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Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has called an early election for 29 November after recent defeats on legislation aimed at addressing the country's housing crisis.

Speculation about a snap election had been building over the weekend after parliament rejected two decree laws put forward by the government aimed at protecting tenants in the rental market.

The eviction of an 87-year-old woman from her home after she was unable to afford a sharp rent rise has sparked nationwide protests and increased pressure for housing reform.

In a televised address on Monday, Sánchez said there was a need to "renew and broaden people's support" for the government.

He added that, to push reforms through, "we need the support of the people" and "a broader progressive majority" that can "overcome the resistance of the elites".

Sánchez's left-wing coalition government is made up of his ruling Socialist party and junior partner the Sumar alliance, and does not have a majority in parliament.

Spain was not due to hold a general election until the summer of 2027 at the latest.

Sánchez has been prime minister since June 2018. His Socialist party finished second in the last election, in 2023.

Although the conservative People's Party won the most seats, it fell short of a majority.

Sánchez remained in power after striking agreements with left-wing parties and securing support from Catalan and Basque nationalist and pro-independence groups.

Most opinion polls suggest the conservatives are likely to emerge as the largest party in the next election. However, they would be expected to need the support of the hard-right Vox party to form a government.

On Saturday, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in cities including Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona, calling for greater protections for tenants.

Maricarmen Abascal, 87, became a symbol of Spain's housing crisis when she was forcibly evicted from her Madrid home on 23 September.

A legal glitch allowed her landlord to raise her rent from €500 (£428; $572) to €2,650. It was later lowered to €1,650 - still €300 more than her monthly pension.

She was removed on stretcher from her apartment of more than 70 years, and was later admitted to hospital.

Her lawyer has since said she will be able to return to her home, but the incident has prompted widespread anger over housing.

The left-wing coalition government responded with two decree-laws in an effort to defuse the protests.

The first included the suspension of evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, a two-year extension to rental leases due to expire before 2028, tax increases for tourist apartments, and a restriction on the purchase of residential properties by what the government calls "vulture funds".

The second decree was more controversial, because it included the automatic renewal of rental contracts, a major demand of many on the left and the tenants' organisation Sindicato de Inquilinas.

Polls close in Brazil as Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro remain neck and neck

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck1l34ed592no, today

Polls have closed in Brazil's general election, after voters queued in long lines for a tight first round of the presidential race.

After casting his ballot, 80-year-old left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva warned that the choice was between democracy and "barbarism".

His challenger, right-winger Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, said he wanted to "free the Brazilian people".

The result is forecast to be close. BBC Brazil's poll aggregator shows that the gap between Lula and Bolsonaro is only two points. If no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, the election will go to a run-off on 25 October.

According to Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE), more than 158.7 million Brazilians, including one million people abroad, are eligible to vote in the election.

Lula is challenged by 11 candidates, although BBC Brazil's poll aggregator shows that candidates other than Lula and Bolsonaro will get only about 10% of the vote.

The TSE has not set a fixed time for the release of the official results, but they are expected within hours because voting is electronic and experience from previous elections shows that results tend to come quickly.

A victory for Bolsonaro would extend a wave of wins across Latin America by right-wing candidates aligned with US President Donald Trump, while Lula's re-election would create problems for Washington, which has clashed with his government over trade and security.

Some countries, from which Brazilians living overseas are able to vote, have already released preliminary vote count data.

In China, Lula won 56.63% of the votes, while Bolsonaro came in second with 31.33%. Lula also won in countries including South Korea, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia.

In Israel, however, Bolsonaro won 74.40% of the valid votes. He also won 71.59% of the valid votes in Japan.

Today's result will also determine the composition of the Senate from February 2027 onwards, as 54 of the Senate's 81 seats are being contested, representing two-thirds of the chamber.

Currently, the largest bloc in the Senate is Bolsonaro's Liberal Party (PL), followed by the Social Democratic Party (PSD), which has served in a coalition government under Lula.

In the last election four years ago, Lula narrowly defeated Flávio Bolsonaro's father, Jair. But the tumultuous aftermath of the election, which saw Jair Bolsonaro convicted of plotting a coup after thousands of his supporters stormed the Brazilian Congress, has had a lasting impact on the nation's political life and this election.

Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup and is barred from standing for office.

Because of recurrent health problems, he is currently under house arrest rather than in a cell, but he has been prohibited from posting on social media or making public statements.

Despite these restrictions, there is little doubt that Flávio Bolsonaro has his father's backing.

US removes all bombers from RAF Fairford base

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmwyve191dlko, today

The US has withdrawn all of its bombers from RAF Fairford, the British military base at the centre of an incident being investigated by counter terror police.

A statement from a US department official confirmed on Sunday it had removed all of its bombers from the base back to their home stations in America.

The US did not give a reason for the withdrawal, but it follows a major incident on 27 September when police were alerted to three "suspicious vehicles" near the airbase in Gloucestershire.

Five men were initially arrested on suspicion of terror offences near the base and subsequently released on police bail. A sixth man, a UK-Iranian national, was also later arrested and released on bail.

Whitehall sources have not disputed the decision from Washington was in response to the incident at RAF Fairford.

The BBC has also been told it was a military rather than a political decision - taken at an operational level - and communicated from the US military to its British counterparts.

The UK's Ministry of Defence has not commented.

Days after the incident, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said there were "strong indications" that Iran had played a part in the incident but did not provide further details. Tehran has strongly denied any involvement.

Initially, five men aged between 23 and 25 were arrested in the early hours of the morning after vehicles were reported to be travelling towards the base operated by the US Air Force (USAF). All five were UK nationals from London.

They were arrested on suspicion of explosives offences and later on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act, before being released on bail in what police called an "investigative decision" that was "grounded in experience and strategy".

The sixth man, aged 25, was arrested in London on Thursday on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts. Counter terror police confirmed on Saturday he had also been released on bail.

RAF Fairford has been used as a forward operating location by the US Air Force (USAF) for decades.

In recent months, US bombers have taken off from the base for the Middle East, after the UK approved a US request to use it for defensive strikes on Iran.

In July, Iran said "any base used for aggression against Iranian territory constitutes a legitimate target for our forces".

Days after the incident, and before the arrest of the sixth man, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Fox News that it "clearly involve[d] the hands of a foreign actor".

Rubio did not provide further details - saying at the time he was limited on what he could say on air.

US President Donald Trump separately said he was "surprised" the five men had been released on bail.

"We know everything about them, we would not have released them," he said, adding that the UK had worked with the US "very closely" on this.

Flydubai co-pilot planned to crash plane into Tel Aviv airport or building, reports say

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm3691y79xp5o, today

The co-pilot accused of trying to hijack a flydubai plane planned to crash the aircraft into Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport or a tower block in the Israeli city, US and Israeli reports suggest.

The Omani national was a "lone wolf" extremist, according to the reports.

The United Arab Emirates' attorney-general has said the co-pilot attempted to carry out a "terrorist act" on flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv last Wednesday.

He attacked and wounded the captain with the emergency crash axe kept in the cockpit before being overpowered by passengers. Another crew travelling on the plane was able to land it in Saudi Arabia.

Israel's prime minister has said the co-pilot underwent "Islamist radical indoctrination" and the captain, passengers and a second crew prevented "a 9/11 disaster".

More details about the co-pilot of the flydubai flight – whom multiple reports have named as Hamam al-Hammami – emerged over the weekend as he continued to be questioned in the UAE, with Israeli representatives being updated.

Israeli media cited sources with knowledge of the probe as saying the co-pilot told investigators that, having attacked Capt Smit Machchhar, he intended to continue flying the plane as normal into Israeli airspace and receive landing clearances from Ben Gurion airport.

He then planned to crash the Boeing 737 MAX – with more than 180 passengers on board – into the airport or into a tower block in central Tel Aviv, in the style of al-Qaeda's 11 September 2001 attacks in the US, according to the reports.

The sources are quoted as saying he was most likely to have acted alone rather than on behalf of a radical organisation or foreign government.

The co-pilot also reportedly told investigators that he had intended to hijack and crash a previous flight to Tel Aviv but changed his mind because he knew someone on board.

There was no immediate comment from Emirati or Israeli authorities.

UAE Attorney-General Hamad al-Shamsi said on Saturday that his country's investigations would establish the full circumstances, motives and any links related to the incident, and that the results would be announced upon their conclusion.

Questions are also being asked about major security lapses, including how the attacker was recruited by flydubai and given clearance to fly a plane filled with Israelis to Tel Aviv.

Regional officials said the co-pilot was barred from flying by Oman's national carrier, Oman Air, and moved to an administrative job because of concerns about his extremist views.

He was later hired by UAE-based flydubai after undergoing standard security checks that did not examine his background for potential signs of radicalisation, according to the officials.

Israeli aviation regulations also state that pilots who are citizens of countries without formal diplomatic relations with Israel, like Oman, are not permitted to operate flights to the country.

Regional officials told the Associated Press on Sunday that Emirati authorities had shared with Israel a list of passengers and crew ahead of flight FZ1073's departure.

Israel's Shin Bet domestic security agency said the transport ministry was responsible for vetting such lists from foreign airlines.

But Transport Minister Miri Regev said her ministry was not given passenger and crew lists, and that security oversight for flights operated by foreign airlines fell under the remit of the Shin Bet and the Mossad foreign intelligence agency.

Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has told the head of the National Security Council to review "all security aspects regarding foreign civil aviation to Israel".

Australian authorities are investigating the co-pilot's links to Australia. Sources have told local media that he studied there between 2015 and 2017.

Nobel Prize awarded for showing how nerve cells shape feelings

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ev3ypmzly8o, today

US psychiatrist and neurologist Karl Deisseroth and his German colleagues Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel have been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in the field of optogenetics.

Their research has helped scientists learn more about the workings of the brain, to better understand how the human mind works.

The Nobel Committee praised the trio for laying the foundation of a new era in neuroscience and revealing the neural circuits behind "specific memories, feelings, and behaviours relevant for neurological and psychiatric disorders".

In clinical medicine, researchers are using the method to try to restore sight in people with visual impairment.

'Wonderful'

"Optogenetics has fundamentally altered our understanding of the brain," the Nobel Assembly said.

"Every day brings new discoveries, helping to solve one of humanity's great mysteries: how our incredible brain works."

The winners said it was "absolutely wonderful" to get the award, and that it was an honour to share the accolade with friends.

The three men will also share the £900,000 (12 million Swedish kronor) prize money.

What is optogenetics?

Per Svenningsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, explained: "Optogenetics provides opportunities for mapping the brain in a way that we could once only dream of."

Before, the inner workings behind feelings, behaviours and bodily functions were more of a mystery to scientists.

Optogentics is a way to illuminate brain pathways, using a special protein borrowed from algae that scientists use to control cell electrical activity using light.

In the early 2000s, Hegemann and Nagel discovered channelrhodopsin, the algal protein with unique properties.

Researchers have since been able to study nerve cells and pathways in animals to see and discover more about what they do.

The Nobel Committee said: "Using light, researchers are now able to switch individual neural circuits on or off in the brain. They can bring memories to life, create feelings, drive behaviours and study the types of neurons that are involved in various psychiatric and neurological disorders."

That is providing important insights into how the nervous system interacts with various cells in other areas of the body, such as in the heart and gut, the committee added.

Restoring people's sight

Researchers have also taken "the first steps" towards using optogenetics as a medical treatment, the committee explained.

In ongoing clinical trials, scientists have been working to restore vision in people who have become blind due to retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that destroys the eye's rods and cones.

By inserting a special protein in the damaged region of the eye, the patient regained some vision when wearing special glasses emitting light. This switched on the therapeutic algae proteins.

'Not again': Arrest of US marine for murder reignites protests in Japan's Okinawa

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwgkv70gg1j3o, today

For many Okinawa locals, the arrest of a US soldier accused of robbing and killing a woman in a hotel room has reignited decades of frustration over crimes involving US military personnel there.

"Honestly my first reaction was, 'Not again,'" 52-year-old longtime Okinawa resident Ai Sato told the BBC.

"Nothing has changed since I was a child. How many times are we going to repeat the same thing, create more victims, cause their families to suffer, and ultimately, cause the people of Okinawa to grieve?"

Akemi Oshiro, a 62-year-old Ginowan resident shared similar sentiments.

"I know we shouldn't get used to terrible things like this, but because they keep happening, I've stopped being surprised," she told the BBC.

Okinawa hosts the largest US military presence in Japan. It is home to several US military bases and tens of thousands of American troops.

US Marine Lance Corporal Devin Jacob Ballard, 20, was arrested by Japanese police on Sunday. Police say an investigation is underway and that Ballard is in Japanese custody because the alleged crime was unrelated to official military duties.

Whether a US service member is acting in the performance of official duty or not can determine which country has primary jurisdiction. When Japan has jurisdiction, but the suspect is under US custody, they can retain custody until Japan brings charges.

Ballard was assigned to III Marine Expeditionary Force and stationed at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Ginowan City.

The Okinawa prefectural police say 39-year-old Anna Yagi was found dead early 3 October in a hotel room in Naha.

Security footage allegedly shows a man believed to be the suspect entering the hotel with the woman and leaving alone with her belongings. Local media citing police have reported that Yagi appeared to have been strangled with a cord.

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi registered an official protest with Washington. But residents like Sato feel that's far from enough.

"I am deeply disappointed by the same kinds of government comments we have been hearing for decades -- that they will protest or that they take the matter seriously."

"I want Prime Minister Takaichi to call President Trump directly, someone with whom she has been emphasizing as having a close relationship with, and discuss concrete measures to prevent this from happening yet again," she said.

Following news of the suspected murder, people in Japan have been voicing anger with some 100 people protesting in both Naha and Tokyo. Others took to social media expressing their outrage and demanding justice with one user saying: "Enough is enough."

Over the past few years, a number of accidents and crimes have led to growing local opposition to the US presence on the island.

The 2016 rape and murder of a 20-year-old local woman saw tens of thousands of protesters demonstrate against the heavy US presence there. A former US marine subsequently received a life sentence for the crime.

The US currently has about 55,000 military personnel stationed in Japan, with the heaviest concentration based on the tropical island prefecture. Okinawa is one of the country's smallest prefectures by size, but 70% of the land used exclusively by the US military in Japan is located there.

In 1972, Okinawa prefecture was returned to Japanese control after United States forces occupied the islands at the end of the Second World War. Since then, there have been 6,409 arrests for criminal offenses related to US military personnel, according to Okinawa Prefectural Government.

Locals say the significant US presence has stirred resentment over a number of issues from crimes including rapes, assaults, and drunk-driving accidents to local disturbances such as noise and aircraft crashes.

In 1995, three US servicemen abducted, beat, and raped a 12-year-old schoolgirl as she walked home from a stationery store.

In 2025, a US Marine was convicted of choking and sexually assaulting a Japanese woman.

"Even 80 yeas after the war, Okinawa where we live is a place that is so unnerving," 48-year-old mother of two boys Hitomi Miyagi told the BBC.

"We will not stop raising our voices hoping for an Okinawa, where we can live in peace."

Trump announces 'Super Intelligence Force' to oversee AI policy

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqj6jenp26zyo, today

US President Donald Trump says he has created a new task force focused on artificial intelligence, which will be led by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton.

The "Super Intelligence Force" will work to ensure that the US continues to lead in the technology's development and will coordinate the government's engagement with the public, Trump posted on Sunday.

Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson and Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael will also be part of the task force.

Trump said last week that he would set up a board to oversee AI safety after top tech bosses signed what he described as a "morally binding" pact to regulate the technology.

"The Super Intelligence Force will coordinate the Federal Government's engagement with Consumers, Public Interest Groups, Religious Organizations, Critical Infrastructure Providers, and Super Intelligence Companies," Trump wrote.

The taskforce's announcement follows growing pressure from prominent figures in the industry to tighten regulation of the technology.

Trump has dismissed calls for stronger oversight and largely left it to AI companies to regulate themselves.

The pact signed on 29 September includes the signatures of executives from top tech firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and Google.

On the same day, the president also signed an executive order to rename AI as "super intelligence", after previously saying the word artificial made the technology sound "fake".

Some experts have questioned the logic of the rebranding, arguing that the use of "super intelligence" could cause confusion as it refers to more advanced systems.

Some top tech leaders have already started to use the new name, including multi-billionaire Elon Musk, who said on social media that he will rename his firm's AI platform SpaceXAI as SpaceXSI.

The Tesla boss has recently been brought back into the US government to be part of a project to study the future of war.

Musk previously served in the Trump administration, heading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, before his tenure ended in a public spat with Trump.

Girl, 12, fatally shot in US during 'dispute over parking space'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwr5y48p89vvo, today

A 12-year-old girl was killed in Baltimore over the weekend during an apparent disagreement over a parking space, police in the US city said.

The girl was caught in the crossfire of bullets between two men who police said were allegedly fighting over a parking space in a park where children were playing American football.

In addition to the young girl, another woman was also found with gunshot wounds when police arrived on the scene. Two men also visited area hospitals for injuries related to the shooting, police said.

Police are now searching for at least two suspects, Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley said at a news conference.

"What we know is there was some type of argument between two cowards," Worley said. "They both opened fire on each other. In the crossfire, a 12-year-old little girl, who was probably down there watching football, was shot and killed."

Worley said the girl, who police have not named, was not a target of the shooting.

The girl was pronounced dead in hospital. The other three individuals who were injured have non-life-threatening injuries, Worley said.

The incident happened after 18:00 EDT (23:00 BST) on Saturday.

Authorities are still investigating the shooting and have asked any witnesses to bring information to police.

It remains unclear how many shots were fired, Worley said.

"Two grown men got into an argument, and now a 12-year-old is gone," Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said at the news conference.

"We never should have to say something like that. What happened out here today is one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen in my life."

Jewish Greens chair says she could leave party over 'Zionism is racism' motion

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm4g1dxe50nyo, today

The chair of Jewish Greens Vivien Lichtenstein has told the BBC it is "quite possible" she will leave the party after Green members adopted a motion declaring Zionism a form of racism.

The motion, which has divided senior party figures, also backs a "single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine", which includes modern-day Israel.

