. It's well known that AI chatbots like Claude or Gemini can sometimes hallucinate things that simply aren't true. They will tell you about a film that never existed, or a quote that was never said. Now there is evidence that this is increasingly happening in science. Eventually, it's feared, it will become difficult to separate true scientific discovery from AI-generated fiction.

And all of this could threaten to erode - if not explode - the rock on which scientific research rests: trust.

A 'watershed moment'

One threat is to scientific journals, the guardians of scientific integrity, which are seen to be failing to deal with a tsunami of AI-generated distortions.

"Generative AI has basically disrupted the whole scientific process," says Dalmeet Singh Chawla, a science journalist who has spent a decade reporting on research misconduct.

He tells the BBC that publishers' integrity staff - the people who screen submissions for accuracy and reliability - will need to "drastically increase [in number and effort] if they're anywhere near the fight". He says: "Right now, it seems like they're not."

On the face of it, AI seems just the right tool to power scientific research. Scientists deal with huge amounts of information. Telescopes and particle accelerators, for example, collect billions of data points – too large for the brain to comprehend. AI can pick the scientific highlights from the surrounding humdrum.

The poster child of scientific AI is the UK-based firm Google DeepMind, which in 2020 solved one of biology's biggest problems: how proteins in living things fold into their precise shapes.

It may sound dull, but proteins are the tiny machines that make life work, and the shapes they fold into determine what they can do; from building cells and fighting infection to helping form the tissues and organs of the body.

Before AI, scientists had to conduct time-consuming experiments in the lab. Then, Google DeepMind developed an AI model called AlphaFold that accurately predicted 200 million protein folds in just one year.

The equivalent experimental work would have taken hundreds of millions of years in laboratories. The firm gave the results away for free to researchers. The head of DeepMind and the project's lead scientist were both awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

It was big hugs all round.

Dr Pushmeet Kohli, who leads DeepMind's science work, told me that AlphaFold could be seen as a "watershed moment".

Questions over AI's work

But elsewhere, the use of AI in science has come with accusations of hype. Some computer models are accused of exaggerating the significance of their findings, with the human researchers that oversee them then believing some of the claims without enough scepticism.

Basking in its success over AlphaFold, for example, DeepMind turned its attention to predicting the structure of new materials. The work could lead to the development of better batteries, cheaper solar cells and electronic components that are not dependent on rare earth elements. (In theory, no-one would need to argue about mining rights ever again, and Greenland would be safe from invasion.)

A DeepMind model came up with what the firm claimed were more than two million new crystal structures, announced as "nearly 800 years worth of knowledge" released in one go. Of those, some 380,000 were considered promising enough to make in a laboratory.

But then came a warning sign from two chemists at the University of California. Anthony Cheetham and Ram Seshadri went through a random sample of the supposed new crystals. Writing in the journal Chemistry of Materials, they concluded that they had "yet to find any strikingly novel compounds", arguing that many were "trivial adaptations of known materials". Their verdict was not that the method was wrong, but that the results need more scrutiny and validation from human chemists.

DeepMind rejects the charge, saying it tested each compound for novelty. Dismissing a new structure for looking familiar misses the point, the company argues: swapping a single atom is how many of today's most useful materials arrived, from phone components to sunscreen.

Research 'slop'

In those cases, at least, the science was mostly real and the issue was just AI potentially exaggerating its importance.

Arguably of even greater concern is the growing risk that scientific journals will become polluted with so-called AI "slop" - where a computer, not a human scientist, is writing the research, leading to fake citations and phantom papers.

In 2024, computer scientist Prof Dmitry Kobak, of Ghent University, searched more than a million biomedical research papers for trigger words favoured by the LLMs that generate AI writing. His team found that by December last year, nearly 90% had AI fingerprints on them. AI detection technology is not perfect; some forms of the software have labelled the US Constitution, written in the 1780s, as "AI-generated". But still, Kobak said he was shocked by the scale of apparent AI use. There is a risk, he told Nature, that "whatever bias the LLM may have will just suddenly permeate the (scientific) literature".

Kobak is among many researchers who worries that AI is slowly killing scientific journals.

And it matters: research papers are the lifeblood of scientific advance. When a discovery is published, another team in another part of the world might obtain funding to build on the results.

The process of peer review - in which research papers are checked by other scientists before they are published - is also being compromised.

A team led by Weixin Liang and James Zou at Stanford University analysed referee reports submitted to four major computer science conferences, and found up to 17% of the text had been substantially modified by a language model.

A critical part of a scientific paper's integrity involves lead scientists listing earlier research in order to show what they have done is genuinely new. These are called citations. A separate team at Cornell University found that researchers were using AI to compile citations, and that it was inventing bogus research, with around 147,000 pieces of phantom research cited last year.

If AI continues to distort the integrity of the academic process in this way, then researchers will be sent up blind alleys, public money will be wasted, and the fruits of valid research - such as new drugs or green technologies - will be slowed or not realised at all.

'Research-grade AI'

Some publishers of scientific journals, such as Elsevier, are taking steps to avert this growing crisis of confidence.

Elsevier's research integrity team has developed some 100 signals that flag a paper for closer human scrutiny. Nature's journals forbid AI-generated images and tell referees never to upload a manuscript into an AI system. The website arXiv, where scientists share their early-stage results, bans researchers for a year if they submit invented references.

Prof Sarah Main, an Elsevier vice-president, is among those at the firm trying to work out how to responsibly use AI in research. "What we're calling research-grade AI would focus on ensuring the researcher is in the driving seat," she says.

As AI agents process the mass of data emerging from particle accelerators, the cosmos and the natural world, how do we know they are getting it right?

And there's another worrying question: how do we know that AI agents are not dismissing an important result as an anomaly? The discoveries of penicillin, radioactivity and weird stars called pulsars all came from odd results that could easily have been dismissed. Hunches by humans made them into some of the biggest scientific moments of the last century.

Can AI really replicate that sense of serendipity and human ingenuity?

Kohli of DeepMind does not think the answer is to turn our backs on AI. That would be "like saying you should be computing without using calculators", he told me. But he accepts there should be human guardrails: "The agents today are imperfect. Somebody has to take accountability."

His test is a simple one: "You have to understand what the agent has done, and you have to take responsibility. You can't just specify the problem and let the machine write the paper and submit it as true."

Prof Andrea Pauli of the Vienna BioCenter in Austria has followed that test. She spent almost 10 years on a question no-one has yet been able to answer: how a sperm gets into an egg. Responsible use of AI helped her toward an answer. Her lab found a protein on the surface of zebrafish eggs which pointed to a lock-and-key mechanism for allowing the sperm in.

Hers is a case for hope, in a sea of AI scientific slop. It shows that AI can help.

This is also a story about humans. Soon after the formation of Basecamp - the lab I visited in a former London watch factory - its co-founder, Oliver Vince, was ill in hospital with leukaemia (from which he has recovered). It motivated him to develop an AI system that stood a better chance of curing cancers. It might not work, he says, but it's worth a shot.

"We have a technically feasible path to curing cancer," he says.

Not a promise from Vince, but a direction. The big question is whether AI carries the science there, or quietly erodes the bricks it is built on.

Top image credit: Getty.

Israel and the US are both going to the polls - the consequences will be global

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crlykey9jywqo, 7 days ago

In the next week, two sets of elections will be held on two continents, the outcomes of which could have profound consequences for the world.

By a fluke of electoral timetabling, millions of voters around 6,000 miles apart will unite in exercising their democratic rights within days of each other.

Voters in Israel go to the polls on Tuesday to elect a new parliament; a week later, voters in the United States will elect a new Congress.

A former speaker of that Congress, Tip O'Neill, may have once said that "all politics is local". But the consequences of these elections will undoubtedly be global.

For these elections are not just proximate, they are intertwined.

The future governance of Israel will have a lasting impact on the Middle East and wars raging across the region.

And any change in the electoral map of America could shape not just those wars but also the future of the global economy.

Between the two there is a physical connection: the lobby group Republicans Overseas Israel estimates about half a million Israelis with American passports can vote in both polls.

Marc Zell, the group's chairman, said these electors could influence tight races in the US, such as the Michigan senatorial contest, in which he estimated 10,000 absentee ballots would be cast from Israel. "They can really make a difference," he told the BBC.

But the policy connection is perhaps deeper - and most acute regarding the US-Israeli war on Iran. The massive aerial attack, which began in February, destroyed many military targets and killed much of Iran's leadership. But it failed to overthrow the regime which hit back hard across the Gulf and seized control of the Strait of Hormuz and the energy that flowed through it.

The Iran question

The sheer fact of the elections has already shaped decision-making.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has used the campaign to talk up the possibility of launching a fresh attack on Iran.

He has made new claims – without providing evidence – about Iran's nuclear threat, insisting again the Islamic regime must be overthrown.

His aim: to shore up his reputation as a security leader, which took such a battering after the deadly 7 October Hamas-led attacks on Israel.

US President Donald Trump has added to the speculation of renewed attacks on Iran by endorsing Netanyahu's re-election campaign, saying both men should "soon finish the job" in Iran.

Yet for all the sabre-rattling, there have also been contradictory reports that Trump intervened to restrain Netanyahu from attacking Iran before polling day, fearing a fresh spike in energy prices would remind US voters of his unpopular war.

So might an attack on Iran, then, be delayed until after the elections? Israel's media is full of speculation Netanyahu could try to engineer his survival by attacking Iran as caretaker prime minister after the election.

He would argue, so the theory goes, for a government of national unity – involving him – rather than a coalition between opposition parties. Netanyahu has long been seen as a great survivor of Israeli politics. If he were to lose power, he would face an official inquiry into his actions before the October 7 attacks and renewed legal proceedings involving allegations of corruption.

So real is this speculation that Netanyahu's rival, the former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, has already ruled out joining any unity government. Like all mainstream Israeli politicians, Eisenkot sees Iran as an existential threat to Israel and supports military action against the Islamic regime. But he has explicitly warned against escalating the war for political purposes.

'Legacy mode'

Certainly, Trump may be more willing to attack Iran after the midterms if he is unconstrained electorally and hoping to extract himself from the war with one more push. Some analysts believe Iran is so economically weak from the war and economic sanctions that a fresh round of military strikes might encourage Iranians to overthrow the regime. Others see this as yet more wishful thinking. It is a strategy that has repeatedly failed, but still has currency in Washington.

"After the midterms, he will be in legacy mode," one well-placed Western diplomat told me. "He will want to show agency on anything that is not the quagmire at home."

In Israel there is a broad consensus across most parties about the threat from and the need to constrain Iran. But if voters elect a new government, they might have a prime minister with less political and personal investment in fresh attacks.

In those circumstances, Trump has suggested his thinking may change, too. "If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi [a nickname for Netanyahu], America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so," he wrote on social media.

Little wonder policymakers in Tehran have been following US opinion polls as closely as any analyst inside the Washington beltway. The risk, of course, is that any post-electoral strikes would plunge the Middle East into fresh chaos if Iran were to retaliate hard.

Publicly and privately, Iranian officials have threatened to hit airports, pipelines, undersea cables, energy facilities, desalination plants as well as US bases and warships.

Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, wrote in the Financial Times that new attacks would put "civilian lives and the wellbeing of all regional states and the global economy at great risk".

It's the economy

The two elections again intertwine around the global economy. Affordability and cost of living have dominated campaigning for the midterms, issues made worse by Trump's war that raised prices as Iran choked the flow of energy through the Strait of Hormuz.

The economy is also an election issue in Israel, where voters face high costs and low wages. But here, too, the war plays its part with soaring defence spending putting even more pressure on the public finances.

Trump has sought to appease voters ahead of the midterms. He has lifted sanctions on Russia, hoping in vain that by importing diesel from Moscow, prices might fall significantly. He has been taking a tough line with Ukraine, calling on its leadership to make concessions in the hope – also so far in vain – of claiming a foreign policy victory.

But Republican ire at his controversial strategy is growing. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a frequent critic of Trump, told CBS News: "If the President wants to actually bring down energy prices, he can do it by solving the Iran problem, not by doing a solid [favour] for Vladimir Putin."

One consequence of the Iran war – along with Israel's military operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank – is that traditional bipartisan support in the US has fractured. Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing Democratic candidate for the Senate in Michigan, campaigns on cutting military aid to Israel. "An ally that takes your money, to push you into wars you shouldn't be fighting, is not an ally," he told ABC News.

The US and Israel initially attacked Iran to destroy its ballistic missiles, degrade its nuclear capability, weaken its support for proxy militias and even oust the entire regime. Since then its war aims have changed to reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Brad Lander, a Democratic congressional candidate in New York who also sits on the left of his party, chose even to travel to the West Bank only days before polling. He helped Palestinians harvest olives and was briefly detained by Israeli forces, all grist to his social media electoral mill. In the history of US politics, this is not normal. Even Netanyahu is warning that Israel may in future have to survive without a US security blanket.