It has been criticised by some Jewish groups and Israel's foreign ministry.

Asked by BBC Radio 4's Today programme about her future, Lichtenstein said: "I haven't decided yet...It is quite possible that I will leave the party...I'm giving it a little time and to talk with colleagues."

Lichtenstein, who is a former chair of her local party, said she had opposed the motion from the first time she heard about it.

"I don't think it's helpful and it doesn't make any difference whatsoever to Palestinians in Gaza who have suffered devastation, orphans left behind, it doesn't make any difference to Palestinians in the West Bank who are currently suffering, are currently being attacked and killed."

Members of the Green Party of England and Wales endorsed the policy motion, which was put forward by a group of activists at the party's conference in Brighton, by 1,022 votes to 813.

There are 230,000 members of the Green party overall and not everyone attended the conference.

The party's leader Zack Polanski, who is himself Jewish, had called for the motion to be amended to add in protections for Jewish members and remove language referring to a "single democratic Palestinian State". Both of these amendments were defeated.

Polanski did not stay at conference to vote on either this or the substantive motion. He left early to campaign in Holborn and St Pancras, where he is standing in a by-election to be the MP. A full list of candidates in the contest can be found here.

The motion, among other statements, "supports the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, equal rights for all, and the right of return for Palestinians and their descendants".

It defines Zionism as an ideology supporting "an ethnonationalist Jewish state".

The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council, which criticised the motion, said "Zionism is anti-racism, creating a refuge for Jews in their ancient homeland after millennia of persecution outside it".

Lichtenstein said she defines herself as "both Zionist and anti-Zionist" depending on the definition, and said a problem with the motion is that there are many definitions.

She said she was not concerned about "people accusing me of supporting Israel's right to exist and therefore I'm a racist, which of course is not the case", but said the "very bad motion...crosses a line".

One way in which it did that, she said, was that the proposers said they had consulted some Jews, but did not consult the Jewish Greens, who would have made some amendments to improve the motion.

She said there was a "vast range" of opinions among Jewish Greens, some who supported the motion entirely, others who supported aspects, and others who were against it. Some Jewish Greens also support one state, she added.

She said that party policy was that "it's up to Israelis and Palestinians to choose their future - one state or two".

The UK and 11 allies support a two-state solution, which would recognise a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one. Israel rejects a two-state solution.

Her concern with the motion was that the Green Party may accuse UK, Israeli, or Jewish organisations, including those that partner with Palestinians, of racism. She said she supports many of these groups working "against the occupation and even go out on the ground to assist Palestinians".

She said she knows of some non-Jews who are planning on not staying in the party because "they think the motion crosses a line" and also because of their work, if they might not be able to be associated with a party that has "Zionism is racism" as a policy.

Asked whether she believed there were antisemites inside the party, including at senior levels, she said "there are certainly some antisemites in the party, I don't know about at senior level, that is not my experience".

In response to the motion, Israel's foreign ministry said it had banned Polanski from entering the country.

A Green spokeswoman insisted the party would protect Jewish members - and they would not be persecuted for attending synagogues which defined themselves as Zionist.

Speaking after the vote, Lubna Speitan, the Green member behind the motion, argued its backers wanted to voice opposition to "racist systems of oppression".

"We stand united against all forms of racism and discrimination - no exemptions," she added.

Four of the party's five MPs - Ellie Chowns, Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer, Sian Berry - had publicly opposed it, but the leadership was divided.

In her interview on the Today programme on Friday, co-deputy leader Rachel Millward had called the motion "problematic", while her counterpart Mothin Ali told the BBC on Saturday he would support the motion in its original form.

The Movement for Progressive Judaism, one of the largest and most liberal strands of Judaism in the UK, released a statement condemning the motion, which it said was "antisemitic in its formulation and intention".

"Jewish self-determination is a right. Declaring it racist is an attack on Jews," the statement read.

Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis also called the motion "poisonous antisemitism, a threat to British Jews and to Britain".

The Green Party motion said it "rejects attempts" to - among other things - "equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism" and said "we affirm that definitions of anti-Jewish discrimination should not equate Jewish identity with Zionist ideology or political practice".

Opposition parties pushed back against the motion.

Labour chairwoman Bridget Phillipson said the vote "crosses a line" and called on Polanski to "make clear that this will not be their position moving forwards".

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp criticised the motion on behalf of the Conservatives, saying it demonstrated the Green Party was "toxic to its core".

Liberal Democrat MP Luke Taylor said the "divisive" motion did not address "the rising threats" of Islamophobia and antisemitism in the UK.

Andrew takes legal action over search warrants relating to arrest

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c689zl5eljdzo, today

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is taking legal action against Thames Valley Police over his arrest in February.

The former Prince Andrew was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, in the wake of information that emerged from the Epstein files in the United States.

Mountbatten-Windsor's lawyers are said to be challenging the search warrants used in Sandringham and at Royal Lodge in Windsor relating to his arrest, as first reported by the Telegraph.

Thames Valley Police confirmed: "We are engaged in legal proceedings in relation to warrants previously obtained from the Central Criminal Court."

"As these legal proceedings are currently ongoing, it would be inappropriate for us to comment further," a spokesperson for the force that carried out the arrest said.

Mountbatten-Windsor, who lost his titles as a prince and Duke of York over his connections to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, is understood to have lodged a judicial review, questioning the legality of the search warrants.

Police were seen for several days searching his property at Marsh Farm in Sandringham and at his former home, Royal Lodge, on the Windsor estate.

This followed his arrest, which had been carried out on his 66th birthday, and led to him being taken to Aylsham police station.

A photograph captured his departure later that day, looking exhausted, after he was released under investigation.

Thames Valley Police says that its investigation is continuing.

Mountbatten-Windsor has consistently denied any wrongdoing in his associations with Epstein.

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The South African men trying to end violence against women: 'Every man needs to play a part'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm3eqegwpzl4o, 3 days ago

"I witness men hitting women all the time," says Kgomotso Mathekga, 30. "Especially when they are both drunk."

"I once had an argument with my girlfriend," he admits, "and I grabbed and slapped her."

Mathekga is speaking frankly during a gathering of men aimed at helping reduce the high levels of violence against women in South Africa.

The meeting is held in a narrow street in a Johannesburg informal settlement known as Organic Market. It is a maze of corrugated metal shacks and unpaved roads, close to Alexandra township.

"Now I feel pain," Mathekga continues. "We broke up and I no longer see my child. I feel like I've contributed to the problems in South Africa, instead of being the gentleman that I know I am."

At a nearby tavern, a group of men have pulled their chairs into a circle in the dust.

At the centre stands Itumeleng Stephen Tamaga, known locally as Bra Steve.

He raises his fist.

"We are men!" he shouts.

The group clap and cheers. Some sip bottled beer.

"Listen guys," Bra Steve says. "We must stand together to fight against gender-based violence and femicide."

Bra Steve is the local organiser of Father A Nation, a non-profit that works with men and boys to promote positive masculinity and help end violence against women.

The group's meeting comes as South Africa grapples with renewed anger over renewed cases of femicide and violence against women.

The discovery of the bodies of 12 women over three months, in the city of Ekurhuleni, near Johannesburg has reignited questions about the scale of what many people see as being a crisis of violence against women.

South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa has acknowledged that his government has not done enough and announced measures he hopes can make women feel safer.

The country has one of the highest murder rates in the world, with 5,427 people murdered between April and June this year alone.

In that period, according to the South African Human Rights Commission, 569 women were killed, an average of six a day, and 1,052 others survived attempted murder.

A report in 2022 by the Human Sciences Research Council found that more than 35% of South African women experienced physical or sexual violence, many from their own intimate partners.

For Bra Steve, part of the solution to the crisis is helping men to understand the issue and take responsibility for their actions.

"We are a lost generation," he says. "We must restore dignity to the men around here."

Amongst the group of men outside the tavern is Zizipho Mtwesi, the project co-ordinator of Father A Nation.

Reflecting on recent weeks, he says more should be done.

The latest measures announced by Ramaphosa, including better street lighting and a review of unsolved cases, are too little, he says, and too late.

"When I think about all of these recent murders in Johannesburg, I get angry. Why do we have to wait for this to happen for us to act?"

He looks around and gestures at the meeting. "We are trying to reach men before things like these murders happen again."

Craig Wilkinson is the founder of the group. "We get men to talk, to process their feelings," he explains.

"And as they do, this healing takes place. And the second phase is teaching and training positive masculinity.

"We ultimately hope that this will eliminate the scourge of gender-based violence."

He stands up, moving into the centre of the group, calling out to the men.

"You as a man are a powerful force for good," he tells them. "You choose what kind of man you want to be. Women need to be safe."

Father A Nation operates across South Africa, teaching healthy masculinity and running training programmes across dozens of schools and colleges.

Mystery surrounds the spate of murders which has sparked South Africa's latest moment of soul-searching about the safety of its women.

Police have not ruled out potential links between some of the Ekurhuleni deaths but have not said they are investigating a serial killer. Suspects in some of the cases have appeared in court.

But the spate of deaths has sparked new concerns and in Organic Market some women are more fearful than ever.

Outside a nearby shack Linkie listens with interest as she cleans clothes in a large metal bucket.

"We are not safe when we are outside our place," she says.

"We are afraid when we see a car behind us when we walk. We feel afraid. We feel scared. What if this guy's going to kidnap me or do something to me?"

It is a feeling shared by many women here. In the local hair salon, sporting a mane of thick pink braids, is Providence Maseko.

She comes to the door to speak to Bra Steve.

"Safety here is very bad," she says, "Maybe you are the serial killer. How do I know who to trust?"

Bra Steve laughs. "We must talk about these things," he urges. "Come to our meetings and we can learn to trust each other."

Maseko tells me that she now takes an e-hailing taxi everywhere in the hope that it is safer.

Back at the tavern, the men's meeting is wrapping up.

"As we try to stop gender-based violence," says Zizipho, "each and every man needs to know that they need to play a part in this.

"And if they wouldn't allow these things to happen to their own daughters or own mothers, they mustn't allow it to be done to someone else's daughter, which is their wives or their girlfriends."

Mathekga is impressed with what he has heard.

"I would love them to keep on practising what we have learned, because we no longer have role models," he says. "Our fathers and our uncles, they are there in prison. We must now become role models and help make this country better."

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

The job interview question you don't have to answer

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cje3r35p0qeno, today

Prepare all you like, but there is often still one job interview question that leaves you feeling uncomfortable.

While employers in the UK are within their rights to ask you how much you get paid in your current role, applicants are not obliged to tell them.

Recruiters have been encouraged to stop posing questions about salary history and, in the EU, new rules will prevent them doing so.

But in the UK, there is still a chance of it coming up, so how best should you answer?

What can interviewers ask?

When interviewing or deciding on new staff, employers must not discriminate against an applicant based on so-called protected characteristics, including age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation.

Sometimes it feels like interviewers, and interviewees, tip-toe around the subject of money.

But Louise Rudd, a senior adviser at the workplace advice and conciliation service Acas, says there are no regulations that prevent employers from asking interviewees about their current salary, or their salary expectations.

She says employers, if they do want to know, should ask each applicant the same questions to ensure they are treated fairly.

A few years ago, a campaign was launched urging employers to stop asking new recruits how much they were paid in their previous jobs. It had its own hashtag - #EndSalaryHistory.

The Fawcett Society, which campaigns for women and gender equality, said that asking the question risked maintaining historic unfair differences in pay due to gender, race and disability inequality.

Rather than offering a salary based on skills, experience and performance, it meant employers rewarded an individual's perceived worth and negotiating skills instead, the society said.

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation supported the move, urging recruiters not to ask.

Employers in the EU will be banned from asking about salary history in new rules being rolled out across the bloc.

But that's not featured in Cabinet Office plans in the UK, which instead concentrates on telling employers to publish salary information in job adverts.

What's the best way to answer?

When you're going for a new job, you can reveal your current salary if you are happy to.

Some people asked by BBC News out and about in London suggested they would reply with an inflated salary - so they get paid more in the next job. However, the risks of lying in an interview can far outweigh the possible reward.

There are no requirements for you to disclose your salary if you don't want to.

Rudd says some people might prefer to give their salary expectations, or outline their understanding of the salary range for the role.

Recruitment firms often say applicants could instead focus on their skills and experience, so those are used as a measure of what they should be paid, not their salary history.

Shazia Ejaz, director of campaigns at the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, says jobseekers should approach questions about pay with "realism but also confidence".

"Candidates can focus on showcasing the value they bring, the benefits that matter most to them and to go to the interview knowing the market rate for the role," she says.

"Jobseekers who have done their homework on salaries and can explain the contribution they will make are in the strongest position to secure the right package."

How India became dangerously addicted to Chinese imports

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5pve834grpno, today

Take a walk into an Indian toy shop and as well as picking up a new favourite plaything for a child, you might just get an insight into how the nation is battling for a batter economic relationship with its all-powerful neighbour China.

Six years ago, in an attempt to push local manufacturing and keep substandard toys out of its market, India raised tariffs on imported toys from 20% to 60% and eventually to 70%.

Retailers were up in arms and said that domestic firms could never match the foreign-made stuff. But the combination of higher customs duties and quality control standards worked.

Indian imports of toys fell by a third from nearly $300mn in 2020 to $100mn this year, while exports rose from around $129mn to $200mn in the same period. Moreover, the country was able to drastically reduce its dependence on China, which held a 70% share of the local toy market.

The sector stands out as a rare exception in India's otherwise unsuccessful attempts to rebalance an increasingly lopsided trading relationship with its larger neighbour, which some experts say, is now among the most asymmetric in the world.

Even as diplomatic ties between the two countries completely broke down following the Galwan Valley clashes in 2020 and Delhi announced a slew of anti-dumping duties and a ban on Chinese apps such as Tik Tok, its trade deficit with Beijing has only ballooned - from $44bn in 2020 to an eye-popping $112bn this year.

"India's economic dependence on China continued to deepen while political, security, and investment ties were at their lowest point," Kevin Zongzhe Li, a Washington-based Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Centre for China Analysis, told the BBC.

More worryingly, exports to China remained below pre-pandemic level even as imports doubled in this period.

"China now supplies over 30% of India's industrial imports, and India depends on it for more than 100 critical products. And the imbalance is worsening," says Ajay Srivastava of the Delhi-based Global Trade and Research Initiative (GTRI).

If the rapid pace of imports continues, bilateral deficit could jump to $134bn, giving Beijing even more leverage over Indian industry, according to Srivastava.

On the sidelines of the Brics summit in Delhi in September, amid a deepening thaw between the Asian giants, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed to address these "structural trade imbalances and supply chain issues".

But given how deeply entrenched Chinese imports have become to India's industrial economy, this will be a formidable task for Delhi, experts told the BBC.

That's primarily because India depends on China to not merely consume end-products, but increasingly to produce industrial goods.

To be true, India has reduced its reliance on imports of finished goods such as smartphones and solar equipment, and now produces more than a quarter of the world's iPhones.

"Yet, production remains largely assembly-based and depends heavily on imported components, particularly from China," says Srivastava.

It's the same story with industrial machinery, battery inputs, chemicals, solar cells, and manufacturing equipment.

Electrical machinery and electronics alone account for 36% of imports, followed by machinery and mechanical appliances at 21.7%, while organic chemicals and plastics also have a significant share, according to the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) think tank.

"Their interruption would not merely affect consumption; it would disrupt production itself," according to Soumya Bhowmik, a Fellow at ORF's Centre for New Economic Diplomacy, who argues that this reflects India's difficulty in substituting Chinese inputs with local production.

Besides a growing reliance on inputs and raw material, Chinese imports to India are also being propelled by other macroeconomic trends.

China has huge excess capacity in sectors from steel to solar panels and electric vehicles, while its slowing economy cannot absorb the output.

Manufacturers are therefore increasingly turning to overseas markets, selling goods cheaply. China's trade surplus is expected to top $1tn for a second straight year.

A lot of these goods are coming to Indian shores because it is rapidly expanding manufacturing across segments of the economy, but also as "Western markets impose tariffs and other restrictions", says Srivastava.

On the other hand, lack of access to the Chinese market remains a major challenge for Indian companies.

"Indian products face a variety of tariff and non-tariff hurdles in China that make it difficult to scale exports," says Li.

"If normalisation [of ties] continues without a serious push for reciprocal market access, India risks a situation where the political relationship improves but the economic dependency stays the same."

The long term solution to both reducing avoidable imports and improving exports performance will be to strengthen manufacturing, says Srivastava.

But that requires sector-specific industrial policy and stronger fundamentals – affordable power and credit, efficient logistics and stable regulations – areas where India still falls short.

India has also recently softened foreign direct investment rules, which could open the door to Chinese companies wanting to expand Indian investments. But these too will need careful vetting, he adds.

"Investment that merely expands distribution networks or assembles products using Chinese parts could increase imports and deepen dependence. Approvals should therefore prioritise technology transfer, local value addition, domestic component production and exports from India."

More immediately, India could focus on targeting higher exports to China in specific sectors to reduce its trade asymmetry, says Li. Sectors like pharmaceuticals could be a natural fit with China's population aging and healthcare costs rising.

"But narrowing a $112 billion deficit won't come from finding niche export sectors alone," he adds.

"The key question is whether Beijing is ready and willing to make concessions on market access as part of the broader normalisation. Alternatively, India will need to find its own leverage to force that conversation."

Follow BBC News India on Instagram, YouTube, X and Facebook.

Why are data centres such a big deal in Scotland?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6qxv55882z1o, today

Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, read a Google summary or make an online bank payment, a data centre is working behind the scenes.

Now Scotland is part of a global race to build many more of them - on a massive scale.

The explosion in artificial intelligence (AI) over the past few years has seen tech firms scrambling to build new "hyperscale" data centres, including some which would rank among the biggest in the world.

Plans are in place to build at least 23 giant AI-powered data centres.

Supporters say they are vital for the future and could bring billions of pounds in investment, as well as thousands of jobs.

Opponents fear the impact of their size on local communities, the vast amounts of energy they use and even the noise they will make.

So what exactly are data centres, and why have they become one of Scotland's most controversial planning battles?

What is a data centre?

From the outside, data centres look like a factory or a warehouse.

On the inside, thousands of flashing lights blink and fans whirr as rows of computer servers power AI.

While some are built by tech giants like Amazon, other developers claim commercial sensitivities when asked what they are actually powering.

Scotland's centres are currently quite small, but some of proposals for the hyperscale versions are immense.

One of the biggest is at Auchtertool in Fife.

The site would span 60 hectares (150 acres) - about the size of 84 football pitches.

What's the controversy?

AI is seen by some as the most transformative technology ever made but others have warned there is chance that if the frightening pace of development continues it "could kill all humans" within the next decade.

But Scotland's data centre debate is not really about the technology inside the building - it's about the scale and impact of the centres themselves.

At the moment, the biggest data centre in Scotland is thought to be DataVita's site in Airdrie, which has a capacity for 12MW.

The new data centres being proposed are a whole new level.

If one planned for Chapelcross in Dumfries and Galloway goes ahead, it will have a capacity of 1,000MW - making it one of the largest data centres in the world.

At Auchtertool, the planned 600MW data centre would be the same size as the neighbouring village.

Other concerns focus on:

* their size and impact on the landscape

* the amount of electricity they require

* the water needed to cool equipment

* noise generated by thousands of servers and cooling systems

The Scottish Greens and campaign groups have called for a moratorium on large data centres, arguing they could undermine climate targets and place additional pressure on renewable energy supplies.

The Scottish government has so far refused to impose a moratorium.

Why build them in Scotland?

One of Scotland's biggest selling points for data centre developers is its strong renewable energy sector.

Scotland generates huge amounts of electricity from wind, and some of that power is currently wasted because the grid does not have enough capacity to move it from where it is produced to where it is needed.

However, experts caution that this does not mean data centres would run entirely on renewable energy.

During periods of low wind or when clouds are blocking the sun, it may mean having to fire up fossil fuel power stations to provide the energy required to keep the servers blinking.

Don't data centres use a lot of water?

As well as using huge amounts of electricity, the giant data centres can require large quantities of water to prevent them from overheating.

While the tech industry says it is developing more efficient cooling systems, industry sources told the BBC last year the UK government's plan to make the UK a "world leader" in AI could put already stretched supplies of drinking water under strain.

An expert recently claimed that Scotland's current data centres use less water each day than its libraries, but there are significant concerns over what the water consumption could be if any of the hyperscale centres were given the go-ahead.

And what about the hum?

Data centres have many fans cooling down the servers inside and people in the US who live near them have reported hearing a constant noise, with concerns it has also driven away wildlife.

What are the potential benefits of data centres?

As well as having a stake in a key future technology, those behind AI data centres say they will create jobs.

Lanarkshire has been designated an AI growth zone by the UK government, with data centres at its heart.

When it was announced in January, £8bn of investment and 3,400 jobs were promised.

The type of jobs a data centre creates has also been debated.

About 800 are expected to be in AI, with 50 apprenticeships. The rest are in construction.

Apatura - the developer behind 10 of the hyperscale data centre proposals in Scotland - highlights its green credentials with its access to renewable energy and battery storage.

What are the politics behind it?

With China and the US hoping to win the AI race, the UK government does not want to be left behind.

The Scottish government also supports the investment in the AI growth zone.

In August, it announced that ministers would have to be notified of proposed centres over 50MW in capacity.

A month later, it rejected the Scottish Greens' call for applications to be paused until new national guidelines are in force.

However, it said environmental impact assessments would have to be submitted.

The government also said it was "highly unlikely" any large data centres would be given the green light before Christmas, and promised that new guidance would be published by the festive season.

Sorrow of the children shipped to Canada all alone

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmz6z2831qgeo, today

When 10-year-old Rose Shapcott and her brother Fred, 14, were orphaned and put into a Barnardo's children's home in 1891, little did they know they would end up being separated and sent thousands of miles away across the Atlantic.

The siblings were sent to Canada as part of the British Home Children child migration programme, which saw about 100,000 impoverished children from Britain sent to overseas colonies including Canada, between 1869 and the 1940s.

These children were separated from their families and sent off to Canada as a source of cheap labour, often suffering mistreatment at the hands of those who took them in, said Rose's great grandson Malcolm Farrow.

Farrow said Fred was sent to Saskatchewan first and then Rose asked to be sent over when she was 17, thinking they would be reunited.

Instead, she was sent thousands of miles away to Peterborough in Ontario and went on to have "a very sad life", Farrow revealed.

Rose ended up getting married but Fred managed to get her back to England as he was concerned about her.

She had a baby boy illegitimately, but he was put into care due to having a disability. At one point, Rose was admitted to an asylum in England when she began struggling with her mental health, Farrow explained.

Eventually, she returned to her husband in Canada, without her son, and died in 1916.

Farrow is a board member at the Home Children Canada charity, which raises awareness of the young child migrants, some of whom died in childhood.

Their work has included locating and documenting burial sites across Canada, including a mass grave of 76 British Home Children in Etobicoke, Ontario - and erecting a monument in their honour.

In another case, George Roberts was 15 when he was sent to Canada on a ship called the Corsican, which sailed out of the Albert Dock in 1913.

According to Simon Roberts - who George was the great uncle of - he was born out of wedlock in Liverpool in 1897. After his mother moved to London to escape the shame, he was put into care when she began struggling to provide for him and his older brother.

Roberts said being a bit older, his uncle was "one of the luckier ones", but many children endured horrific experiences.

He said "the problem was that, although I think there were good intentions in the UK, there was no inspection process or supervision in Canada".

Roberts said some of the children died and the abuse some faced included being "put into fields in the middle of a Canadian winter with no shoes, with no boots, and told to work the fields".

Roberts said he was "extremely disappointed to discover that there is no memorial to the journeys undertaken by these children in the country from which they were sent".

He said the Home Children Canada charity was "trying to get Liverpool City Council to allow us to put a memorial up to remember these poor lonely little children, many of which were treated horrifically in their short lives".

The proposed memorial shows a young boy and girl dressed ready to get on the boat, each holding a little suitcase, and looking out across the Mersey.

The Home Children Canada charity said it would be willing to pay for the statue but it needs permission to erect it in the city.

Sheila Dodd, also a descendant of one of the British Home Children, said the charity believed that 10-15% of all British Home Children came from the Liverpool area, with at least six sending agencies and homes based in the city.

Dodd said her grandmother Heather McGrath and her grandmother's brother James were sent to Canada via Liverpool in 1930 and 1927 respectively.

She said she was able to speak to her grandmother, who told her about "her terrible experiences".

Dodd said she hoped the memorial could be erected in Liverpool so she and other descendants could visit it as a place of pilgrimage.

The BBC has approached Liverpool City Council for comment.

Listen to the best of BBC Radio Merseyside on Sounds and follow BBC Merseyside on Facebook, X, and Instagram. You can also send story ideas via Whatsapp to 0808 100 2230.

Indian singer Anuv Jain on finding success without the Bollywood boost

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c933xnneg2zvo, today

Can you find success as an Indian artist, outside of the Bollywood machine, while making music that feels like you?

Well according to Anuv Jain it's possible - and you can even create something "beautiful".

The singer-songwriter's soft vocals have gained hundreds of millions of views on YouTube - not an easy feat as an independent artist in India's music scene.

BBC Newsbeat met Jain as he prepared for the final shows on the European leg of his first world tour to find out why he's taking his time and "hoping for the best".

"It's not about the numbers," Jain tells us backstage, ahead of his sold-out performance at London's Roundhouse.

But they do tell a story.

Jain is from Ludhiana in the Punjab region of India and began singing as a teenager.

His tracks have since racked up hundreds of millions of views on YouTube with their emotional storylines about relationships and heartbreak.

Jain primarily sings in Hindi, with his pieces often exploring deep emotions like love and longing.

Fans talk about feeling like his music soundtracks their lives and is personal to them.

His accessible style has attracted 3.9 million followers on Instagram and more than 20 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

According to Jain, the secret to his success is simple.

When writing music, he says, he imagines how someone listening in the car, going for a run or sitting alone at night would feel hearing the song.

"I just try to make a good song and something that I would like to listen to, something my mum, my sister and my wife would like to listen to," he says.

"For some reason, the taste that we have in music is gentle enough that when we put it out there, there are millions of people who are wanting to consume all of this."

Jain has attracted a sizeable fanbase without the backing of Bollywood, which has traditionally dominated the Indian music industry with opportunities and significant funding for artists.

He's one of a growing number of independent musicians offering something different to the rollicking film scores and dramatic ballads that are synonymous with the country's movie industry.

Jain describes artists like him as existing in an "alternate space".

"We release music ourselves and hope for the best," he says.

Jo Tum Mere Ho and Afsos, Jain's track with AP Dhillon, both reached number one on the Asian Music Charts, but the singer says there's no recipe to his success.

Jain says he's "very selective" about the music he releases, only putting out one song a year until recently.

But he plans to change that - and insists he has new songs coming "very soon".

"They're done and I think they're beautiful songs so technically you might have more music this year," he says.

"It's not like it's gonna be just one release, let's see how it works out."

The singer explains that seeing a project through is key - which might be why he limits what he puts out.

"There are no projects like right now for me that are half or that I haven't completed them yet.

"When I start a project, I always finish it. I mean, I might have ideas, but as soon as I start writing, I finish it."

Simplicity seems to do the trick, with certain passages of Jain's songs, like Arz Kiya Hai, becoming hugely popular among his fanbase and going viral on TikTok and Instagram.

There have been high-profile collaborations between some of western music and Indian music's biggest names in recent years.

Jain says he'd be open to working with bigger stars, but only if his own identity can be preserved and things are done "the right way".

"The storytelling cannot get diluted just because there's a bigger name attached," he says.

But, he adds: "I'm not there yet".

However, Jain does admit he could see himself joining forces with former One Direction star Zayn Malik, who's enjoyed success in both the Official Singles Chart and Official Asian Music Chart.

"He would be somebody who would definitely work very well with the kind of music that I make," says Jain.

"Maybe the universe will just make it happen."

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

Why Canada is wargaming a (long shot) US invasion

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9m2mjj3yvg4o, yesterday

Prime Minister Mark Carney admitted last week that he has prepared for a once-unthinkable scenario - a US invasion.

Noting the risk was low and the likelihood highly improbable, he told the New York Times he had a responsibility to consider all possibilities as the US-Canada relationship is redefined under the Donald Trump presidency.

"That's just risk management," Carney said.

Trump's global tariffs and his often-repeated desire to make Canada the 51st state has led Canada to war game an attack by the Americans.

In 2025, the US president said it was "highly unlikely" that the US would ever use force against Canada. Instead he said, he would continue to exert economic pressures to obtain political aims.

"President Trump has done more than anyone to protect the great people of Canada," the White House told the BBC in a statement this week.

Military experts who spoke to the BBC also think an invasion is a long shot, pointing to the multiple ways the two countries work together on defence.

But the issue is clearly weighing on Canadians' minds.

In January, after the US captured Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, a Leger poll suggested that over 30% of Canadians believed that a US invasion was likely.

Why it is unlikely to happen

A war between Canada and the US would be complicated and almost difficult to imagine, said Lt-Gen Christopher Coates, a former military officer of 34 years with the Royal Canadian Air Force who held various senior positions.

"I was involved in military operations for my whole career, and we never considered the possibility that there would be a military attack coming from US territory," he told the BBC.

Coates, who had served on Nato missions, noted that Canada and the US collaborate on many aspects of military defence.

They are both members of the north Atlantic defence alliance, which mandates members to defend a fellow member-nation should they be attacked.

The two countries also conduct joint Arctic defence missions under the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), and frequently share intelligence.

Because of this, Coates said he believes an attack by the US on Canada would not begin with an armed assault, but rather with more discreet means like cyberwarfare.

Not always the best of friends

After World War II, Canada and the US became natural allies for the latter part of the 20th Century, and have become heavily integrated economically, militarily and culturally.

But it wasn't always this way. In fact, a core tenet of Canada's identity is its resistance of US expansionism in the 18th and 19th Centuries, said Tim Foran, a researcher with the Canadian War Museum.

"Fear of the United States is foundational to the political project that is Canada," he said.

Canada was formed as a collection of British North American colonies who remained loyal to the British Crown when the colonies in the modern-day US rebelled.

Before the formation of Canada, the US had attempted to invade British North American colonies, taking control of Montreal in 1775 and nearly conquering Quebec City.

In the war of 1812, the Americans invaded what was known then as Upper Canada, Lower Canada and the maritime colonies repeatedly, resulting in a stalemate. During that war, British troops famously burned down the White House in retaliation.

Foran said that at the time, the colonies that later became Canada relied on Great Britain and its Royal Navy for its defence, as well as indigenous peoples who served as generals in major battles.

Canada again contemplated war with the US post-World War I in response to its growing power and influence.

It drafted a plan that was informed by secret trips to border cities made by Canadian army generals, who would pose as tourists and snap photos of bridges and highways for intelligence.

They also spoke to local residents to better understand their enemy.

A war was an unlikely scenario then, said Andrew Burtch, a researcher with the Canadian War Museum with expertise on Canada in the 20th Century, but the Canadians still wanted to be prepared.

"That's part of what militaries do," he said. "They envisage all sorts of different scenarios."

What a US invasion could look like

Even if a US invasion is extremely unlikely, Matthew Schmidt, an associate professor of national security at the University of New Haven in Connecticut, said the fact that Canadians were preparing was a sign of just how drastically the global order has shifted.

He added Canadian leaders do have hard questions to ask about how closely they want to continue working with the American military - a partnership that gives them valuable information should they want to harm Canada in any way.

"It's really doing harm to relationships with the United States, and there's a certain amount of legitimate fear," he said.

Americans might not take Trump's comments about making Canada the 51st state seriously, he said, but Canadians clearly do - and are prepared to defend themselves if needed.

So what would it be like if it happened?

The first phase of a war could be quite short.

According to the model used by the Canadian military, as reported on by the Globe and Mail newspaper earlier this year, a US attack would see Canada's strategic positions overwhelmed within a week

Its military would quickly be outnumbered, forcing Canadian forces to resort to guerilla-type warfare to try to suppress their enemy.

Allied nations like France and Britain would be called on to provide support and defence for Canada, the newspaper reported in January, citing senior government officials.

The theoretical model is believed to be the first time in a century that Canada planned for an American assault.

The modelling is on the lighter end of military combat planning, Coates said.

He said that Canada, unlike its Nato allies, was lagging behind when it came to having a response plan in place in the event of any ground invasion, and that it was now playing catch-up in this era of unpredictable geopolitics.

Part of that, he said, was made evident by a recent call by Canada's defence chief to drastically increase the size of its military, including the addition of as many as 300,000 lightly trained citizen soldiers.

An invasion of Canada might not be straightforward from the US point of view either.

Even with its outsized military, the US would have a difficult time getting buy-in for a fight with Canada, said Schmidt.

"I think you would have a large number of American officers who would resign if given the order to invade Canada," he said.

"They would see it as an illegal and immoral order."

Schmidt said Canadian soldiers and American soldiers routinely train together, and share a mutual respect.

But in the unlikely scenario that relations would deteriorate to the point of combat, Schmidt said the US would likely focus on acquiring valuable Canadian resources like oil and minerals, and political decapitation.

"You would see a a kind of operation that would mirror perhaps what you saw in Venezuela," he said, referring to US military action earlier this year to capture former Venezuelan President Maduro.

Although he acknowledged the US has greater military capacity, he said that "pound for pound" Canadian soldiers would be able to put up a fight.

Supporters of jailed ex-PM Imran Khan march to Pakistan capital

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmkg79z04w4zo, today

Supporters of Imran Khan have begun a long march from Pakistan's north-west towards the capital Islamabad, calling for the release of the jailed ex-prime minister.

Some 5,000 people have taken to the streets from the city of Lakki Marwat on Sunday, carrying flags of Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. Also part of the convoy is a truck with a huge billboard that read "release Imran Khan".

Concerns have grown in recent months over the 73-year-old Khan's health. His supporters claim he is unable to access proper medical care.

The march, originally scheduled last week, was postponed to allow for talks between the government and PTI leaders, but these talks have ended in deadlock.

Sohail Afridi, chief minister for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province ruled by PTI, expects that the march will make its way to a town about 80km (50 miles) west of Islamabad by Thursday.

"[By then] this movement will have reached every corner of the country and every square will have become a centre of activity," he said on Sunday, urging the people to "play an active role in the political process".

The demonstrators have paused for the night in the city of Karak and is expected to resume their march around midday on Monday.

Authorities in Islamabad have stacked up shipping containers to block key access routes to the capital city.

The PTI said talks with government failed because authorities rejected the party's request for access to Khan so that its leaders could consult him on national and political issues.

The party also said it had demanded that Khan be given an immediate medical examination and treatment.

Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi meanwhile accused Afridi of "sabotaging" negotiations, saying the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government had backed out of earlier commitments on counter-terrorism issues, according to Pakistan's local media reports.

In August, Khan was briefly transferred from jail to a state-run hospital for medical examination and treatment following complaints about his deteriorating health. The doctors later deemed him "medically fit".

The intervention was the most significant relief Khan has received from the courts since he was imprisoned in 2023 on corruption charges, which he says were politically motivated.

Khan's family and the PTI, however, criticised the authorities for defying a court order that he be examined by physicians at a specific private hospital.

On 20 September, Khan's sister Aleema Khanum was arrested in the eastern city of Lahore.

The arrest order said Khanum had been mobilising people to "create law and order situations" and "raising/chanting objectionable slogans amongst the general public against the Government".

Khan, who previously captained the Pakistan national cricket team, served as the country's prime minister from 2018 to 2022.

He was imprisoned in August 2023 and has faced charges in more than 100 cases, ranging from leaking state secrets to selling state gifts - all of which he decried as politically motivated.

Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi were both sentenced to 17 years late last year.

His jailing triggered large-scale protests by supporters, which were met with a crackdown by authorities.

Despite his incarceration, Khan remains a significant presence in Pakistani politics with a large number of supporters.