Of course, if Israel's prime minister were to lose, his departure would end a scratchy bromance that has seen Trump blow hot and cold. Last week the president called his Israeli counterpart a "great warrior prime minister". During the summer, he said Netanyahu was "effing crazy". A new Israeli leader would have to forge a new relationship with an outgoing US president, a very different dynamic.

If the Democrats were to win greater control in Congress, that might place some check on blanket US support for Israel. Congress has traditional powers that it can use to restrain military spending. It could also cut military aid to Israel. But as president, Trump would retain significant executive power – and a veto – to continue prosecuting the conflict as he saw fit.

The decision by Israel and the US to go to war with Iran earlier this year transformed the global economy and international geopolitics. The choices voters in both nations make in coming days may shape where the world goes next.

Top image credit: Getty.

Healey's Budget needs to sustain the stronger economy through gathering clouds

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck87z4ng2l03o, 7 days ago

There have been almost no Budget leaks.

The chancellor's aides are using intelligence-style security measures to guard its secrets: the Budget has been split into "compartments" with very few given access to all of them. There are codenames. The IT has been locked down and ministers viewing the plans have to sign a digital promise not to brief media.

Such security is a response to the feeling that speculation around the last Budget, sometimes informed by insiders, was economically destabilising.

As a recent former defence secretary, Chancellor John Healey has embraced such strict procedures, and has approached most of his public engagements and interviews with a sturdy refusal to break the Budget omertà, akin to his fellow Yorkshireman Geoffrey Boycott's at times ultra-defensive stance on a cricket pitch.

The economic news has been good - growth has been better than expected and the International Monetary Fund has endorsed the UK for "standing out" among the G7 countries for at least planning to cut borrowing.

The bond market's reverse beauty contest, in which investors single out the countries they distrust most, has moved on from Britain. Traders I occasionally hear from who were once focused on UK borrowing costs are now more preoccupied with "le spread" - the widening gap between French and German borrowing costs (the former being higher than the latter) - and with America's long-term debt outlook.

And yet there are clouds on the horizon. The inflation rate rose more than forecast to 3.5% in September, and borrowing numbers were also higher than forecast. This means an imminent Bank of England rate rise is very much on the cards, with the resultant rise in mortgage repayments for some.

Credibility with investors requires not just that Budget maths add up on Wednesday, but also belief that growth plans are realistic, and the perception that Downing Street can actually convince MPs to pass its Budget.

The question for John Healey is whether he can deliver a Budget that can sustain the revival in growth and offer the help with the cost of living that his backbenchers demand. At the same time he needs to reassure the markets that his budget will keep a check on borrowing.

The curious case of the UK economy

"Is it resilient, or is it actually strong?" has been the tone of the debate among economists about the curious case of the UK economy ahead of what is a vital Budget.

The UK is the fastest growing G7 country so far this year, at 0.6% in Q1 and 0.5% in Q2. The widespread assumption of stagnation in the second half is being defied with Q3 heading for 0.6 to 0.8%.

Each quarter has seen growth twice as fast as predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in March and independent forecasters. This is the fastest growth in the first eight months of a year since 2017, ignoring the post-lockdown re-opening.

It's more resilient than it was in 2022. Back then, the Ukraine war, massive energy bailouts, and Liz Truss' mini budget all culminated in the UK facing the highest borrowing costs in the G7, in what was derided in financial markets as a "moron premium".

Then last year, with constant policy u-turns, UK borrowing costs rose the most of the G7.

This year the gap has narrowed, as uncertainty about the US and France takes centre stage, but all advanced economies are feeling the heat from the Iran war energy shock.

Inflation has risen, but not just in Britain. The link between gas and electricity prices has weakened, meaning spikes in gas prices have less impact on electricity bills than they used to and helping to keep inflation lower than it otherwise might have been.

The fact that up until now the Iran war has been more of an oil shock than a gas shock (where the UK is more exposed) has been another saving grace. Meanwhile, the significant amount of AI and tech investment in the UK is another boost to the economic numbers.

The net result is that doom-mongering predictions of recession, of being hit worst by the Iran war, and, in some quarters, of imminent national bankruptcy, have been defied.

That economic defiance of the early part of 2026 has persisted in the first three months of the Burnham-Healey tenure in Downing Street, buoyed by a lull in the Iran war and the energy price shock.

Burnham was advised upon entry to Downing Street that if consumers could at least feel more confident, they might save less and spend more and therefore help boost growth.

So far Burnham and Healey appear to be relying on a series of relatively inexpensive "feel-better" policies - such as capped bus fares and a temporary VAT cut on household energy bills - that have improved confidence without significantly increasing spending.

But there isn't a lot of spare money, which limits just how much can be offered for "temporary and targeted" measures. And come January, the clouds on the horizon could be overhead, with typical energy bills predicted to rise by 16%, interest rates potentially up and an enduring fear that the AI bubble could burst.

Healey's essential judgement

At a gleaming hi-tech robotics research facility in Coventry last month, John Healey sought to set out the broad contours of his approach to the economy. On a walkabout at the Manufacturing Technology Centre, I asked him if there had been too much doom-mongery.

"I know the global conditions mean that it is hard… we have huge latent potential in this country. Great talent, and deep capital markets.

"The challenge now is to make sure that we balance the books, we manage and control public spending, and the prime minister and I are in lockstep in our determination to meet the fiscal rules with a buffer," he said.

The giant orange robot arms whizzing around were being trained by AI to use lasers to carve the most intricate metal shapes for prototype parts for the jet engines of the future. The Budget manoeuvres required by Healey may require even more precision.

The essential question is whether he has chosen to impress the markets and explain himself to his MPs, or impress his MPs and explain himself to the markets. Judging by my three interviews with him in recent weeks, it is more the former than the latter.

The answer may not be found in his speech at all, but in the borrowing tables that will reveal how much money the government expects to borrow over the coming years, published in the OBR's forecast released - assuming no repeat of last year's disaster - when Healey sits down in the House of Commons around 13.00.

Just after that, as Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is delivering the Opposition's response, the real reaction the chancellor's team will be looking for is whether the markets move, particularly when the Debt Management Office publishes the "gilt remit" - the detail of any changes to its plan to sell UK government bonds to investors.

My sense is that every effort is being made to minimise this number, and help guide down medium and long-term borrowing rates for the government and for mortgages. (It was at this moment in 2022 that markets vomited at the prospect of how much extra they thought the government would need to borrow after Liz Truss' mini budget.)

From Healey's first day in office, the prudence message was practically tattooed to his head. He has spent more time working in the Treasury than any recent chancellor. He spent five years from 2002 to 2007 as a junior minister when Gordon Brown was chancellor - five finance bills, five Budgets, pre-Budget reports and two Spending Reviews.