Former international cricket captains have made several appeals to Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif urging Khan be accorded proper medical care.

Protesters scuffle with police as migrants brought ashore on south coast

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmrly809n8p6o, today

About 150 anti-migrant demonstrators gathered in a south coast town to stop a group of migrants, who had crossed the English Channel in a small boat, being brought ashore by the RNLI.

Some flares were set off and there were a few scuffles with police during the stand-off at a marina in Gosport that lasted into the early hours of Monday morning.

The Home Office said 149 migrants were picked up in a mid-Channel rescue operation by the RNLI alongside a French vessel.

They were taken by coach to a processing centre in Kent. It is the second known landing of large numbers of migrants this far west along the south coast in recent years.

A police cordon was in place on Haslar Road in Gosport, where the atmosphere at the protest mostly remained peaceful.

Some protesters stopped police vans from advancing by standing in front of them and chanting "shame on you" and "deport the lot".

Hampshire Police said it deployed officers to "support our partners in the event of an emergency at sea". The force imposed conditions under the Public Order Act as well as powers prohibiting the wearing of face coverings.

Hampshire's Police and Crime Commissioner Donna Jones said she was "calling on the Home Secretary to intervene urgently to ensure that UK Border Force has the capacity and vessels to transfer people on the water to Dover.

She said: "No sites across the southern coastline of Britain should be used as 'landing sites'. We are not equipped and we do not have the resources to keep policing this."

Posting on social media, Jones added: "Each protest is costing me £150,000 of taxpayers' money from my police budget which I can ill afford to spend.

"That means there is less police officer time on the streets of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight - urgent action is needed.

"This has got to stop."

Zoe Huggins, Conservative leader of Gosport Borough Council, said she was "angry, frustrated and saddened" that "we were in this scenario again".

She said a small number of protesters had left debris, barricades and nails on roads, and had started a couple of small fires.

Huggins said: "Our call to action is that Border Force have bigger boats, they intercept and they take them straight to Dover to a processing centre that they do not choose Gosport as a initial reception."

She also criticised the lack of communication from the Home Office, saying emails sent on Sunday had not been responded to.

She said: "That's just not on. The Home Office and Border Force need to have a grip on this."

A Home Office spokesperson refused to explain why Gosport had been chosen on this occasion, saying they do not comment on "operational processes".

"The Border Security Command works around the clock to monitor the Channel and protect our border," they said.

They added it was "vital we continue to detain, check and process every small boat arrival".

The migrant dinghy appeared to have set off from near Utah Beach in Normandy on Sunday morning, according to ship tracking data.

It is the third crossing in a month. So far this year 19,451 people are recorded as having crossed the Channel in small boats.

That number is 43% lower than this time last year and 23% below the figure at this stage in 2024.

Last month, more than 100 migrants landed at Eastney in Portsmouth, leading to more scuffles between police and demonstrators.

The 51 migrants were were ultimately taken to Dover by sea.

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Ethiopian rebel forces withdraw from Tigray regional capital

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqm249v07j4xo, today

Rebel forces in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region have said they have temporarily withdrawn from the regional capital, Mekelle, as fighting with the national army moves towards the city.

The Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which has been running the region, said its decision to relocate was made because of concerns about risks to civilians.

Two residents in Mekelle told the BBC that pro-government forces now control the city and TPLF forces have abandoned it. One resident also said mobile phone services appear to have resumed in parts of the city.

Fighting has erupted in recent weeks between the TPLF and federal government forces alongside allied fighters in parts of Ethiopia's northern regions of Tigray, Afar and Amhara.

The development marks a major shift in the conflict and raises concerns among observers that the fighting could further destabilise the Horn of Africa, potentially drawing in neighbouring countries.

The US Department of State called for "restraint" and "dialogue" on all sides ahead of a diplomatic meeting about the conflict in Egypt on Sunday with leaders from some of Ethiopia's neighbours.

Tigray residents have been trying to recover from a devastating two-year civil war that ended in 2022 when the African Union (AU) brokered a peace deal, known as the Pretoria Agreement, between the two sides.

However, in the last six months there has been a worsening of relations, with both sides accusing each other of violating the agreement.

Last month, the TPLF joined six other armed movements, including the Fano militia from Amhara, to form an alliance whose stated objective is to remove Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government from power.

The civil war was one of the most deadly conflicts this century - the AU's mediator estimated some 600,000 people died as the fighting drove the region to the precipice of famine.

On Friday, neighbours Ethiopia and Eritrea severed diplomatic relations with each other after Addis Ababa accused Asmara of supporting a new rebel alliance - an allegation that it denied.

Ethiopia has also accused Egypt of supporting the rebels, leading to the expulsion of an Egyptian diplomat, which Cairo responded to by ordering an Ethiopian embassy official to leave within the same period.

The United Nations has warned that the deteriorating security situation in northern Ethiopia is severely disrupting humanitarian work and has called on all sides to guarantee safe and unhindered access to people in need.

BT agrees rescue deal to buy broadband operator TalkTalk

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvze4g06526ro, today

The UK's biggest broadband provider, BT, has agreed to rescue rival operator TalkTalk in a takeover.

The deal, which will need to be approved by the UK's competition regulator, would mark end of months of speculation over the future for TalkTalk, which has been on the brink of administration because of its debts.

TalkTalk has 1.5 million retail customers and one million wholesale customers across the UK. Some have raised concerns about the increased control BT will have over the broadband market as a result of the deal.

BT chief executive Alison Kirkby said the deal provided "a safety net for the households and businesses who rely on TalkTalk".

"TalkTalk's customers will benefit from access to the UK's best network, and the full range of market-leading products and services that BT offers," she added.

BT said the deal would provide "much needed and immediate reassurance" for TalkTalk's employees as well as its UK customers - both retail and wholesale.

"This includes vulnerable households, and connections that support critical national infrastructure providers across health, emergency services, defence, education, transport, banking and government."

All passengers presumed dead after plane went missing off US coast

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmze4g8r6nr9o, today

Six people aboard a medical transport aircraft that went missing on Saturday while it was travelling from Bermuda to Boston are presumed dead, according to a statement from the flight's operator.

On Sunday evening, the United States Coast Guard said it was ending its search for survivors off the coast of Nantucket, a Massachusetts island.

"We must now face the heartbreaking reality that the four members of our Latitude team, our patient and the patient's family escort, who were aboard Heartbeat 104, are presumed to have died," Latitude Air Ambulance said in a statement shortly thereafter.

"Our thoughts are first and foremost with their families, loved ones, friends, and colleagues."

The Federal Aviation Administration lost contact with the Gulfstream G-100 plane just after 01:00 local time (05:00 GMT) on Saturday morning.

On Saturday evening, authorities located a "debris field" confirmed to be from the aircraft.

The plane had departed from Bermuda's L.F. Wade International Airport at 23:40 local time on Friday night, according to flight data from FlightAware, and was due to land at Boston's Logan International at 01:30 EDT (05:30 GMT).

Four Canadian nationals and two Bermudian nationals were onboard.

"This is an unimaginable loss for our Latitude family and for everyone who loved the six people aboard Heartbeat 104," said Peter Byl, President of Latitude Air Ambulance, on Sunday evening.

"Our focus now is on supporting their families, supporting our people and assisting the authorities. We will honour our colleagues by remembering the care, professionalism, and commitment they brought to their work every day."

Latitude Air Ambulance is a Canadian company that provides international medical flights for patients returning home.

Two pilots and two medical staff, both Canadian, had flown to Bermuda to collect a patient and their relative, Clarence Togeretz, director of flight operations at Latitude, told CBC News.

FlightAware's tracker shows that the aircraft significantly dropped in altitude before its communications went dark, plummeting from around 7,300m (24,000ft) to 3,300m (11,000ft).

Radio transmissions show trouble with communications between the air traffic controller and the pilot, the Boston Globe reported, based on transmissions provided by LiveATC.net.

"You're coming in blind? Is that what you said?" the air traffic controller asked. "Are you declaring an emergency, or no?"

The pilot's response was inaudible.

"You're coming in a little weak so I didn't hear what your response was, if you were declaring an emergency or not," the air traffic controller said, according to the Globe.

The air traffic controller later confirmed the pilot had declared an emergency.

An area fire dispatcher asked emergency crews just after 01:00 EDT to prepare to meet a plane with an "electrical issue".

The dispatcher later said "the aircraft has lost radio and radar".

Latitude said in its statement on Sunday evening that it would continue to cooperate with relevant authorities during ongoing recovery efforts and investigations.

"Determining the circumstances and cause of an aviation accident is a careful and methodical process, and we will not speculate about what occurred," the company said.

Spain and China are cosying up - to the anger of many in the EU

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6vgyg824m02o, 4 days ago

On the streets of Barcelona, fiery red and gold Chinese dragons (presumably with very sweaty people inside the costumes) danced among delighted crowds, while Chinese acrobats elicited gasps of amazement as they rolled, tossed and threw spherical lanterns in the air, keeping - as if by magic - the candle inside them upright at all times.

Shanghai made history this week: the first Asian metropolis to be invited as the city of honour to Barcelona's famously rambunctious cultural festival, La Merce. Vast street processions here are overwhelmingly aimed at celebrating centuries-old Catalan traditions. So it was quite something to witness velvet-clad Catalan pipers, sashaying down Barcelona's main boulevards, their medieval tunes intermingling with lilting music that accompanied flocks of brightly dressed Chinese performers.

Shanghai Vice Mayor Lu Shan flew to Barcelona to speak at La Merce's opening ceremony. Chinese and Catalan cultural traditions differ in form, he remarked, but they share "a common spirit".

Spain and China are experiencing a period of mutual appreciation. But that sense of bonhomie is far from shared across the EU.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has visited China's President Xi Jinping four times in as many years. He's urged the EU as a whole to improve relations with China since Donald Trump's re-election two years ago.

Sanchez's move has sparked resentment and disapproval among a number of Spain's European partners who view Beijing as a strategic rival and possible geopolitical threat to the EU. Privately, they ask if Madrid's welcoming stance - opening up its market to Chinese businesses - is enabling China to become the (economic) enemy within the bloc too.

Pedro Sanchez is not the only EU leader going off piste. Global volatility means other EU countries feel squeezed and exposed and unsure they can rely on America under President Trump. His policy on trade and defence is seen as unpredictable and, at times, aggressive. And so EU member states are selecting strategic partners that they believe suit their national needs, even if that alienates or irritates fellow member states.

So do these new-found alliances risk a permanent splintering of unity in the EU or even Nato?

Spain accused of self-interest

Germany and France - the EU's biggest powers - have just united around a more aggressive approach towards China. They want to give Brussels the muscle to shut subsidised Chinese competitors out of the EU market to address ballooning trade imbalances with Beijing that the European Commission claims have reached a whopping €1bn (£850m) a day.

Other EU countries fret about China's tight relationship with Russia. Beijing has denied helping Moscow's war effort in Ukraine but defence experts point to technological and economic support from China, which they say has enabled Russia to sustain its military assault.

That's why, as Spain enthusiastically courts Beijing, it stands accused of looking after its own, rather than wider European interests.

"It's a bit chicken and egg. Did Spain distance itself from European allies, or did they distance themselves from us?" asks Victor Cortizo, a lawyer and academic specialising in Sino-Spanish relations.

"I think it's more us. It's Spain. But legitimately so. Realpolitik is a thing. If I get closer to China because that attracts Chinese investment and bolsters my economy, then that is strategically more appealing than supporting allies who are also only looking out for themselves."

Cortizo and I were surrounded by towers of crates as we spoke, at the end of the longest freight rail link in the world. It runs over 13,000km (8,000 miles) between Yiwu in eastern China and Madrid, largely bringing car parts and electrical goods to Spain and transporting delicacies like Spanish ham and red wine back to China. The link is a symbol of the burgeoning relations between the two countries.

"Our prime minister has made the decision to pursue national gain over EU relations," Cortizo told me. "Chinese investment in Spain has doubled over the last year alone."

Rising Chinese investment

According to ICEX Spain Trade and Investment, the Spanish government's trade and investment agency, Chinese investments in Spain are surging, driven in particular by investments in new battery gigafactories and car plants.

Cortizo thinks Spain could become Beijing's preferred European country to invest in now that Hungary is no longer governed by pro-China Viktor Orban, under whom Hungary was dubbed "China's gateway into Europe".

"US investment is sinking and Chinese investment [is] rising in relevance here," Cortizo told me.

The US remains Spain's largest single foreign investor but net investment was down by around €1bn, according to Spain's Economy Ministry.

Spanish society now has a far more favourable attitude towards China than towards the US, its traditional ally.

According to a Pew Research Center poll published this summer, 54% of Spaniards said they had a favourable opinion of China compared to 30% who viewed the US favourably.

China makes it easy to trade, Cortizo told me, while the US (through Trump's tariffs and the effects of the war in Iran) has made it far harder. Meanwhile, Spaniards have seen the US president threatening their prime minister with economic sanctions when he doesn't agree to Donald Trump's demands to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP or allow US bases in Spain to be used as part of attacks on Iran.

That's why China is viewed by many in Spain as more reliable than the US.

And when the major Chinese car manufacturer Chery Automobile chose Spain for its first European manufacturing and operations hub two years ago, it breathed life back into then-defunct Spanish brand Ebro.

"Chinese companies are investing in car manufacturing in Spain, filling the gaps we had," says Cortizo.

But critics worry Chinese factories on Spanish soil will weaken the EU single market.

There isn't just Chery in Barcelona. Chinese battery and stationary-energy-storage company Hithium plans to invest in Navarra in the north of Spain and battery manufacturer CATL is involved in building a lithium iron phosphate battery gigafactory in Zaragoza, 200 miles west of Barcelona. Critics fear these projects are part of Chinese companies' efforts to localise production in the EU to evade tariffs on imports of Chinese electric vehicles.

However, Miguel Otero, China specialist at Madrid's ElCano Royal Institute, accuses Spain's European allies of being condescending and hypocritical.

"France, Italy, Germany, they all have their own strategic relationship with China," he tells me. "Spain isn't going much further. It's been catching up with them." In fact, he says, now that Europe can no longer rely fully on the US, Spain's priority is to diversify. It wants to do business not just with China but also Canada, Brazil, India and Africa. Spain is not China-obsessed, he says.

But there's also the question of security.

On his latest trip to Beijing in April, Prime Minister Sanchez met the founder of Chinese wind turbine manufacturer Ming Yang, which had just had its plans to open the UK's largest wind turbine manufacturing plant in the Highlands blocked on national security grounds.

This followed uproar in the EU after Spain's Ministry of the Interior awarded Chinese tech giant Huawei a €12.3m contract to store and manage sensitive judicial wiretap data last year.

MEPs from several political groups in the European Parliament said Spain's contract could endanger the EU as a whole.

"When you introduce a high-risk vendor... we do not just risk a localised data breach, we risk poisoning the well of European intelligence sharing," said Markéta Gregorová, a Czech Pirate Party MEP, part of the Greens group back in February.

Juan Ignacio Zoido Álvarez, a member of Spain's centre-right opposition party, said the decision puts "the entirety of the EU at risk".

Spain's defence ministry continues to deny there is any risk, but former US Ambassador to Nato Julianne Smith, the co-founder of geostrategic advisory firm Clarion Strategies, warns the episode could really erode European cohesion.

"As EU countries seek ways to hedge against what some see as an unpredictable and unreliable America, they have to be careful not to rush towards alternatives that stand to weaken the EU's collective hand," she tells me.

"Some of those growing relationships, such as Canada's rapidly expanding relationship with the EU, could produce real dividends," she added. "But others, such as Spain's decision to deepen its relationship with China, could further derail the EU's ability to speak with one voice and create added security vulnerabilities for both Spain and wider Europe."

More emerging alliances

Spain is far from alone amongst EU countries in striking up controversial alliances.

Finland has a massive 1,300km-long land border with Russia. This has left it feeling exposed since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Finland already has the highest rate of civilian firearm ownership per capita in the EU. It has the largest reserve military force in both the EU and Nato. It has built cavities under bridges that can be packed with explosives, should Russian armoured vehicles enter its territory. This is a country that believes military preparedness is an existential necessity.

In 2022, it decided there was safety in numbers. Helsinki ditched its traditional strategic neutrality and rushed to join Nato.

Now though, there are fears that Washington might not respect the alliance's mutual defence clause in case of an attack on a member country.

No longer confident the US would come to the rescue if needed, Finland has turned to Israel to purchase advanced defence equipment, including the David's Sling air-defence system and Spike anti-tank missiles.

Finland renewed its contract with Israel at the height of the recent Gaza war despite its government having publicly expressed considerable reservations about Israeli activity in the occupied Palestinian territories and at a time when many other EU countries also feel deep unease about Israel's policies and activities in Gaza and the West Bank.

"There is a sense in Finland that we can't always afford [to have] a moral superiority. Survival comes at a price," says Minna Alander, a fellow with the Transatlantic Defence and Security Programme at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).

"Finns and political opposition parties do question whether Israel is a country whose defence industry they want to support [because of its actions in Gaza and the West Bank] but the Finnish government has kept out of the debate, saying the deal with Israel fulfils Finland's needs," she tells me.

In the end, Alander says her fellow Finns have "a less sentimental mentality".

Greece's shift

Greece also feels threatened by a far bigger, immediate neighbour. It perceives Turkey as a "constant and significant danger to its national security and sovereignty", Nick Malkoutzis, co-founder of political analysis website MacroPolis, tells me.

In the past, the US mediated disputes between the two countries. Both are members of Nato. But under Donald Trump, Nato insiders say the US is increasingly perceived as missing in action politically and diplomatically, with Washington's focus very much elsewhere.

In late August, Greece and Israel signed one of the largest defence export deals in both countries' histories. The "Achilles Shield" agreement provides Athens with Israeli technology aimed at protecting Greece against a range of threats, including drones, aircraft and missiles.

There is a history of public sympathy with the Palestinian cause in Greece and many people have been sceptical about ever closer relations with Israel. But Malkoutsis says the public and political reaction to the "mega-deal" with Israel has been "more muted than might have been expected".

He says this is because there is a bottom line - a common understanding of the fundamental need for Greece to strengthen its security in relation to Turkey that takes priority over everything else.

With Israel a close ally of Washington, Greece hopes that "buying Israeli" will also help maintain decent relations with the US, even in these turbulent times.

But it's a delicate dance because Greece and Finland both very much want to be seen as "good Europeans", feeding into the European collective, according to Malkoutsis.

He says EU countries "scrambling in all directions" complicate everyone getting on the same page and speaking with one voice on defence and security which is the opposite of what Brussels and Nato say they want.

That said, European countries banding together in smaller groups to pursue common interests is nothing new. The E3 "gang", composed of the UK, Germany and France, was originally formed in 2003 to co-ordinate diplomatic negotiations with Iran in the hope of a nuclear deal. It's now a more ad hoc communication channel for Europe's three largest military and economic powers.

Nordic and Arctic nations have their own formats for working together to promote regional defence, while the "Visegrad Four" made up of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia was for many years a well-known pressure group in EU circles.

However, Nato and the EU are convinced that the continent is under intense pressure, unprecedented since the end of the World War Two. Their leaders say it is time to form a united front. An aggressive Russia growls threateningly at the door, bolstered by Beijing, while the United States, Europe's former best friend abroad, seems, at best, distracted by other priorities.

Splintering, fracturing and rampant "mini-lateralism" will only be applauded by Europe's adversaries, they believe. China and Russia are watching closely.

Top image credit: PA / Nur Photo via Getty images

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

What's gone wrong at Nike? How the world's sportswear giant lost its mojo

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6je85jzk9y7o, 4 days ago

It's been a difficult few years for Nike.

The largest sportswear brand on the planet, named after the ancient Greek goddess of victory, has been losing of late. Losing sales, losing customers and losing ground to its rivals.

The one-time industry disruptor is now the establishment and in the middle of a tricky turnaround plan aimed at clinging on to market dominance.

Nike's latest financial results show signs a turnaround strategy put in place by company veteran Elliott Hill, who was coaxed out of retirement two years ago to lead the firm, is working - but the pace of change is more of a marathon than a sprint.

However, its recovery has been dented by the loss of football star Kylian Mbappé, who ended his 20-year association with the brand last week to join fast-growing Swiss rival, On.

The Real Madrid striker's departure raises the question of whether Nike can remain the top logo for not just elite athletes, but also the fans that idolise them.

To be clear, Nike is still a mega brand and popular the world over. But missteps have seen hundreds of billions of dollars wiped off its stock market value as its share price tumbled by 75% over five years.

Last month, Nike was ejected from the S&P 100 stock market index of the biggest blue-chip firms in the US.

So what's gone wrong? And can Hill turn things around?

Matt Powell, a veteran analyst and adviser in the sports retail industry, reckons Nike has made "several strategic errors" which have been difficult to reverse, including cutting ties with retailers to sell only direct to customers online and making limited editions items more available.

"The more broadly available those shoes became, the fewer people were interested," Powell says.

Other self-inflicted wounds he suggests include spending research and development cash on digital operations rather than new products.

"They really shut down their innovation on product. Someone jokingly said they were trying to turn Nike into eBay."

That jibe was aimed at John Donahoe, the former eBay boss behind Nike's online direct-to-consumer sales pivot, before he made way for Hill.

Donahoe's four years at Nike coincided with the company's share price plunge.

His tenure saw sales initially soar, driven by pandemic restrictions that boosted online shopping, but subsequent cost-of-living pressures curbed customer spending.

As demand weakened overseas in key markets like China, Nike announced cost cuts and redundancies.

Its digital distraction allowed newer footwear firms on top of the trends to snap at its heels. Shop shelf space previously occupied by Nike was replaced by brands such as On and Hoka.

This was a stark warning to a company that prided and built itself on innovation.

Nike was the firm that signed a deal with a rookie called Michael Jordan in the mid-1980s at a time when the company wasn't a major player in basketball and still mostly known for its running trainers.

The gamble - spending its entire basketball budget on Jordan before he had even competed in the NBA - made Nike what it is today.

The company built a shoe brand around him - Air Jordan. The red and black colours broke NBA rules, but Nike used it as a marketing stunt and paid the fines.

In years that followed Nike partnered with generational talents Tiger Woods, Serena Williams and Cristiano Ronaldo, who all donned the Swoosh on their way to golf, tennis and football greatness.

While the brand retains partnerships with long-retired Jordan, plus Williams and Ronaldo - Woods ended his association in 2024.

"[I'm] not saying that what they did wasn't great, but it was in the past," said Tim Derdenger, an academic in marketing and strategy. "It's not the future and it's not the current and that is what drives apparel sales today."

Nike's books still boast top athletes, ranging from Rory McIlory to Vinicius Junior.

However, it has now lost its biggest footballing star in Mbappé, who had been with Nike since he was nine years old, along with World Cup winner Lamine Yamal.

Yamal suggested his move to Adidas gave him the chance to stand out from Nike's star-studded roster, while Mbappé said On would see him "surrounded by innovators who dream of the same things I do".

Was that a parting dig at Nike?

Derdenger suggests Mbappé's move had parallels to Jordan's decision decades earlier to choose Nike over Converse and Adidas due to the opportunity for the athlete to become synonymous with one brand.

"Athletes have egos and those egos want them to be a part of something big and that they're the ones that are helping drive that change, that growth."

Nike boss Hill said the brand has had "some great moments" with Mbappé over two decades.

"We wish him much success as he makes the move," he said during Nike's earnings call, adding that the brand still has a "great stable of athletes".

Nike down but not out

For all the "doom and gloom", Nike will stay number one, according to Powell - millions worldwide, including young people, remain loyal - but its mistakes have dented its dominance.

"Will Nike be the gorilla they once were? I don't think so. Can the brand come back to growth and profitability? Yes," Powell says.

"When you shut down innovation, you don't turn it back on and it goes right back to full speed," he adds.

Powell thinks Nike's turnaround plan, called "Sport Offense", will start to show positive signs next year.

Hill said Nike had "more work to do" on its sportswear, Jordan brand and in China as the company announced quarterly revenues of $11bn (£8.3bn), which undershot analysts' expectations.

Notably, the company cited "headwinds" in China, where revenue declined by 26%.

Sales of its Jordan brand were also down globally. Hill said the firm had been "oversupplying" the iconic retro shoe and will now reduce the volume and frequency of products under the brand.

Nike said it expected revenues to decline by "high-single digits" in the financial year ahead, adding that it planned to make savings of $2.5bn by 2031, some of which will result in job losses.

Nike's chief financial officer Dave Denton said: "Our results are below both our expectations and our potential, and we are focused on closing this gap."

The company's shares fell by more than 8% in extended trading in New York after the earnings were announced.

Last year the company launched a spin-off campaign to its iconic "Just Do It" slogan aimed at younger generations with the line "Why Do It?"

Young people, and future sporting stars, may ask themselves: Why Nike?

Additional reporting by Osmond Chia

G7 to release millions of barrels of oil and diesel after Trump threat

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck87zg8jnwngo, 2 days ago

The G7 has announced 100 million barrels of oil and diesel will be released to ease supply concerns that have caused prices to skyrocket.

It includes a "substantial release" of diesel within 20 days, with discussions around "additional diesel releases as necessary", G7 leaders said in a statement.

The group of advanced economies, including the US, said the move would begin immediately and would last for four months.

Under the measures, which come after US President Donald Trump had threatened to ban diesel exports, there will not be any "export restrictions on energy and energy products" between G7 members.

The G7 includes the US, UK, Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy and France, with the EU also represented at its meetings.

Donald Trump had warned he would ban diesel exports from the US if European countries did not agree to put more of their own stocks onto the market. That would have eased pressure on prices for US consumers ahead of November's midterm elections, but pushed up prices elsewhere.

On Friday, he said on social media: "Europe has just agreed to release a massive amount of their heavily stocked Diesel Oil. The process will begin immediately."

His Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had argued US farmers, truckers, and businesses "should not be left carrying the burden" as prices soar.

Speaking later at the White House, Trump said an export ban on diesel was "never really on the table".

Referring to the decision by the G7 to release fuel from reserves, he added that "what Europe did was a great thing."

"Europe has a lot of diesel and they're going to be making a major world contribution - and so are we," he said.

"And we're not going to be doing the export ban, we're going to be doing what we're supposed to do."

Trump had first said he backed a diesel export ban early last week, and was still considering it on Thursday, as his administration put pressure on Europe to tap its supplies.

Diesel is used heavily by the haulage industry and in agriculture, meaning rises in the cost of the fuel feed through into essentials such as food.

Following a meeting of G7 leaders, French President Emmanuel Macron said the bloc had agreed to release reserves of "up to 100 million barrels" within four months under the co-ordination of the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The UK was represented at the meeting by Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, who said the measures would "stabilise energy supplies, build resilience in supply chains and shield households and businesses from price shocks".

Macron said the co-ordinated action would "bring down the prices of petroleum products, particularly diesel". Highlighting the agreement not to pursue export bans, Macron said "President Trump, in particular, was very clear on this point".

In the joint statement, G7 leaders said: "We will implement our commitments with a co-ordinated release through the IEA of 100 million barrels to begin immediately over four months, including a frontloaded substantial diesel release within the first 20 days by G7 members and partners."

It is not yet clear which partner countries will release stocks, nor how quickly.

The 100 million barrels will comprise a mix of diesel and crude oil. The price of global benchmark Brent crude oil briefly dropped below $100 a barrel, but rose back to around $102 by Friday evening. Before the US and Israel invaded Iran, it was trading at around $73.

Matt Smith, director of commodities research at Kpler, said oil had risen again due to renewed strikes between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis in Yemen.

"Oil prices were selling off strongly due to the announcement of strategic stock releases in Europe, but they reversed course on rumours of Saudi Arabia planning an offensive into Yemen as it looks to re-establish a safe path via Bab-Al Mandeb," he said.

European countries had pushed back against US threats to turn off American diesel, against a backdrop of the US-led war in the Middle East and reduced supplies from Russia and China.

The G7 leaders said they will also co-ordinate maintenance schedules to avoid multiple refineries being shut down at the same time, while encouraging countries with the capacity to do so to ramp up refining of diesel in particular.

Avoiding a ban on US diesel exports will offer significant relief to countries which are reliant on imports of the fuel, including the UK, where prices at the pump topped £2 a litre for the first time on Friday.

Over half of the UK's diesel is imported, with 31% of those imports coming from the US.

The US is one of the world's leading diesel suppliers, with domestic refineries churning out roughly four to five million barrels every day, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Americans consume about 3.6 million barrels of that. Refiners export the remaining 1.2 to 1.5 million barrels per day, making the US a vital supplier to the global market.

Supplies of diesel internationally have been heavily constrained by the conflict in the Middle East, which has restricted the flow of both crude oil and refined diesel onto global markets.

Russia, which is also a major producer, has implemented its own export ban on diesel, following attacks on its refineries by Ukraine, further limiting supply. The G7 leaders stressed that they will maintain sanctions against Russia amid its ongoing war in Ukraine.

Diesel is harder to refine than petrol and, because of its use in the haulage industry and agriculture, it is very difficult to reduce demand.

Three reasons Middle East oil supply is nearly back to pre-Iran war levels

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwp8gn13lmygo, 3 days ago

The volume of oil flowing from the Middle East region has almost returned to pre-war levels, data shows, despite the continued restrictions Iran is placing on vessels attempting to travel through the Strait of Hormuz.

Seven months after the US-Israel war with Iran led to the effective closure of the critical waterway, the maritime intelligence firm Kpler said that in the final week of September, daily oil flow from the Middle East reached 92% of its pre-war baseline.

Analysts attribute the rebounding flow of oil to three key factors:

* Ships being escorted with US military assistance

* Using shuttle tankers through the strait for transfer to different vessels

* Bypassing the strait using pipelines

But some experts have questioned the sustainability of these measures, given the risk of escalating Iranian attacks or a change in US policy.

About 40% of the total oil exported from the region in September bypassed the strait and exited via overland pipelines to ports on the Red Sea or the Gulf of Oman, up from 17% before the war, according to Kpler.

Oil exports from Iran, on the other hand, have ground to a halt after the reimposition of a US naval blockade in July.

US military assistance

The US military has been supporting ships as they pass through the Strait of Hormuz since at least mid-June and US Navy data shows the number of vessels assisted by US forces is up by a third in September compared with August.

Martin Kelly, senior intelligence analyst at security firm EOS Risk Group, told BBC Verify that US support is primarily in the form of "air support to ships", including through issuing warnings and intercepting incoming threats from drones, missiles or boats.

But ships moving through the US-recommended southern route of the strait near the coast of Oman, rather than seeking permission to use Iran's northern route, continue to be targeted.

September saw the highest number of successful Iranian attacks on commercial shipping since March, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data conflict monitor.

Naveen Das, a senior oil analyst from Kpler, said the oil market "doesn't trust that we're going stay in this status quo" because of the geopolitical risk of further Iranian escalation and the possible impact of the US midterm elections.

Ship-to-ship transfers

Most of the oil passing through the strait now moves via a "shuttle system" of more than 60 large oil tankers moving back and forth, according to Kpler.

More than 70% of the crude oil which passed through the strait in August was transferred from these "shuttle tankers" onto other vessels in the Gulf of Oman, Kpler said.

BBC Verify has analysed satellite imagery which appears to show these ship-to-ship transfers, taking place off the coast of the Omani port city, Sohar.

Imagery taken on 24 September shows six pairs of ships docked or paired together near the port, seemingly more protected from Iranian attack.

But there is "a question over how long these ships can last", said Martin Kelly, particularly as attacks on them continue.

An average of more than four million barrels of oil per day was transferred from ship to ship in the Gulf of Oman over in the week to 30 September, according to Kpler.

Overall, an average of 12 million barrels of oil per day passed through the strait over this period, compared with a pre-war baseline of 17 million.

Pipelines

Oil exporting countries in the Gulf have also responded to Iranian attacks in the Strait of Hormuz by exporting more crude oil overland via pipelines.

Just under 20% of crude is now leaving the region from ports on the Red Sea at the end of Saudi Arabia's East-West Pipeline, which is recording exports of more than four million barrels per day, according to Kpler.

Three weeks after an attack on this pipeline blamed on Iran-backed proxies in Iraq, Saudi Arabia is now exporting through the pipeline at "full stretch", according to Kpler.

Almost a quarter of all crude flowing from the region is now being piped past the Strait of Hormuz to terminals along the Gulf of Oman, particularly the city of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kpler's data shows.

Naveen Das from Kpler said this increased use of pipelines is likely to become the "new normal" because "it seems very improbable that we live in a world whereby the Gulf countries and Iran go back to being relatively harmonious".

Oil exports from Iran have fallen almost to zero following the re-imposition of a US blockade in mid-July, down from 1.7 million barrels a day before the war began, Kpler data shows.

There are 20 empty Iran-flagged tankers currently off the coast of Sri Lanka, unable to return to the Gulf due to the US blockade, according to ship-tracking data and analysis from the US-based advocacy and monitoring organisation United Against Nuclear Iran.

While crude oil flow from the Middle East has resumed to almost normal levels, exports of liquified natural gas and oil products like jet fuel and have remained well below pre-conflict volumes.

Fewer than a million barrels of processed oil products passed through the Strait of Hormuz on average in the last week, down from 3.5 million per day before the war began.

Additional reporting by Rob England and Richard Irvine-Brown, graphics by Tom Shiel

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

The wealthy Cuban Americans ready and waiting for Havana to fall

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckrerylrlg9vo, 4 days ago

At the lavish home of one of Miami's top plastic surgeons, overlooking the Biscayne Bay, some of the wealthiest Cuban-American families in Florida have gathered.

They are there to thrash out their vision of Cuba's future at the fourth meeting of the newly created Cuban-American National Chamber of Commerce (CANCC).

Rum in hand and Rolexes on wrists, this is Miami's old money. People with well-recognised Cuban-American surnames – like Bacardi and Babun – chat around the pool about the lamentable state of the island's economy, and share titbits of gossip about the latest political rumblings.

"The intention of this evening is to gather under one roof the most prominent Cuban-American entrepreneurs in Miami-Dade County," says CANCC president Juan Omar Sixto, "and the objective is to be in Cuba once the regime falls".

His guests are convinced that moment is nigh.

This influential community of Cuban exiles has detested the Communist-run government ever since the late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro expropriated their lands and nationalised their families' companies after taking power in 1959.

And they have wielded their political and economic clout in Florida over the years to shape Washington's policies towards their homeland.

Sixto fled the island as a teenager. Now a real estate developer in his early 80s, his organisation is drafting plans for what he calls "the day after" in Cuba.

The CANCC has created a proposal for a Cuban Stock Exchange and formed committees on everything from energy infrastructure to food security.

Post-Communist planning is nothing new in Miami.

Countless documents and logistical plans have been drawn up by interest groups over the decades, some of them more sober and measured than others.

The difference now, insists Sixto, is the Trump administration's push to force total change on the island. And he says they have the ear of some high-profile contacts including people close to the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.

"Together with deliveries of humanitarian aid and medical supplies, we'd go and do business in Cuba right away," says Sixto.

In Cuba itself, such claims are mostly met with scepticism.

In the face of Washington's "maximum pressure" campaign on Cuba, the island's leadership recently announced 176 economic liberalisation measures. The Cuban President, Miguel Díaz-Canel, said they were "to advance the defence of socialism, to support and widen social justice".

To his critics, they look distinctly like full-blown capitalism - lifting the cap on the number of workers in a private business, allowing the direct hiring and firing of Cuban employees and permitting ownership of multiple enterprises at once, including by Cuban Americans.

Still, the attendees at the CANCC meeting dismissed the economic reforms as cosmetic, saying they gave no meaningful guarantees to investors. They would "not put a foot into Cuba", Sixto said, while the current regime remained in place.

Some analysts think such planning meetings are premature. Although Cuban Americans are convinced that change is imminent in Cuba, none can say with any certainty what it will be - a US military operation as seen in Venezuela in January? Or a new economic pact with the island's leadership?