For his Labour Party conference speech, Healey sported Brown's old conference tie. But the Treasury he returned to this year is a changed place in important ways. When his predecessor wore the tie, the Treasury was running an annual surplus, not a £120bn deficit adding to a £3 trillion total national debt.

I asked him just afterwards, and just before he was whisked off to a meeting of the government's emergency COBR committee on RAF Fairford, if he was going to have another go at some of the things that proved so difficult for his predecessor, former Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

He replied: "100%. I was very clear to the conference today and the public beyond. There isn't the money that there was in the 1990s. People understand that. The public aren't daft.

"Running through the Budget I deliver must be fiscal discipline and the maintenance of control on the public finances, because otherwise we won't get on top of the debt costs."

One intriguing element of what we may see on Wednesday is that this theoretically more left-leaning Labour government appears to believe they have the political capital to save money on welfare payments.

The aim is to get some of the 1.35 million people currently off work with mental health issues back into jobs.

Some reporting suggests some affected younger people may see benefits payments cut, with the government instead investing more in getting them into jobs and keeping them in them through the offer, for example, of in-work therapy.

A constrained Chancellor

Back in Healey's time under Gordon Brown, there was no OBR. Back then it was not unknown for late budget maths problems to be settled with an optimistic tweak of a forecast, a date change to the economic cycle, or choosing a stronger rate of long term growth.

The OBR's verdict is crucial now - to what extent it agrees with projected welfare savings or even the importance it places on stronger GDP figures matters now.

The bigger point here is that the chancellor must be shocked by the contrast between the sheer power of the Brown Treasury to do what it wanted, and the reality of what he currently faces: the constraints of the OBR, manifesto red lines, bond markets, significant debts and an energy shock.

There are reasons to postpone some of the toughest decisions beyond this Budget, such as how to fund desired increases in spending on defence and social care. The economic outlook could improve were the Iran war to settle at some point in the next few months, and after revised statistics the OBR may also have cause to rethink last year's downgrade to long term economic growth.

There is an imaginable pathway to a forecast next year with higher growth, lower inflation and lower debt interest costs, plausibly improving the public finance projections by tens of billions.

This would be a much more agreeable basis upon which to decide the pace of those big ticket spending rises. It also may be a tempting option for anyone thinking about an election. Former Treasury officials lament: "There is always a reason for procrastination."

Expect the Chancellor to laud the resilience and strength of the UK economy and seek to sustain it, and spread growth geographically. His key judgement, however, will be a balance between extra financial and economic support and the peril of still elevated borrowing costs.

He will try to offer breathing space. It may be needed not just for households and families, but for the Exchequer itself.

Top image credit: Reuters/Getty Images

How is the US economy really doing under President Trump?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv98ze40jz18o, 13 days ago

President Donald Trump has been boasting about the performance of the US economy ahead of the midterm congressional elections, claiming he has boosted incomes, reduced inflation and created jobs.

Trump has repeatedly said: "We have the hottest country anywhere in the world."

While the overall US economy is faring better than many expected after Trump launched his sweeping "Liberation Day" tariffs in 2025, there's evidence those import taxes and the impact of the US-Israel war with Iran have pushed up inflation, with the harmful effects felt by most American households.

The US economy is also being helped by an AI investment boom, and could falter if that spending were to dry up.

So how does all this feel for the average American? BBC Verify has looked at whether the evidence supports the president's claims.

1. US economy growing

The overall US economy is growing at a respectable clip by the country's recent historic standards.

The latest data shows US GDP - which is how economists measure the size of the US economy - currently expanding at an annualised rate of 2.2%.

And it has increased by around 3.2% overall since the end of 2024, just before Trump took office for his second term.

That is more growth than any other member of the G7 group of leading economies over that period.

The US growth rate has been faster than was forecast by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the immediate wake of Trump's announcement of a swathe of new tariffs on goods coming into the US on 2 April 2025.

It downgraded its forecasts at the time, citing the negative impact of Trump's import duties on investment and consumer spending.

Though it is important to note that Trump eased the tariffs considerably in the months that followed, reducing the impact that had initially been expected on the economy.

The US economy has also been heavily supported in recent years by American technology companies making massive investments in AI, including by constructing data centres around the country.

Spending on building data centres (excluding the IT hardware to go in them) by US businesses in August 2026 was $5bn, almost double the monthly rate when Trump returned to office.

2. Inflation picked up

Many American voters wanted to punish Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election, holding him responsible for the pain caused by a significant spike in prices in the wake of the pandemic.

The current rate of US inflation is 3.7%.

That's still well down on the recent peak rate of 9% under Biden in 2022, but higher than the 3% rate that Donald Trump inherited in January 2025.

Economists estimate US inflation would have been lower without the new tariffs imposed by Trump since he returned to office.

While the impact of the Iran war on global energy prices, with the significant disruption to oil and fuel supplies from the Middle East, has also helped push up US domestic inflation.

The price of a gallon of diesel in the US - a fuel used not only by drivers but also widely in agriculture and industry - hit a record high of $6.52 in September.

The price of some grocery staples like beef and coffee have risen since Trump returned to office, though the price of eggs has fallen.

And some US retailers have warned that rising energy prices caused by the Iran war will make producing food more expensive and raise prices at the till.

3. Household income growth held back

Average US household incomes are still rising under Trump.

The median income - after adjusting for inflation - rose 2.6% in 2025 to $87,460, the highest on record.

However, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) think tank has estimated the combined effects of the following on US households:

- Trump's tax cuts

- The expiry of extra government subsidies that had made health insurance cheaper for millions of Americans

- Higher-than-expected price rises during Trump's second term, including those linked to tariffs and the Iran war

ITEP's conclusion is that the middle fifth of households are, on average, around $1,700 worse off in 2026 than they would have been, while the poorest fifth are around $750 worse off.

The richest 1%, by contrast, are estimated to be an average of $12,560 better off than they woud have been, primarily because of Trump's tax cuts.

ITEP's estimates about the impact of tariffs on American households of different income levels are broadly similar to those of the Tax Foundation think tank.

4. Job creation slowed down

Trump predicted his tariffs would result in America being "flooded with jobs" as manufacturing firms set up new factories on US soil to avoid their products being taxed at the border.

Since he returned to the White House, an average of 34,000 jobs have been added to the economy each month.

But that is significantly down on the 122,000 jobs added each month in the final year of Biden's presidency.

And the number of Americans employed in manufacturing - 12.6 million in September 2026 - is slightly lower than it was when Trump's second term began.

However, the US unemployment rate remains relatively low at 4.2%, which is broadly where it was when Trump returned to the White House.