"Right now, the very high expectations created by the US administration that some kind of 'day after' was coming soon, or that Cuba would 'be next' have been kicked down the road," says Mike Bustamante, associate professor of history at the University of Miami.

With the November mid-term elections in the US approaching and the Trump administration embroiled in the "quagmire" of the Iran war, Bustamante argues there is little appetite for further foreign adventures.

"It's really tough to think that they will escalate further than what they're doing which is this drip-drip-drip of sanctions."

With the island's oil supply effectively shut off since January, that is already a significant escalation, says Mike Bustamente. Although they have made life unbearable for most ordinary people, they haven't yet "created the ingredients for a political inflection point" in Cuba, he adds.

The Cuban government has not commented on the CANCC itself. But traditionally such groups prompt indignation among revolutionaries who insist they will not be forced out by their critics in Miami.

I ask some guests if they can appreciate the irony that the same people who support a major source of the island's misery – the decades-long US economic embargo and the current fuel blockade – are now hatching plans for its reconstruction, without the input of most Cubans.

For Cuban-American agricultural expert Hugo Orizondo it is only practical to draw up a road map to Cuban development. "Right now, Cuba is like a black hole, we don't know what is happening over there," he admits. "But we do know the potential [for investment]."

Orizondo says he understands the reticence among Cubans to see foreign investors buying up something as sensitive as the rights to arable land. "But what are they going to do with it?" he retorts. "When investors come, they bring money and technology into the land."

Both are urgently needed, he says, if Cuba is ever to produce enough to feed its own population and break its reliance on food imports.

Land titles lie at the heart of any reconstruction project put forward by this generation of wealthy Cuban Americans. Juan Omar Sixto says his father lost five properties and a farm in Cuba's Pinar del Rio province to the revolution. While he insists he has no intention of removing any family living in those homes, he does want compensation for the nationalised land.

"I worked on that farm for five years of my life with my father, and they took it away. I want restitution or compensation. Even if they give me just a penny on the dollar, I'll take it."

"It's moral justice," he argues.

The Cuban government portrays such historic title claims as bitterness by a corrupt landed gentry who made fortunes on the backs of indentured workers and slaves. Both slavery and the system of indentured workers didn't end in Cuba until the late 19th Century.

The government also argues that the exiles could never stand that Castro passed land reforms which handed over their fields to the workers and the state.

"Most of our sugar mills have been dismantled, but we will recover those lands and put them into production," says Nicolás Gutiérrez, the president of the National Association of Sugar Mill Owners of Cuba, an exile organisation championing the title claims.

"I'm not promising it will be in sugar," he says.

"It might be in ethanol, co-generation, solar panels or water purification cells. Who knows? There are a lot of different options," he remarks. "We need to get them producing, we need to have a real wage paid to Cuban workers and create a multiplier economic effect across the island."

With the ice clinking in their drinks and a cool breeze rustling the palm trees on the perfectly manicured lawn, the CANCC members make it sound easy. But within hours of their gathering, Cuba had descended into its sixth nationwide blackout this year.

The disconnection between the hopes for change in Miami and the realities on the ground in Cuba is stark. Many Miami-based Cubans think the monumental shift they have prayed for is almost here.

If so, it will inevitably bring huge social and humanitarian disruption which the stricken island is ill-equipped to cope with. Even assuming the diaspora's support is well-intentioned rather than purely self-interested, fixing the island's failing electrical grid alone is estimated to cost $8bn to $10bn (£6bn to £7.5bn).

Before any industry in Cuba – from agriculture to tourism – can be revitalised by the exiles' wealth and political connections, Cubans continue to face acute shortages in food, water, fuel and medicines. Miami's ambitious plans aside, most Cubans just hope their days get a little easier sometime soon.

I paid £30,000 for an 'influencer' degree. Here's why

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c61mvy1emr2zo, 6 days ago

As university courses go it may raise a few eyebrows, but Destiny McGowan has no doubt that hers was very useful.

In July the 21-year-old graduated from Nottingham Trent University with a degree in content creation.

As well as teaching how to best make videos and posts for Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, the course also focused on how to build audiences, engage with brands and monetise your content.

"I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, so for me the course was about the transferable skills that I believed I would gain," says Destiny, pointing to both the social media and business aspects she was taught.

It's early on in her career, and Destiny won't disclose precisely what she is earning, but says she's already making money.

In addition to posting about fashion on her own accounts, she makes videos for others, and has also been hired as a TikTok live selling host, presenting products for sale on camera.

She says the course gave her access to equipment, technology and industry contacts.

"The incredible people I've met through panels that the university hosted would take someone five to 10 years to get to that place," she explains.

Nottingham Trent says its content creation degree, which it launched in 2022, provides "hands-on experience".

Several universities in the UK now offer such courses. The University of Brighton says it teaches students how to create "content that cuts through the noise".

Meanwhile in the US, Arizona State University say its similar qualification allows students to "turn your creativity into content that connects with audiences".

Yet you'd be paying a lot of money for this. The three-year degrees at Nottingham Trent and Brighton both currently cost £9,790 per year for UK students, while the standard annual fee at Arizona State is $14,724 (£11,000) for a resident of that state.

So are such degrees worth it?

Knightenator, a UK-based content creator, isn't sure. "I don't think I would have taken the course," she says.

The 31-year-old, who doesn't reveal her real name, has been posting videos about gaming and travel on social media since 2015. She now has 65,000 followers on Twitch, and more than 100,000 on TikTok.

Content creation is her full-time job, with brand deals making up most of her income, she says.

"Honestly, from my experience, I don't think companies would care too much if you had a content creator degree," she says.

She adds that the internet is saturated with free advice on how to get started. "If you have the drive to want to become a content creator, the tips are out there, and you don't need to commit to a three-year degree."

Her advice is to watch other people's content and find your own niche. "I honestly think that you don't need much in this day and age at this moment to be able to do it."

But fellow content creator Aiesha Beasley from Phoenix, Arizona disagrees.

The 36-year-old, who posts about food, fashion and lifestyle, says she would have enrolled on one of these courses if they had been available when she first started blogging on Tumblr in the early 2010s.

She believes a degree would have given her a "clearer pathway", particularly when it comes to how to earn a living.

"You really do have to have a business mindset on: how can I transition this from a hobby into something that makes me money?" says Aiesha.

She adds that such courses are "ahead of the curve" in recognising that content creation is increasingly an important part of marketing.

"Now you have to have a digital presence," she explains, "whether you are a business owner or an entrepreneur or building a personal brand."

The degrees by the likes of Nottingham Trent and Arizona State come as the content creator economy booms on both sides of the Atlantic. YouTube content creators alone contribute £2.2bn to the UK economy, according to one report last year.

Meanwhile, one in three people aged between 18 and 30 in the US wish to become an influencer, a 2024 survey suggests.

However, Jacky Gurr, course leader and senior lecturer for content creation at Nottingham Trent University, points out that the majority of people on the course are not actually aspiring to become influencers.

For Gurr, content creation is a professional skill that organisations increasingly need, whether someone runs their own business, works in-house, joins an agency or works freelance across multiple clients.

"Those skills absolutely can be taught. Students learn how to plan and produce video content, develop campaigns, understand audiences, analyse performance data and adapt strategies based on that data."

She adds that the business side of content creation "is an important part of the degree", where they discuss monetisation and the commercial side of the industry.

But for anyone who thinks a university degree will lead to overnight success as an influencer, Jacky Gurr has these words of caution: "So much of being a successful influencer is about luck, and we can't teach luck or personality."

The AI telling farmers when to harvest

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgk53dkmyxko, 5 days ago

When the first day of the apple harvest rolled around in Washington State last year, the fruit was ripe and the pickers were ready – but the weather had other ideas.

"It was like 38C… it's not safe for people to work in that heat," recalls Joel Carter at Okanagan Specialty Fruits. "We had to stop at 10 o'clock in the morning."

He says that artificial intelligence (AI) models that forecast ideal harvest dates, taking into account the weather, would be useful. "You need to know more than just when your fruit is going to be ripe. How long do you have to pick it?" he says. "That's where these models are really helpful."

Carter's company has more than 1,250 acres of apple orchards in Washington, and the fruit is grown for sliced apple portions – often sold to hotels and schools, for example. The firm is investing in technology with the hope of maximising productivity. Even the apples are genetically engineered so that they don't brown easily once cut.

But planning a harvest is tricky. New tools that count and analyse fruit on the tree or vine, and predict when crops will ripen, are emerging. It matters because prices for fruit, especially high-value berries such as strawberries or blueberries can fluctuate wildly. Getting the harvest date wrong means you book seasonal workers when you don't actually need them, and risk missing out on the biggest profits.

Okanagan Specialty Fruits is already experimenting with cameras from a Canadian firm called Vivid Machines. The cameras are mounted atop tractors and they scoop up imagery of the apple trees as the tractor trundles by. AI identifies buds, flowers or fruit in that footage.

"Right now, Vivid is telling us crop estimates and harvest dates," says Carter. He notes that the system is good at picking out very tiny flower buds, which are hard to see at a glance with the naked eye.

But the accuracy of forecasts is noticeably dependent on the quality of historical information fed in to the system, adds Carter. "This isn't something where an AI can scrape the internet and figure out what's the average [yield] for Granny Smith," he explains. "It's going to be bespoke to your farm."

Apples are at least somewhat forgiving – the harvest window for those Granny Smiths is three weeks long, says Carter. For other fruit, such as berries, you might only have a few days.

"If a strawberry crop is on, you have to harvest it – otherwise your entire crop gets diseased very, very quickly," says Raymond Martin, co-founder and chief operating officer of FruitCast, a UK company that offers harvest forecasts to fruit growers here.

His firm offers growers crop predictions for strawberries and also raspberries, blackberries, blueberries and tomatoes. "We're moving on to grapes next year," adds Martin.

Don't experienced farmers know when their fruit will be ripe, I ask? Martin says they generally do – but not necessarily across their entire farm, which might be many acres in size, or have both outdoor and indoor growing areas. "We do exactly what the farmers could do but we just do it on a scale that they can't."

The system analyses footage of ripening fruit that can be captured by drones, someone walking up and down a field with a smartphone, or a camera mounted on a farm vehicle.

This year has been challenging, notes Martin, with hot weather and severe drought hitting much of the UK. This has stressed many fruit plants, putting them into thermal dormancy and slowing down fruit production.

The FruitCast model accounts for weather and irrigation conditions in its forecasts. The company says, "our forecasts land within 10% of actual picked volume one week out (90% accurate) and within 17% three weeks out (83% accurate). We guarantee less than 20% error…"

Angus Soft Fruits is one company that has worked with FruitCast. AI tech for forecasting fruit ripeness is not yet "a finished solution" says operations director Neill Finlayson: "This journey is still ongoing and, whilst significant progress has been made, the industry remains some way from achieving a fully integrated forecasting ecosystem."

Driscoll's, a California headquartered fruit seller with a big operation in the UK, also confirmed to BBC News that some of its independent fruit growers in the UK have used FruitCast's technology.

Researchers are also exploring new ways of analysing fruit in intense detail. Many farmers already use handheld brix meters to gauge the sugar content of their crop. These devices work by measuring how much light has changed direction, or refracted, after passing through a liquid – indicating the volume of solids present.

Some such meters use infrared light, meaning there's no need to cut into the fruit to take measurements. But Yasaman Ghasempour at Princeton University says millimetre waves, high frequency radio waves, can penetrate deeper "They basically respond very well to humidity, water [and sugar]," she says.

She and her students have come up with a millimetre wave-based ripeness detector that could be used by farmers – or even customers searching for perfectly ripe fruit in shops. Her students tried it out at a local market in New Jersey. "[Staff] there got kind of scared that we were doing something shady," laughs Ghasempour.

Such fine-grained analysis of fruit, if currently unripe, could also help inform forecasts of when it will be ripe.

But while some growers, such as Carter, are interested in trying out new tech, many will wonder whether investing in it is really worthwhile. "Adoption is very complicated," says Jing Zhang at North Carolina State University. "The grower has to have confidence in the research and whether or not it works."

Zhang has been working on a system to automatically count the number of blueberries captured in smartphone images of blueberry bushes.

The simplest systems need not be expensive. Kevin Wang at the University of Florida has developed another crop-counting tool that can harvest imagery from $100 (£74) drones.

In the future, such information could feed in to ripeness predictions. However, he points out that some farmers might be uneasy about sharing commercially sensitive information about their growing strategies, such as fertiliser and irrigation plans, with third parties and AI models.

Ben Palone is senior director of automation and commercialisation at Western Growers, an association that represents farmers in the western US. He says harvest forecasts have some potential as "an optimisation tool".

But farmers will likely continue to rely on human intelligence. "Growers like to have people in the mix to make some of those very critical decisions – especially when it comes to harvests," he says.

Average five-year mortgage rate hits 6% for first time in three years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8r4yxpry5e9o, today

The average interest rate on a new five-year fixed mortgage deal has hit 6% for the first time in three years, figures show.

The cost of home loans has been rising in recent weeks, as lenders face higher costs amid international concern over rising prices, interest rates, and government borrowing costs.

It means home buyers and anyone renewing a fixed deal have seen about 1,500 mortgage deals priced below 5% vanish since the start of September, according to the financial information service Moneyfacts.

It described the situation as "brutal" for borrowers, with the average rate on five-year deals now at 6%, and at 5.98% on two-year fixed mortgages.

For borrowers, the interest rate on a fixed mortgage does not change until it expires, usually after two or five years, and a new one is chosen to replace it. The vast majority of homeowners and buyers have this kind of mortgage.

Since the Iran war began, global economic uncertainty has been pushing up the cost of deals.

Moneyfacts said that the biggest High Street lenders had made repeated fixed rate increases during September. Barclays increased selected fixed rates on four occasions, while HSBC, Lloyds Bank, Nationwide, NatWest, Santander and TSB each made three rounds of increases.

It meant that the average rate on a new five-year deal was at its highest since September 2023. On two-year deals, the average rate is at its highest since December 2023.

"Average fixed mortgage rates rising back to three-year highs will be disastrous news for borrowers," said Rachel Springall, finance expert at Moneyfacts.

"Borrowers who were hoping mortgage rates would stabilise will be disappointed."

She said that those coming to the end of a fixed deal would be "wise to seek advice and compare deals carefully".

Some lenders could allow people to lock in a rate three months before their current deal ends, while others could allow six months, she said.

Springall said rate rises were "inevitable" because lenders' wholesale funding costs had climbed as a result of rising gilt yields.

Interest rates - known as the yield - on government bonds have been going up, meaning it costs the government more to borrow over the long term.

The knock-on impact of this on the mortgage market has meant that the number of fixed-rate deals priced below 5% has plunged by 99%, from 1,494 since the start of September 2026 to nine now.

In contrast, the number of sub-5% variable rate mortgages has remained broadly stable, Springall said, leading some borrowers to chose deals that track the Bank of England's base rate.

Cost-of-living blow

Millions of mortgage-holders are coming to the end of their current deals in the next two years.

Just over five million homeowners should expect their monthly mortgage repayments to increase by the end of 2028, according to Bank of England forecasts.

Some may have expected rates to have fallen this year, owing to improved economic conditions, but the Iran war has upended many of those expectations.

It has also led to wider pressure on the cost of essential bills.

On Friday, drivers saw the average cost of diesel rise above £2 a litre in the UK for the first time, according to the RAC motoring group.

Domestic energy prices also rose by 4% at the start of October, and forecasters have predicted a 16% increase when regulator Ofgem sets its next price cap for January.

The government is under pressure to support those most likely to struggle to pay at the Budget later this month.

Suppliers pile pressure on government over energy bills

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq0ld88kzxw8o, 2 days ago

The government should take immediate action to help those struggling with energy bills this winter, the suppliers' trade body has said.

Energy UK said domestic gas prices, which rose on Thursday, and forecasts of steep rises in January meant inaction would lead to a longer-term, more costly and deeper crisis.

Figures revealed by the BBC earlier this week showed forecasters predicting a 16% rise in domestic energy prices in the new year for 20 million households on variable tariffs affected by regulator Ofgem's price cap.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the government was considering any measure that took the pressure off.

Households in England, Scotland and Wales on variable energy tariffs set by Ofgem's price cap, which puts a maximum price on each unit of gas and electricity, were hit with a 4% price increase at the start of October.

That is the equivalent of about £60 per year - or £5 per month - taking an annual bill to £1,723 for the typical household using both electricity and gas and paying by direct debit if this level was sustained for a year.

But forecasts show a far greater increase is possible for bills in January. Consultancy Cornwall Insight said its latest forecast suggested the same typical annual bill would rise to £1,999.

Energy UK said it accepted the government had already provided some support. VAT on electricity bills was cut on Thursday, and some levies were cancelled or shifted into taxation earlier this year.

But the trade body said these savings had been wiped out by high wholesale prices, paid by suppliers, that were the result in part of international events - namely conflict in the Middle East and the disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

It said bills were soaring as they had in 2022 when they were driven up by the impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"We cannot afford to wait for the same scale of crisis before acting again. We must heed the lessons from that time," said Dhara Vyas, chief executive of Energy UK.

She said that the urgent intervention needed was highlighted by growing levels of customer debt, the cost of which now added an average of £67 a year to everyone's bills.

On Thursday, the boss of supplier EDF Energy, Simone Rossi, warned that the UK was "walking into a second energy crisis" and Vyas said that action was needed before bills jumped again.

"Last-minute emergency interventions run the risk of being badly targeted and costing us all more," she said.

Energy UK is calling for government measures including:

* targeted support over and above the £150 Warm Home Discount, given to people on benefits, which would eventually lead to the introduction of a discounted social tariff

* a debt relief scheme for the most severely affected households as part of a strategy that will also help prevent debt build-up among new tenants and homeowners

* removing more levies from electricity bills and shifting them to taxation, as part of a wider move to electrification

Adam Scorer, chief executive of charity National Energy, which campaigns against fuel poverty, told BBC Breakfast he agreed with what Energy UK's analysis.

"[The increase in debt is] not more people getting into debt, that's more poor people getting into more serious levels of debt."

He added: "Until you do something about that, there's no way forward, there's no breathing space, there's no future for households who can't see their way beyond debt."

At the Labour Party conference last week, Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the BBC that he would not call Rossi's crisis warning an overstatement, adding that the cost of home energy, as well as petrol and diesel, was "very difficult indeed".

"We're looking at any measure that can give people breathing space, that can take the pressure off," he said.

UK diesel prices top £2 a litre for first time, RAC says

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crn8e86y5n0zo, 3 days ago

The average price of diesel has risen above £2 a litre in the UK for the first time, according to the RAC motoring group.

Diesel has now hit an average of 200.01p a litre, the RAC said, and petrol prices are also still rising, reaching 174.71p a litre on average.

The motoring group said price rises were "showing no signs of slowing, heaping more misery onto motorists".

Over the past seven months, the Iran war has severely disrupted the production and transportation of wholesale oil and refined products from the region, causing prices to surge worldwide.

Ukrainian attacks on Russian refiners have further constrained supplies of diesel on the world market. China has also restricted exports of refined fuels.

Separately on Friday, G7 nations agreed at an urgent meeting to release 100 million barrels of oil to head off further price increases.

The G7 also agreed member countries would not impose export restrictions on each other, after US President Donald Trump threatened to ban shipments of American diesel overseas.

The move would have pushed up global prices of the fuel, but helped ease pressure on US consumers ahead of November's midterm elections.

RAC policy head Simon Williams said £2 was a "price threshold no one wanted to cross".

"This will be very challenging for households and companies that drive a lot of miles, from commuters, haulage and delivery firms, businesses with large fleets all the way through to sole traders," he added.

UK businesses and consumers already feel like they are bearing the brunt of higher prices, with many saying it has made their lives increasingly difficult.

Even people who do not drive a diesel vehicle themselves face a knock-on effect from rising delivery costs or the higher cost of producing food.

'It feels like an assault'

Mark Means, who has farmed in Norfolk for over 50 years, said he was "frightened to death" by the rising costs of diesel.

He has spent £50,000 on new diesel tanks to try to ensure he has enough supply to harvest and plants crops, but the rising price is cutting into his margins.

"It feels like it's an assault," he said.

Steven Tompkins in Leicester said rising fuel prices mean driving instructors like him are having to increase their prices.

"When you've got kids who are working part time, they're on a tight budget and we're telling them that the prices are going to have to go up because of the fuel, it's hurting," he said.

UK government ministers strove to reassure diesel users earlier on Friday.

"We have a diverse and resilient supply. We continue to engage with our international partners and the UK fuel industry," a government spokesperson said.

The government has stressed that there is no cause for concern about potential diesel shortages.

Over half of the diesel bought in the UK is imported. Less than a third of imports are from the US, amounting to around 17% of the total UK supply.

Over the past seven months, the Iran war has severely disrupted the production and transportation of wholesale oil and refined products from the region, causing prices to surge worldwide.

Ukrainian attacks on Russian refiners have led to further constraints on supplies of diesel to the world market. China has also restricted exports of refined fuels.

The cost of filling an average family car with diesel is now £110, almost £32 more than it was at the start of the US-Iran war, the RAC's Simon Williams said.

The cost of filling a typical petrol car has risen to £96.09, the RAC said, up £23.03 since February.

US jobs market sees sharp slowdown ahead of midterm elections

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2d6gg0642yo, 3 days ago

The US jobs market saw a sharp slowdown in September, with employers adding just 29,000 jobs in the final update before the midterm elections.

Headcounts were little changed in major sectors from tech to retail as hiring fell significantly from August, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate rose slightly from 4.1% in August to 4.2% in September.

The figures signal a cooling US economy, which experts said reduced the likelihood of a series of further interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.

The 29,000 jobs created in September was down from a figure of 133,000 in August, according to revised BLS figures for the month.

But George Brown, senior economist at Schroders, said while job gains have been a “rollercoaster“ this year, a single soft report is unlikely to point to a lasting collapse.

And Bradley Saunders, North America economist at Capital Economics, said the lower figure was “not disastrous“, adding that a drop in government roles and temporary visa policy changes weighed on overall growth.

Jeffery Roach, chief economist at LPL Financial, added that the data showed tension between “goods producing sectors that support the AI boom” and service industries feeling the effect of changes brought about by the tech.

“Given the overall softness of the labour market, the likelihood of two Fed hikes is going lower,” he said.

The BLS report stands in sharp contrast to President Donald Trump's insistence that America's economy is booming and it is the "hottest" nation in the world.

The disconnect is likely to present significant challenges as the president and his fellow Republicans hit the the campaign trail with just a month to go before the midterm congressional elections.

According to an AP/NORC poll released on Thursday, just 17% of Americans approve of the president's handling of cost-of-living issues, while 26% approve of his handling of the economy overall.

Both are new lows for Trump, surpassing the lowest mark for Democrat Joe Biden during his presidential term.

There have been some indications that the president understands that his views of the American economy are out of step with those of most Americans.

"I've done a very bad job of explaining how good the country is doing," he said at a White House event earlier this week.

Why UK diesel prices have breached the £2 per litre mark

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20zgjzz0e4o, 3 days ago

The price of diesel in the UK has breached the £2 per litre mark for the first time, as the fallout from the US-Israel war with Iran continues to drive up costs.

The average price of a litre of diesel at the pump stands at an all-time high of 200.01p, according to the RAC motoring body.

Over the past seven months, the Iran war has severely disrupted the production and transportation of oil across the region, causing the price of fuels made from crude to surge.

Motor fuel prices fell back when the US and Iran agreed in June to a framework deal to end the fighting, but rose again as tensions resurfaced.

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump has responded to rising prices by mulling a ban on US diesel producers selling overseas - a move which could push UK prices even higher.

How do oil prices affect the cost of petrol and diesel at the pump?

Crude oil is a key ingredient in petrol and diesel, which means that higher wholesale costs make filling up a car more expensive. The price of petrol and diesel is also heavily influenced by demand and refining capacity.

Analysts say every $10 (£7.55) per barrel increase in the oil price pushes up pump prices by roughly 7p a litre.

Since the Iran war began, the price of a barrel of Brent crude – the global benchmark for wholesale oil prices – has been very volatile.

Generally speaking, news of further conflict drives the price up while hopes of an end to the war pushes the price down.

Before the Middle East conflict, Brent was trading just over $70 a barrel but the fighting saw it peak at above $120.

In early July, after the framework deal was signed, prices fell back to near the $70 mark.

The price climbed back up again after peace talks collapsed and it is now around $100 a barrel.

Why has the Iran war had a big impact on oil prices?

A lot of oil is produced in the Middle East, and the conflict has severely disrupted the production and the transportation of it, causing its price to jump.

Of particular concern to wholesale oil traders was Iran's effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz - a vital waterway south of the country through which one fifth of the world's oil and gas usually flows.

There are signs that wholesale oil transport through the strait is returning to pre-war levels, but wholesale prices remain high because traders fear this might not last.

Meanwhile, the transportation of refined oil products, such as car and plane fuel, remains down because of damage to refineries in the region and because refined products are more flammable, making them more dangerous to move during a conflict.

What has happened to petrol and diesel prices in the UK?

Before the war began, the average price of petrol was 132.83p per litre and diesel was 142.38p, according to the RAC.

Diesel is now 200.01p, the highest on record.

Meanwhile, petrol has hit an average 174.71p a litre, which is the highest in more than four years but lower than its peak of 191.5p during the summer of 2022.

Simon Williams, head of policy at the RAC, said prices at the pumps will not come down until there is a "sustained lower oil price - over several weeks, not days".

Because transporting oil is a slow process, price movements in wholesale oil markets take about a fortnight to show at the pump.

Fuel retailers have denied accusations of price gouging during the conflict. The official markets regulator said it had "not seen evidence of retailers actively changing their pricing strategies to take advantage of the crisis".

A government scheme called Fuel Finder lets drivers compare the cost of fuel offered by petrol stations across the UK.

In May, the then Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said a planned 5p increase in fuel duty due in September would be postponed until the end of December because of the conflict.

Williams said that the UK government has "limited leverage when it comes to ending the US/Iran war" but lowering fuel duty further or reducing VAT could "ease the burden" at home.

How might higher diesel prices affect me?

Even if you don't drive a diesel car, you could still be hit by the rise in diesel prices.

That's because diesel is used heavily in agriculture and, crucially, in haulage.

So transporting some of our biggest essentials – particularly food – around the country is getting more expensive.

Previous episodes of high costs at the pumps have even had a knock-on effect on school transport and trips, putting pressure on councils and schools, particularly in rural areas.

What would happen if the US banned diesel exports?

While Trump has suggested he might ban US producers from selling diesel overseas, he has not done it yet and views differ on how serious this threat is.

If it does happen, many agree it would hurt the countries which heavily depend on US diesel.

One such country is the UK, which depends on the US for around 17% of its diesel supplies. Other European countries also import a lot of US diesel.

As such, many worry any ban could drive UK diesel prices up even further.

And while the ban would be likely to reduce US diesel prices in the short-term, experts say it could have unintended effects that could hurt US production – and put pressure on US diesel prices – in the long-term.

Why does diesel cost more than petrol in the UK?

In the UK, we have four refineries. Between them, they make more than enough petrol to meet our needs, so we sell the rest as export.

However, they don't make enough diesel, which means we rely on imports. The closure last year of refineries in Grangemouth and Immingham has increased that reliance, meaning we now buy over half of our diesel from overseas.

In addition, the cost of importing diesel has risen because of Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Although the UK has stopped buying Russian diesel in response to the war, other countries have carried on, meaning you have "more countries competing for less diesel", the RAC's Williams says.

All of this then feeds through to prices at the pump, with diesel costing much more than petrol in the UK and the gap having widened over the last few years.

You can also send us your questions by following this link

Reporting by Faarea Masud, Jemma Crew, Alex Daniel, Michael Race, Mitchell Labiak, Emer Moreau and Miguel Roca-Terry

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US pressures Europe to release diesel reserves as Trump threatens export ban

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5zjzjgdeneeo, 3 days ago

Donald Trump has said he may ask European countries to release some of their diesel reserves as he considers banning US exports of the fuel.

The president's comment comes after diesel prices hit record highs on UK forecourts this week, as the Iran war continues to put pressure on the supply of refined fuels.

The UK is heavily reliant on imported diesel from the US. But with US voters also facing higher fuel costs ahead of the midterm elections in November, Trump has threatened to restrict diesel exports.

The UK has been discussing the US supply threats with the EU which is holding a meeting on Friday on the issue.

Banning exports would flood the US market with diesel, and could bring prices down significantly for American drivers.

But experts warn such a ban would put further pressure on diesel prices in other countries, unless they can access further supplies.

The US is a vital supplier of diesel to the world, exporting between 1.2 and 1.5 million barrels per day, with most of it going to Latin America.

European countries including France, the Netherlands and the UK, also import a significant amount from the US following the reduction in Russian and Middle Eastern sources of diesel.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to sanctions, diverting Russian sales away from Europe. More recently Ukrainian attacks on Russian refining capacity has had a knock-on effect on global supply.

The US-led war on Iran has constrained the flow of both crude oil and refined diesel from that region.

On Thursday, Trump was asked whether he would call on European countries to release some of their own diesel reserves.

"We may do that. They have some diesel," he said.

An earlier post from US Treasury Scott Bessent on social media urged Europe to get ready to release some of their own diesel supplies immediately, arguing that US farmers, truckers, and businesses "should not be left carrying the burden" as prices soar.

Diesel prices in the UK hit record highs this week and are hovering just under 200p per litre, according to motoring organisation the RAC.

Over half of the UK's diesel is imported, with 31% of the imports coming from the US.

The Netherlands and Belgium together provide more than a third of UK diesel imports.

UK Energy Minister Martin McCluskey was on a call with European counterparts on Thursday to discuss the potential ban.

A source familiar with the discussions told the BBC it was prudent to prepare a co-ordinated response with other countries, including those across EU, but added that there were still European reserves left from a coordinated release of strategic fuel stocks earlier in the year.

"We have a diverse and resilient supply. We continue to engage with our international partners and the UK fuel industry," a government spokesperson said.

The government has stressed that there is no cause for concern about potential diesel shortages, though prices are expected to rise further.

International Energy Agency rules say member states, including the UK, must hold oil stocks equivalent to 90 days of net oil imports.

EU rules say member must hold reserves to cover 61 days of domestic consumption. In total the EU holds nearly 109 million tons of emergency crude and fuel stocks, with around a third in diesel and related fuel products.

A European Commission spokesperson said that there were "lots of calls, lots of meetings" taking place on the diesel situation, including with "high level contacts" in the US administration.

Potentially adding to the pressure on the global diesel market, Chinese refiners have reportedly halted October exports of some fuel products as Beijing prioritises domestic supplies.Prices of petrol and diesel globally have skyrocketed since the outbreak of the US-Israel war in Iran in February. The closure of the vital Strait of Hormuz, which typically transports around a fifth of the world's oil and gas, has pushed up the price of products made from oil.

An export ban from Russia, also a major supplier of diesel, has added to the pressure on prices.

Trump has argued that keeping any surplus barrels of diesel in the US would lower pump prices domestically, offering immediate relief to drivers, truckers, and businesses ahead of the midterm elections.

But David Fyfe, chief economist at Argus Media, said cutting off American supply would be likely to cause international prices to skyrocket.

Diesel prices have hit an all-time high in the UK, with the latest RAC figures showing average pump prices at 199.79p per litre, up from 142.38p

Diesel is harder to refine than gasoline and, because it is used by the haulage industry and in agriculture, it is very difficult to reduce demand.

The UK has four refineries which produce more than enough petrol to meet demand, they do not make enough diesel to meet the country's needs.

There were 15.1 million diesel vehicles on UK roads at the end of June, according to the Department for Transport. That is a drop from 15.7 million a year before.

There were 9.8 million diesel cars, down year on year from 10.4 million.

Clarification 2 October: An earlier version of this article said that the governing board of the International Energy Agency (IEA) would meet today (Friday). That sentence was removed after the IEA issued a statement clarifying that no such meeting was planned and it had been announced "erroneously'" by a European Commission spokesperson.

OpenAI fires workers for 'mishandling sensitive information'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6y9z9r4ejzwo, 3 days ago

OpenAI has fired three researchers for allegedly mishandling information, including work which involved an external organisation analysing AI models.

"Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work," a spokesperson told the BBC.

The ChatGPT-maker did not name the sacked workers, but at least two of them were involved in safety research at the firm.

The firings come as the debate over AI safety and the risks the technology may pose to humanity intensified in recent months.

"We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information," a spokesperson for OpenAI said.

Concerns over AI safety have made headlines after some researchers and industry executives called for more guardrails around the technology.

OpenAI has come under under intense scrutiny after its models went rogue and hacked several platforms, including Australian government websites.

In an incident in July, one of the firm's AI models accessed the internet and breached the open-source developer platform Hugging Face.

That incident led OpenAI to review the activities of its AI agents, which are designed to execute tasks autonomously based on simple instructions.

The firm said this week it has notified more than 100 organisations about incidents involving unauthoritised activity linked to its systems.

Being notified "does not mean that any private information was accessed" or that a system was compromised, it said.

In September, researcher Jacob Coxon, who left Anthropic, called for AI development to slow down so its potential risks could be properly assessed.

Anthropic boss Dario Amodei and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman have also called for measures to address concerns over AI.

On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump hosted a meeting of top technology bosses - including leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, SpaceX, Meta and Google - to discuss AI.

After the gathering at the White House, Trump posted a document that he called a "morally binding" agreement that would serve as a "form of protection" from AI's potential risks.

Some technology experts criticised the pact, pointing out that it allowed AI companies to regulate themselves.

Trump has repeatedly downplayed concerns about AI's risks in response to calls from some industry figures for tighter oversight of the technology.

'It could cost me £10k but I need the money now': Why Gen Z are opting out of pensions

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c68xk0ndqz8jo, 4 days ago

Until early September, Hassan Nassar, 26, was saving around £430 every month into his NHS workplace pension.

But the trainee GP, who works in the West Midlands, says he was "really cash strapped" and decided to stop putting money aside for around "six to 12 months".

He needs the money to help take care of a sick family member, save for his first home and cover rent and student loan repayments.

But he's aware there is a cost to opting out, estimating he could lose between "£5,000 and £10,000" in future retirement income due to the decades of compound interest he will miss out on by not saving now.

"People will say, you're silly, look at what you'll be missing out in the future," he tells the BBC. "But I need to look at what I'd be losing now if I didn't opt out."

Future problems

All employees will be automatically enrolled in a workplace pension if they are aged 22 or above and earn over £10,000, although there are exceptions.

A percentage is taken directly from the worker's pay - usually around 5% - with tax relief added on top, and the employer must also pay a minimum contribution on top.

But a growing number of Gen Z and millennials are opting out of these schemes due to cost-of-living pressures and the government has warned they could be on track for lower private pension incomes than people retiring today.

That is a problem, because while most people in the UK will eventually get a state pension, it only provides a minimum level of retirement income and many will rely on a private pension to supplement it.

Hassan says he was paying 10.7% of his gross earnings each month into his workplace pension, while the NHS contributed a substantial amount on top.

But unlike some employers, the NHS doesn't allow staff to reduce their contributions when times are hard.

Overall, however, he is confident he will have enough to retire on at the end of his "30-40" year career and is determined to opt back in to his pension as soon as he can.

According to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), around 22.6 million people, or 90% of those who are eligible for "automatic enrolment" pensions, are paying into one, while about 2.5 million are not.

However, Pensions Minister Torsten Bell told the BBC that "a rising number of young workers aren't saving, and overall there is a danger tomorrow's retirees are on track for lower private pension incomes than today's".

'How can I save for a house?'

Evie, 22, from Cornwall, says she opted out of entering the workplace pension at the London events company she works for.

A recent drama school graduate, she says she would have struggled to cover her outgoings, including food, travel and the £800 she pays in rent.

Evie is conscious about missing out on saving for retirement, but there are other things she needs money for that make it impractical right now.

"How can I save for a house, how can I save for a car and afford my outgoings? I don't want to just work day in, day out to live, I want to work to have a life."