Part of the reason for this is Trump's immigration crackdown and deportation programme, which has reduced the size of the available US workforce and means a lower number of jobs need to be created each month to stop unemployment rising.

5. Borrowing costs rising

US government borrowing has increased in Trump's second term, partly driven up by his significant tax cuts.

The federal government deficit - the gap between its revenues from taxes and its spending - was $2 trillion in the year to September 2026. That's equivalent to around 6% of US GDP.

And the US deficit is projected to rise to above 8% of GDP by 2030.

That high rate of government borrowing is itself helping to boost US GDP growth.

The IMF has warned that excessive US government borrowing, which it uses to bridge the deficit, and its rapidly rising national debt are raising the risk of a future financial crisis in America. This would have a deeply damaging impact on most American households.

The growing deficit is also one of the reasons the US government gets charged more to borrow money in financial markets.

The 10-year US government bond yield has risen sharply since Trump returned to office in January 2025 and is now above 5%, the highest rate since the global financial crisis in 2007.

That increase in the market cost of US government borrowing also puts upward pressure on the interest rates on mortgages available to American households.

The interest rate on a new 30-year US mortgage has risen to 7.4% per year, up from 6.9% when Trump returned to the White House.

That's added to problems in the US housing market, making homes less affordable for new buyers. It has left many existing owners reluctant to move because doing so would mean giving up their cheaper mortgages, which they took out at lower rates and cannot take with them to a new property.

Data graphics by Erwan Rivault.

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Trump says US voter fraud is 'rampant' - evidence suggests it is extremely rare

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckeq3vezxlx1o, 5 days ago

President Donald Trump has offered a $1m (£750,000) reward to people who report cases of voter fraud in the US which lead to a conviction.

Ahead of the midterm elections on 3 November, Trump has been casting doubt on the security of the vote - alleging "rampant" cheating in postal voting and non-citizens voting.

However, studies suggest actual cases of these are extremely rare.

BBC Verify has taken a look at the evidence and Trump's proposed changes to the voting system.

How has Trump tried to change postal voting?

For years, Trump has made repeated unsubstantiated claims that postal voting leads to widespread fraud.

He has also encouraged Republicans to vote by mail in the midterms and has said he has cast his ballot by post in the past.

The president has been unsuccessful in his push for Congress to pass an act which would only allow people to vote by mail if they are disabled, ill, serving in the military, or travelling.

The majority of states allow people to vote by mail without having to provide a reason, and in the 2024 presidential election about 48 million people cast postal ballots.

Trump signed an executive order last year which directed the US Postal Service to only deliver ballots to voters on lists of citizens compiled by government agencies. It also sought to require states to use the same envelope style for postal votes.

However, the order was rejected by the US Supreme Court which called such changes so close to the midterm elections "arbitrary and capricious" - but said it could revisit the issue afterwards.

US states have different rules for verifying postal ballots, but every state matches certain voter information on the ballots against what they have on file to check they are eligible and most also conduct signature checks.

What does the evidence show on postal voting fraud?

Studies of multiple US elections suggest postal vote fraud has been extremely rare.

The Brookings Institution policy research think tank looked at the 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections and found an average of about four cases of fraud out of every 10 million postal votes.

The report used a database kept by the Heritage Foundation - a think tank which has been aligned with Trump in the past - which records cases of electoral fraud that have ended in a conviction.

We looked back in the database over the last 20 years and found it has tallied 325 convictions as a result of the fraudulent use of postal ballots.

A 2020 study by the American Statistical Association looked at cases of voter fraud in eight states which send postal ballots to all eligible voters and found no evidence that voting by mail increased the risk of voter fraud overall.

For example, according to the study, Oregon recorded 40 fraud cases between 2000 and 2020 having sent out more than 100 million postal ballots over that period.

How has Trump tried to change voter ID rules?

Trump has claimed non-citizen voting is widespread, and prior to the 2024 election he said Democrats were allowing millions of migrants into the US "so they can vote, vote, vote".

It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in US federal elections - punishments can include a prison sentence, a fine, and deportation.

The voting act the president has pushed Congress to pass would require voters to show a government-issued photo identification before they cast their ballots, as well as proof of citizenship when registering to vote and ongoing citizenship verification.

Critics have raised concerns that stricter voter ID requirements could harm voter turnout as people may not have a passport or the required government-issued photo ID.

"We don't have a national ID card that the government gives out, unlike a lot of countries. Drivers licence is most common but it doesn't identify your immigration status so the ID that most Americans carry around wouldn't be enough for you to vote," says Jonathan Diaz, a voting rights expert at the Campaign Legal Center.

A 2023 survey by the liberal-leaning think tank Brennan Center for Justice suggested that about 21.3 million voting-age American citizens, or about 9%, do not have documents proving citizenship readily available.

However, others argue that there has been no noticeable impact from existing voter ID laws.

"When scholars look at the effect of voter ID laws - either what the conservatives say on fraud or what progressive groups warn against about voter suppression - there doesn't seem to be a lot of proof that either has happened," says Walter Olson, an election expert at the conservative Cato Institute.

A number of largely Republican-run states have tightened voter ID requirements in the last couple of years. There have been 21 restrictive voting laws enacted since the 2024 election to establish stricter ID requirements, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice.

What does the evidence show on non-citizens voting?

Multiple studies show proven instances of non-citizens voting in past US elections have been very small.

The Heritage Foundation's database identified 24 cases of non-citizens being convicted for voting between 2005 and 2025.

A 2026 analysis by Reuters of non-citizen voting cases brought in federal courts found that over the last 30 years 129 people have been criminally charged and 73 of those cases resulted in a conviction.

"The fact that it's illegal for non-citizens to vote is a pretty strong deterrent in the first place as many worry about their immigration status and it would be an extremely risky move to vote," says Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

"There's never been any evidence that there are many people who have done that, certainly not enough to influence an election."

What about non-citizens registered on voter rolls?

Trump has also pushed for states to use a federal database - the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (Save) database - to identify voters suspected of being non-citizens and remove them from voter rolls.

The tool has access to information about naturalised citizens and non-citizens who have contacted the federal government previously. It was launched in the 1980s to help government agencies verify individuals' eligibility for government benefits based on their immigration status.

Critics have questioned the reliability of using the data to remove people from voter rolls as they say it could be outdated and include people who have since become US citizens - but the US Supreme Court has lifted restrictions on the Trump administration using it this way.

"Federal databases can be invaluable to states trying to update their voter rolls so long as their limitations are understood," says Olson. "So part of the Trump plan which requires the sharing of information is positive, even if the second part to require states to treat the database contents as reliable despite their continuing evident gaps and inaccuracies is bad."

The use of the programme by individual states is voluntary, and from those who have used it recently the number of non-citizens detected has been small.

In Georgia, after an audit of the state's voter rolls, 432 possible non-citizens were identified on its voter rolls over 30 years.

The Department of Homeland Security provided Nevada with a list of 185 names which it claimed identified non-citizens who had been improperly allowed to register to vote, but state officials found that they were all in fact citizens.

The White House has pointed to a case in New Jersey, where this summer a software glitch in the state's drivers licensing department registered about 6,600 non-citizens to vote between June 2023 and June 2024. State officials have said fewer than 400 cast ballots and they have all now been removed from the system.

The US Justice Department requested that California doesn't count 20,000 postal ballots ahead of the midterms from people it claims are "likely non-citizen registrants" - but that request has been rejected by an appeals court.

Out of that 20,000, it has charged 28 people who the department says are non-citizens who had illegally registered to vote.

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What are the government's options for reducing welfare spending?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy7l1lrkmk2o, 4 days ago

Chancellor John Healey and Prime Minister Andy Burnham have both spoken of their desire for the benefits bill to come down, but the government has not yet laid out a timetable for any reductions.

Their political opponents have criticised them for a lack of detail on welfare reform in Wednesday's Budget, accusing the government of delaying difficult decisions over cuts.

Official forecasts released alongside the Budget indicate welfare spending is going to increase by £79bn in cash terms over the next few years.

BBC Verify has taken a look at the numbers behind this thorny political issue and some of the difficult options the government have to bring down welfare costs.

How much is being spent on welfare?

The official forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), estimates in its latest forecasts that the cost of the welfare system will rise from £353bn this year to £431bn in 2032.

The OBR's figures include spending on pensioners, which accounts for just under half of the total. The majority of this cost is on the state pension.

However, if we look at the size of welfare spending relative to the size of the overall economy the OBR's projections are less dramatic, increasing from 11.1% today to 11.3% of GDP in 2032.

Total welfare spending would also remain below the peak of around 12% of GDP in 2013 following the global financial crisis, leading some economists and researchers to question the idea that welfare spending is out of control.

But there are some welfare costs that are rising rapidly.

Spending on health and disability related benefits, in particular Personal Independence Payments (PIP), is up sharply since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Accounting for inflation, spending on working-age disability benefits increased from £14bn in 2020 to £25bn in 2026.

Inflation-adjusted welfare spending remains lower than 2013 because several other working-age benefits, such as Universal Credit and housing benefit, were cut by Conservative-led governments as part of their austerity programme from 2010 onwards.

So spending in some parts of the system has come down while it has risen in others - and there could be a connection.

Some researchers think the post-2010 welfare cuts to benefits might have created an incentive for people to claim sickness and disability benefits instead to protect their living standards, therefore shifting costs around the system rather than generating lasting savings.

The problem of Neets

Many also see a specific problem regarding the growing number of young people in the welfare system claiming benefits, including PIP.

Official figures show the number of 16 to 24-year-olds who are not in employment, education or training (Neets) has risen by around 230,000 since 2019 to just under one million.

Former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn is leading an official review into Neets and is expected to recommend major reforms designed to get many off benefits and into work.

His interim report in May estimated that annual PIP expenditure on 16 to 24-year-olds rose from £1.3bn in 2020 to around £3.2bn in 2025. It also projected this cost would reach £6.5bn and cover 700,000 young people in five years' time.

PIP claimants can be in work, but official statistics show that only around one in five are.

What could cutting the benefits bill mean?

Politicians are often unclear about what they mean by reducing spending on welfare.

In March 2025, former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer's government presented a plan which it said would save £5bn a year from health-related welfare spending by 2030 by tightening PIP access and reducing the value of health-related Universal Credit payments.

But official forecasts made it clear that annual spending on health-related welfare in cash terms was still set to rise after the reform, just not as rapidly as the path it had previously been on.

However, at the time the OBR did forecast the plans would help put overall UK welfare spending on a "slightly downward trajectory" as a share of the economy over the medium term, rather than remaining flat as had been previously projected.

So this type of relative reduction in anticipated welfare spending, rather than a cut in absolute cash terms, could be what the government seeks to deliver.

Looming reports may offer options

The final Milburn report is expected in the coming weeks, as well as a separate final report from disability minister Stephen Timms into the options for PIP reform.

There has been speculation that these could recommend creating a new welfare system for people under the age of 25, so they are not eligible for PIP and receive lower payments than older people.

There are also suggestions Timms could propose a new PIP eligibility test to reduce access, although he was not specifically instructed to find savings.

Reforms along these lines could potentially make some savings to the welfare bill relative to the existing trajectory of rising spending, as well as reducing forecast welfare spending as share of GDP.

But some analysts argue that to be effective in delivering sustainable savings, such reforms are likely also to require the government to spend a lot more to enable young people in particular to get into and remain in work.

This was signalled by the interim Milburn report which noted that for every £1 the government spends on employment support for young people around £25 is spent on benefits, suggesting he could propose a significant increase in government spending on welfare-to-work schemes.

This means that any welfare savings could, in the near term at least, be offset by additional spending in other departments.

However, in the long term this approach could still deliver welfare savings if the employment support was effective.

Graphics by Rob England

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Oil spill washes up on UAE beaches after tanker strike

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6rey3n974g5o, 10 days ago

An oil spill from a tanker attacked near the Strait of Hormuz is spreading along the United Arab Emirates (UAE) coastline, forcing the closure of some beaches and coastal areas.

Satellite images from Monday show the beginnings of the oil spill from a ship matching the location and dimensions of Gem No.2, which was damaged between 9 and 10 October during a record surge of vessel strikes by Iran.

The slick of oil had spread more than 35km (22 miles) from the tanker by Wednesday, the satellite imagery showed.

UAE authorities said on Thursday that the incident is affecting beaches near the northern city of Umm Al Quwain and verified video from Friday shows the oil washing ashore, colouring the water black.

The UAE's Ministry of Climate Change and Environment said on Thursday that it "immediately began containment" in order to "limit environmental impacts".

Prof Steve Widdicombe, director of Sharjah Marine Science Research Centre in the UAE, told BBC Verify it was "inevitable that there will be an impact", but researchers caution it is too soon to assess extent of the damage.

Initially a much smaller oil leak could be seen emerging from the ship on 19 October.

But the slick appears to have rapidly spread over two days, according to radar satellite imagery reviewed by BBC Verify and intelligence firm MAIAR.

Oil spills can cause immediate deaths of marine animals and other organisms, for example by physically trapping turtles, smothering the feathers of seabirds or damaging the gills of fish.

They can also cause longer-lasting damage, Prof Widdicombe said, if species remain exposed to toxic compounds from the oil which could impact their ability to reproduce.

Researchers have cautioned the environmental impact at this stage is very uncertain, as it depends on factors including the volume and type of oil spilled, how quickly it evaporates or breaks down and the effectiveness of the clean-up operation.

But the spill does extend towards Siniyah and Khor Al Beidah islands, a globally recognised Key Biodiversity Area containing habitats like corals, seagrasses and saltmarshes, as well as species including green turtles and the critically endangered Halavi guitarfish.

The proximity of the spill to this area is the "most concerning environmental angle", according to Eoghan Darbyshire, a scientist at the Conflict and Environment Observatory.

Tanker hit 14 days ago

BBC Verify analysis of the dimensions and location of the ship indicate they match a crude oil tanker called Gem No.2.

Maritime intelligence firm Vanguard reported the Panama-flagged tanker was "struck by an unknown projectile" on 9 October, just north of the town of Al Jazeera Al Hamra, causing a fire on board that was later extinguished.

Verified footage first posted on social media on 10 October showed the crew running across the deck and putting on lifejackets as a large cloud of black smoke rose over the ship.

Iranian state media shared footage of a ship matching Gem No.2 which appeared to show the vessel on fire with burning oil spilling into the sea.

The ship had been attempting to exit the Strait of Hormuz via an "unauthorized and dangerous route", according to state media.

All 22 Indian crew members were rescued, the Indian consulate in Dubai said on 11 October.

Gem No.2 is one of a record number of ships that reported being attacked in and around the Strait of Hormuz at the start of October.

Security experts told BBC Verify this was part of an Iranian effort to assert greater control over the strait, in response to the US military successfully escorting more vessels through the vital shipping lane.

Tankers and other commercial vessels have come under attack from both Iranian and US forces in and around the Strait of Hormuz amid the conflict between the two countries.

Another major oil slick washed up on the shores of Iran's Qeshm Island in August, which experts said threatened wildlife, protected ecosystems and fishing communities.

Additional reporting by Charlotte Green

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Four ways Labour could raise money in the Budget without hiking income tax

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c65yn9p55np2o, 8 days ago

We're likely to hear a lot about the chancellor's "headroom" in this Budget.

That is the cash buffer the government has to help meet its own fiscal rules and reduce borrowing.

Economists think the buffer might have halved in the last six months from around £24bn to as low as £11bn, in part because of rising interest rates the government has been paying to borrow money from private investors.

The Chancellor, John Healey, might need to raise money to restore it, which would show the government's plan to reduce borrowing by the end of this Parliament is still on track.

At the same time, he is under pressure to find money to help people with the rising cost of living and to fund spending on defence. However, Labour's 2024 election manifesto pledged not to raise the rates of income tax, VAT or National Insurance.

Increasing taxes on capital gains or extending the mansion tax had been raised as possible options but have since been ruled out by government sources.

BBC Verify has looked at what other options could be on the table for the chancellor to raise some more money on Wednesday.

1. Increase taxes on banks

Banks in the UK have seen profits rise in recent years because they have been able to charge people higher interest rates when borrowing money.

And there is widespread belief among bank bosses that the chancellor is preparing to raise taxes on banks in this week's Budget.

Think tank Tax Policy Associates estimates that increasing the surcharge that banks pay on corporation tax from 3% to 5.5% could potentially raise an additional £1bn to £2bn a year for the Treasury.

A higher tax would initially reduce the profits that banks have to distribute to their shareholders.

Some shareholders will be wealthy investors. The banks have warned that additional taxes could deter them from investing in the UK, which could reduce jobs.

And ordinary savers could be indirectly affected too, if their pension investments include bank shares.

Banks could also pass some of the tax burden on to their customers by offering lower savings rates or higher borrowing costs, research suggests.

2. Higher taxes on gambling machines

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called on Healey to hike the tax on electronic gaming machines - such as those found in betting shops and adult gaming centres which can offer payouts of £500 per game - citing the social harm imposed by problem gambling.

The Social Market Foundation (SMF) think tank has estimated that doubling tax on these machines from 20% to 40% could raise could raise between £275m and £460m - depending on how gamblers reacted to it.

People who use gambling machines could also end up having the tax passed on to them through worse odds on games, though anti-gambling groups argue this could help discourage more people from using them.

Research from the SMF found that gambling machines are increasingly clustered on some of the UK's most deprived high streets, and that one in four people who play casino games on these machines gamble at risky or harmful levels.

The gambling industry has argued such a tax hike could cause betting shops, which own and operate the machines, to close down, by making them less profitable.

It has also argued that betting shop closures could reduce the money bookmakers contribute to horse racing, potentially putting jobs in that industry at risk too.

3. Get online marketplaces to collect VAT

Reports suggest the chancellor is preparing to announce that big online marketplaces such as Amazon, Ebay and Temu will be made responsible for collecting tax owed by retailers selling on their platforms.

The Treasury estimates it is missing out on around £12bn a year in VAT revenues that should be paid by companies, which it calls the "VAT tax gap".

Tax experts say that part of the problem - although not accounting for the full £12bn of the VAT gap - is that some online sellers fail to comply with VAT rules, either by not charging VAT when they should or by failing to pass on VAT collected from customers to the government.

Enforcement can be difficult because some firms that use platforms like Amazon to sell their products are based overseas and falsely present themselves as UK-established businesses.

Others close down and reopen under different company names to escape their tax liabilities.

Reports suggest that this move to make big online marketplaces responsible for collecting the tax - rather than the individual retailers - would clamp down on this form of tax evasion and could raise around £1bn in extra VAT a year.

Amazon, which supports the move, has estimated it could raise £700m a year in VAT for the government.

Some sellers could respond by raising prices or leaving the platform, which could have an impact on some shoppers.

However, it would also level the playing field for online sellers, ensuring those businesses who charge VAT are not illegally undercut by those who break the rules and do not.

4. Cut welfare spending

The above three tax measures together would raise a maximum of only around £3.5bn a year.

That would be small relative to the sums of money the chancellor might well need to restore his headroom and pay for any new spending.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said in the summer he wanted a "fair and lasting" reduction to the UK's welfare bill, while the government is under pressure from opposition parties to find savings from working-age benefits.

The Conservatives claim they could make savings of £36bn a year by restricting people's access to welfare payments.

Reform say they would save £50bn a year in this way, although independent analysts say there are questions about how realistic it is to make such large savings.

Working health and sickness benefits have risen sharply since the Covid pandemic and the overall cost is projected by the Office for Budget Responsibility to increase from £68bn this year to £81bn in 2031.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves attempted to reduce spending on these benefits by £5bn a year by 2030, but were forced to reverse course after a revolt by backbench Labour MPs.

Independent welfare experts and economists say savings from the working age welfare budget are possible but would likely require upfront spending to help people into work, which could cancel out any near-term savings for the Treasury.

Cuts to health and disability welfare would reduce the incomes of people who currently receive those payments and/or those who would otherwise receive them in future - and campaigners warn of the risk of people being pushed into poverty.

However, if more welfare claimants were also supported into work, their overall incomes could be maintained or even rise.

Graphics by Callum Thomson and Lewis McBlane.

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How much gas could Jackdaw provide? And will it cut your energy bills?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq4g13pplyzzo, 12 days ago

The government has approved drilling at the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea.

The decision - which comes after years of debate and legal challenges - will pave the way for gas to be extracted from it and used in Britain's gas network within weeks.

BBC Verify has looked at what this means for energy bills, energy security and the environment.

Where is Jackdaw and how much gas is there?

Jackdaw is a gas field 150 miles (241.4km) east of Aberdeen. It is owned by Adura Energy, which is itself equally owned by the energy companies Shell and Equinor.

The owners of the site, which was first approved four years ago but subject to legal delays until now, estimate Jackdaw has around 10 million cubic metres of recoverable gas.

Based on official forecasts for the amount of gas the UK will need over the next decade, that suggests Jackdaw has the potential to meet around 1.6% of total projected national gas demand between 2026 and 2036.

Operators say it could be connected to the Great British gas network within weeks and could produce gas for the next 11 years.

Where does Britain currently get its gas from?

Around half of the UK's natural gas comes from its existing North Sea gas fields and is pumped ashore via pipelines.

Gas imports make up the remainder. Of these, most come from Norway's North Sea gas fields via separate pipelines.

But a higher share of the UK's gas imports now come in the form of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) compared with 20 years ago.

This is natural gas which is extracted, turned into liquid form and then transported by ship to the country which buys it, where it is turned back into gas form to be used as an energy source.

And the UK increasingly relies on shipments of LNG from the US, which accounted for a quarter of all natural gas imports in 2025.

Will the approval of Jackdaw mean lower bills?

Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh has said the gas from Jackdaw "won't lower energy bills this winter".

And most energy analysts do not expect the additional gas production from Jackdaw to have a significant, direct impact on households' energy bills, either.

This is because of the way natural gas markets work. Great Britain is integrated with wider European gas markets and physically linked to the continent through undersea pipelines.

Gas prices faced by British households and businesses are effectively set at a pan-European level and determined by the price customers across Europe are prepared to pay for the energy.

People across the continent have seen their energy bills rise significantly in recent years, fuelled by the wars in Ukraine and Iran affecting gas and oil supplies.

But the additional gas being pumped into the UK's system from Jackdaw will still be relatively small, and unlikely to significantly move the European price paid by British firms and households.

"Essentially, producing more British energy doesn't necessarily mean cheaper British energy," Karl Matikonis, professor of taxation at University College Dublin, told BBC Verify.

"North Sea oil and gas are sold at market prices rather than reserved for British consumers at a discount."

However, the additional production of gas from Jackdaw could result in more corporation tax revenues for the UK government, because any profits made by the owner would be taxable.

As part of its Jackdaw announcement, the government said it was setting up a new energy wealth fund, using tax revenues from North Sea oil and gas to invest in green energy projects. It said this would "help get bills down for good in the long term" by reducing the UK's reliance on gas for electricity production.

The Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has previously said the tax revenue from Jackdaw "could be used to bring down energy bills" by taking costs off households' bills directly.

However, both proposals depend on the future profits of the owner of Jackdaw, which cannot be forecast with certainty.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said opening the gas field would "protect hundreds of jobs" and the move has been welcomed by unions.

The owner of Jackdaw has also estimated it will help support around 500 jobs, including roles on nearby production hubs, but only 27 direct roles on the Jackdaw gas extraction platform in the North Sea.

What are the arguments for and against Jackdaw?

One of the key arguments put forward in favour of developing Jackdaw is that it would improve the UK's national energy security.

Energy experts take different views on this. Some suggest that if, for some reason, foreign LNG shipments were not able to reach the UK, having additional North Sea gas from Jackdaw available and delivered through a pipeline that the UK controls might prove valuable.

They argue that the reliability of the US as a source of energy has been put into question by Donald Trump's recent comments that he was considering banning exports of US diesel to European countries.

However, others are not convinced Jackdaw would make a significant difference to national energy security because the UK would remain heavily reliant on natural gas imports even when the field is up and running.

The enviromental impact of Jackdaw has also been a significant point of contention. Advocates argue the gas field would be beneficial because the carbon emissions arising from production from the the UK's own North Sea field will be lower than those arising from the production of US LNG.

The North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), which regulates the sector, has estimated the emissions arising from the production, delivery and processing of US LNG are around three times higher than from the production of North Sea natural gas.

That is because the process of liquefying, shipping and then turning LNG back in to natural gas on arrival is extremely energy intensive, compared with pumping it ashore by a pipeline, creating higher carbon emissions.

However, NSTA estimates that Norwegian North Sea gas production - which Britain already imports by pipeline in large volumes - has a considerably lower average emissions impact than that of the UK's existing North Sea gas production.

This is because UK North Sea gas mostly comes from smaller fields and is extracted with older infrastructure and technology than those of Norway.

The owner of Jackdaw estimates the emissions intensity of its production would be lower than from older UK North Sea infrastructure - though it would still be higher than gas produced from Norwegian fields.

So the impact on the environment of the Jackdaw decision partly depends on what happens to the mix of UK gas consumption in future - and where it comes from - which is uncertain.

If additional gas production from Jackdaw displaces US LNG imports, UK-related national emissions could be lower than otherwise.

But if additional gas production from Jackdaw displaces gas imports from Norway instead then UK-related national emissions could be higher than otherwise.

It's important to bear in mind that the emissions from burning gas also greatly outweigh the emissions from producing it.

And analysts argue that if the Jackdaw decision ends up increasing the overall quantity of fossil fuels produced and consumed around the whole world then it will push up global emissions compared with what would otherwise have happened, even if UK-related emissions fell.

Jonathan Stern of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies told BBC Verify: "If what matters is global rather than UK-related emissions then any new fossil fuel development will increase emissions, because the Norwegian and US gas which might replace Jackdaw will probably be developed anyway."

However, the direct impact on global emissions would still be relatively small given the size of Jackdaw relative to existing global production and consumption of fossil fuels.

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