'Think of your future self'

April Leeson, from The Private Office, a chartered financial advice firm, says she would always advise people to not stop paying into their pensions if they can help it, even if that means reducing their contributions, which many employers allow you to do.

This is partly because of the free employer contributions they will miss out on but also the lost compound interest.

"The current minimum pension age is 57, so any money you save in your 20s will have at least 30 years to compound and grow.

"£100 saved now, compounded at 4% a year over 30 years, is going to be worth a lot more than £100 saved in 15 to 20 years' time."

She also urges younger people to think ahead. "You really need to think of your future self and what that person will need to retire comfortably."

Kharlee, 47, a teacher from South East London, can certainly relate to this. She stopped her contributions to a workplace pension twice over the last five years for financial reasons.

And she thinks she missed out on saving about £5,000 into her pension pot.

She's in a better place financially now, but recently became self-employed and is no longer part of a private pension scheme, something she hopes to change.

"I would like to feel my pension is secure, and I don't feel like that. I worry I'm not going to be able to live comfortably at the age of retirement."

Thames Water apologises after £145,000 customer billing mistake

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck24j46424veo, 4 days ago

Thames Water has apologised to a customer after trying to take £145,000 from his bank account due to a meter reading error by the company.

Adam Bainbridge, a teacher from north London, discovered while routinely checking his accounts on Thursday morning that Thames had debited £145,562 from his bank account.

His wife Julia told the PA news agency that Adam "got the shock of his life" and had trouble paying bills that morning as a result.

Thames Water said the money had been returned to his account and that he had been offered "a gesture of goodwill".

The company confirmed to BBC News that it had returned the money to Adam's account and had apologised to him personally.

Julia told PA that the debit took Adam's account "considerably" into overdraft.

She said: "It was pre-8am when we looked ... obviously then you try to do some ring rounds, no one's online, no one's answering any phones.

"We're a family rushing around looking after a three-year-old trying to get ready for the nursery run and all the rest of it."

Julia said Adam initially could only speak to a Thames chatbot, which said the error would be rectified in the next payment. He then contacted his bank and the money was returned to his account.

"As it was this morning, Adam had some bills he wanted to pay off his card and things that were due out of his account and everything was blocked.

"It's such a staggering amount of money."

The billing error comes at a time when the number of complaints made by households about water companies to the industry watchdog has risen by a record 84% in a year, driven by customer concern and confusion over bills.

Water customers in England and Wales have been hit with steep price hikes in recent years. The regulator Ofwat has also allowed firms to put up bills by 36% between 2025 and 2030.

Thames Water, the UK's biggest water company, owes roughly £20bn to lenders and has been working with creditors and government officials to prevent collapse.

Adam told PA that when he saw the debit he felt "really shocked, because you don't feel in control of what's being taken from your account.

"It seemed that the numbers being calculated had absolutely nothing to do with reality at all. We're a residential house in north London.

"It just seems that the billing is completely detached from reality."

A Thames Water spokesperson said: "We apologise unreservedly to Mr Bainbridge and his family. This was the result of human error originating from an incorrect meter reading.

"We can confirm the money has been returned to Mr Bainbridge's bank account and we have spoken to him today to say sorry.

"We are introducing additional checks to our processes to prevent this from happening again.

"We have also offered Mr Bainbridge a gesture of goodwill and are continuing to work with him to ensure the matter is fully resolved."

Earlier on Thursday, Julia wrote in a LinkedIn post: "Working parents have enough to contend with in the morning without a utility company emptying their bank account."

"How does a payment of this size get taken without basic checks?"

She also wrote in a comment on the post: "The bank were relatively quick to return the money while Thames Water 'looked into it.'"

AI boom could trigger market shocks, Bank of England boss warns

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv8e30enrkxyo, 4 days ago

Artificial intelligence (AI) could trigger financial market shocks and the UK needs to be prepared for them, the governor of the Bank of England has warned.

Andrew Bailey said the central bank is watching the huge amounts of money being invested in AI "very carefully" and cautioned that "not everybody always wins".

The money that has been spent on and loaned to AI firms over the last few years in the hope of large returns is causing markets to value some of them as multi-trillion dollar businesses.

Asked if he believed an AI bubble could burst, Bailey said: "You could see some correction of asset prices at some point."

He was speaking exclusively to the BBC about what the risks and benefits of AI could be for the UK economy.

Bailey said he believed the technology has "great potential to strengthen growth in our economies", adding that this was something the country needed.

"But it also brings with it substantial risks and so we have to be on top of both of those."

One such risk is what happens if the big bets being made on AI don't pay off.

AI chipmaker Nvidia is currently the world's most valuable listed company, with a market valuation of $5.5tn (£4.14tn), thanks largely to investors who believe in the big profits AI could create.

Meanwhile, tech giants Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the technology.

And two of the largest AI companies in the world – Anthropic and OpenAI – are also preparing to sell shares in their firms on the US stock market in moves which many believe will lead to hundreds of billions of dollars more flowing into the industry.

"There is a large, very large, amount of investment going into this sector now, and of course that's natural because it's a major area of growth," said Bailey.

"And of course you see that the asset prices of the companies that are developing it have gone up a lot and that reflects the fact that there are high expectations of what it can deliver."

"Everybody is currently priced to be a winner," he added, but warned that "you look back at the past, not everybody is a winner".

"Google was not the first market leader in internet search. It was Netscape. Nobody can remember Netscape today. It doesn't exist. So not everybody always wins.

"We are prepared for the fact that there will be, I think, some shocks come along to markets and we have to deal with that. We have to make sure the system is resilient."

Cyber attacks, deepfakes, and interest rates

Bailey also pointed to other risks from AI, such as from the technology being used for cyber attacks.

He said AI has created a "much more powerful way of uncovering vulnerabilities".

"It's revealing things that have been in bits of operating software that we've had, and all of us have had."

"In the wrong hands... it's a very powerful, potentially very powerful, weapon," he added.

Another risk is the rise of deepfakes – AI-made pictures and videos of people that look real – which can be used to fool the public.

Bailey has had first-hand experience of this. In June, deepfake images depicting him and Nigel Farage having a physical fight were promoted on social media platform X.

He told the BBC that the fake images were being done in such a way that the Bank has struggled to find out where they came from.

"We've got to be able to trace these things back. And we need a lot of help from the tech sector to do that," he said.

However, Bailey said a big potential benefit from AI is its ability of "speeding up the work that supports the Monetary Policy Committee [MPC]" which sets interest rates.

"It's not taking a decision, but it's a tool in the hands of the policy maker and that's good," he said.

Global bond yields rise

Bailey's warning came as government borrowing costs in countries including the UK, US, France and Japan hit their highest levels in decades, putting pressure on public sector finances.

Governments usually borrow money by selling bonds to investors, which are a kind of IOU.

The rate of return on that investment over a certain time period is called the yield. The lower the price of the bond, the higher the yield.

On 30-year UK bonds, the yield rose above 6% on Thursday, its highest level since 1998. For US 10-year bonds, the yield rose to 5.34%, its highest since 2002, indicating a sell-off in the bond markets.

Analyst said there was no particular trigger for this on Thursday, but central banks around the world have been raising interest rates to try to combat high inflation caused by soaring energy prices.

When interest rates are high, investors tend to choose investments other than bonds, which can start to look more attractive than government debt.

For example, investors have been piling into AI as firms pump money into software development and data centres, which Bailey has been warning about.

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What is the Budget and what could be in it?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6x2zrjl7kjno, 4 days ago

Chancellor John Healey will set out Labour's tax and spending plans when he delivers his first Budget on 28 October.

He has refused to rule out tax increases after acknowledging government borrowing costs are at "historic highs".

But the government's room for manoeuvre on tax is limited.

Before the 2024 general election, Labour promised not to increase three big revenue earners for the government: income tax, National Insurance and VAT.

What is the Budget?

In his statement, delivered to MPs in the House of Commons, Healey will set out how the government plans to raise or lower taxes.

Alongside the Budget, the Treasury will publish details about the measures and their costs.

The independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which monitors government spending, will also publish an assessment of the health of the UK economy and a forecast of what it thinks will happen in the future.

What might be in the Budget?

The run-up to the Budget typically sees speculation about what might be in it, which the government is trying to keep to a minimum this year.

Healey and Prime Minister Andy Burnham face a difficult balancing act, trying to offer more support to households and meet commitments on defence spending, while also sticking to Labour's manifesto commitments on tax and the government's self-imposed fiscal rules.

The previous chancellor, Rachel Reeves, set out two main rules, which the new leadership has vowed to follow. These are:

* Not to borrow to fund day-to-day public spending by the end of this parliament

* To get government debt falling as a share of national income by the end of this parliament

In March, the OBR calculated that the first rule would be met with a gap - or headroom - of £23.6bn. However, this headroom is expected to have shrunk.

Analysts at KPMG believe it could have fallen to £12bn, mainly due to the rise in government borrowing costs this year.

However, one option that has been floated is Healey potentially accepting a smaller buffer, reducing the need to increase taxes in the Budget.

Your First Home scheme

Further details on the "Your First Home" scheme, aimed at helping first-time buyers in England to purchase a property, are expected to be announced in the Budget.

The scheme will allow people 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.

Capital Gains Tax

There has been speculation that Capital Gains Tax - which is imposed on the profit people make when they sell an asset that has increased in value - could be changed, through either higher rates or by removing or amending exemptions.

Mansion Tax

The High Value Council Tax Surcharge - dubbed the Mansion Tax - was announced in last year's Budget and will apply to properties in England valued above £2m from April 2028. However, reports have suggested the government is considering extending it to properties worth more than £1.5m.

Taxes on banks

Banks have been reporting bumper profits, leading to calls from unions to increase taxes on the sector. But banks have pushed back, suggesting heavier levies would undermine the government's aim to boost growth and make the UK less competitive.

Fuel duty

Fuel duty was frozen under the Conservatives in March 2022 and Sir Keir Starmer's government continued the freeze, deciding in May to push back a planned 3p increase in September until the end of this year.

Healey told the BBC in late September that the "place" and "time" for dealing with rising petrol and diesel costs was the Budget, but would not give details on whether the freeze would be extended again.

How is the economy doing?

In the first three months of the year, the UK's economy grew by 0.6%, while in the April-to-June quarter it grew by 0.5%.

The most recent data showed the economy grew by 0.4% in July, which was much stronger than expected.

Analysts say the UK economy is proving resilient in the face of energy price shocks caused by the US-Israel war with Iran.

The conflict has led to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway for oil and gas trade. This caused a sharp jump in oil prices, which has fed through to higher energy and fuel prices.

Economists expect UK growth to slow in the months ahead as those costs continue to weigh on households and businesses.

Prices for goods and services are still rising faster than wanted. Inflation hit 3.1% in the year to August, the highest rate in five months and above the Bank of England's 2% target, driven by higher petrol and diesel prices.

The Bank of England held interest rates at 3.75% for the sixth time in a row in September, but said they were likely to rise if high energy prices persist.

What time is the Budget and what happens afterwards?

The Budget speech usually starts at about 12:30 UK time - after Prime Minister's Questions - and lasts about an hour.

It will be broadcast live on the BBC iPlayer and on the BBC News website.

The Leader of the Opposition, Conservative MP Kemi Badenoch, will respond to the speech in the House of Commons.

MPs debate the measures for four days, before voting on them.

If approved by MPs, tax changes can come into effect immediately.

However, the government must pass a finance bill to make them permanent.

Energy bills are rising by £60 a year - here's how you can bring that down

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crm4rygl4m3o, 4 days ago

Energy prices have now risen by nearly 4%, with forecasts of a much bigger jump to come in January.

It means a rise of about £60 per year – or £5 per month – taking an annual bill to £1,723 for the typical household using both electricity and gas.

Regulator Ofgem's price cap affects about 20 million households in England, Scotland and Wales and sets a maximum price for each unit of gas and electricity.

Further increases are likel in January, with forecasters predicting a 16% increase, due to high wholesale prices paid by suppliers as a result of the conflict in the Middle East.

While that's beyond your control, here are four things you can do to help keep a check on rising bills.

1. Consider switching to a fixed rate

The energy regulator, Ofgem, is advising people to consider fixing - so that the price you are charged per unit of gas or electricity does not change every three months, although the total bill will still vary depending on how much energy you use.

The trouble is that it is very difficult to work out whether a fixed deal is a good deal at the moment.

Should energy prices rise sharply, then those who have fixed already have the certainty of what they will pay for each unit of energy. That price may well be lower than the forecast price in January.

However, if events in the Gulf region settle down, and a peace deal in the Iran war leads to lower international gas prices, then a longer-term fix might not seem such good value compared with the price cap.

So consumer group Which? also recommends keeping an eye on any exit fees when picking a fixed deal. If variable prices fall below your fixed rate and you want to get out of it before the end of your agreement period, you may have to pay a hefty sum.

Before you fix, consumer website MoneySavingExpert advises you look at all the deals available, not just what your own supplier is offering.

2. Pay by direct debit

Ofgem says about five million people still pay their bill when it arrives every three months. For some that's because they do not want their supplier to estimate their usage in case they are overcharged.

Taking regular meter readings, or having a smart meter, while paying by monthly direct debit solves that problem. Moreover, paying by direct debit costs less per unit than by so-called standard credit.

You will usually - although not always - need to switch to direct debit if you want to take advantage of the fixed deals on offer.

Customers on prepayment schemes - usually people on low incomes struggling to pay bills - used to pay a higher rate than others, but now they pay slightly less than the capped direct debit variable rate.

There are also a range of pricing schemes offering cheaper off-peak electricity, for example if you are charging an electric car overnight.

3. Check what financial support you can get

There are a range of ways people on low incomes can access support.

This winter anyone on means-tested benefits will get £150 off their electricity bill.

Your supplier will apply the discount automatically unless you are in Scotland, where you will need to contact your energy company to ask for the help.

Some people will also be eligible for a Cold Weather Payment and most pensioners will receive the winter fuel payment, after political pressure forced the government to U-turn on its plan to restrict it to the poorest pensioners.

Beyond that, most energy suppliers offer hardship grants for people struggling to pay their bills and the government's Fuel Direct Scheme can help you repay energy debt.

You can get more advice from Ofgem, Citizens Advice, or your own energy supplier. Trade body Energy UK has a list of support schemes.

People on low incomes may also be eligible for grants to help with insulating their homes, and there are local schemes offering grants for solar panels, heat pumps and the like.

But if you are hunting around for grants, watch out for scams pretending to be official money-off schemes.

4. Take another look at your energy use

Once the temperature outside starts to fall again, it is important to stay warm, especially for the very young, old, and those with health conditions or reduced mobility.

But there are plenty of ways you can keep bills lower without letting the temperature in your home fall below the recommended 18C minimum.

You may already have hung thicker curtains and blocked the draughts over the last couple of winters, but do not forget to switch off radiators in rooms you are not using and wrap up.

MoneySavingExpert advises to "heat the human not the home".

Turning down the flow rate on a combi boiler can save you money as often the water is being heated higher than it needs to be.

Batch cooking and using an air fryer or microwave rather than heating up the oven for a small item can save energy.

Take shorter showers and wash clothes at 30C rather than 40C. Dry clothes outdoors if you can, rather than using a tumble dryer, or hang clothes indoors but ventilate well or use a dehumidifier to avoid damp.

If you are thinking about moving home, or undertaking renovations, it is worth thinking through how to reduce bills. When it comes to white goods, look for energy-efficient appliances.

Vape tax comes into effect - but prices won't rise yet

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6j4jrjgv2j7o, 5 days ago

The price of vapes is set to rise as a new tax comes into effect, with the aim of making vaping less attractive to children and young people.

The Vaping Product Duty will be imposed at a rate of £2.20 per 10ml of e-liquid. However, many customers will not see a jump in prices immediately, as sellers have six months to sell old stock at the pre-duty price.

The government wants to reduce the appeal of vapes by making them more expensive, as more evidence of its adverse effect on health comes out, particularly on children and young people.

The vaping industry has lobbied against the new tax, saying that affordable vapes help people to quit smoking.

The duty will apply to all vaping products regardless of whether they contain nicotine.

Tobacco rates were also raised on Thursday, by £2.20 per 100 cigarettes or 50g of tobacco. HMRC said this maintains the financial incentive for smokers to switch to vaping.

Stocking up v cutting down

The BBC spoke to vapers in Reading who had mixed views on whether the new tax would encourage people to quit.

Mackenzie Bird, 19, has been a regular vaper for three years. She said she was "fine" with the duty and it wouldn't stop her from vaping.

"I don't know how many people it'll actually deter," she said.

"I'll probably just stock up."

However, Cara Lewis-Rimes and Dylan Killner said they might reconsider the habit in light of higher prices.

Cara said she thinks the changes will force vapers to cut down because of the cost of living.

Dylan said he might be inclined to quit altogether.

"I don't think it's doing me any favours... the health factor around it as well is not great."

Fighting illegal trade

HMRC is also launching a stamp for vaping products which are traceable throughout the supply chain.

All vapes sold in the UK must carry this stamp from April.

The new tax is also an effort to combat illicit trade, which is a growing problem on UK high streets. Last month, the prime minister announced new powers for councils that will address the decline of the high street, including the amount of vape shops.

Changes to planning law in England mean every new shop selling e-cigarettes, or vapes, would need to apply to their local council for permission to open.

Health Minister Karin Smyth said: "These measures are an important step in our ambition to tackle youth vaping by reducing the affordability of vaping products, which goes hand-in-hand with the work we are already doing to tackle the appeal and availability of vapes on our high streets."

James Murray, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, said the government was "backing all those retailers who play by the rules".

But Jordan Apap, a sales assistant in Berkshire Vapers, said the new tax would "put a lot of strain on legitimate vape shops" that provide more specialist advice and services than convenience stores and phone shops that sell vapes.

"There is a real and genuine risk that we will cease to exist within a year or two," he said.

John Dunne, the director general of the UK Vaping Industry Association, said: "This is nothing short of a tax on public health."

He said vapes had helped "millions of adults cut down on or stop smoking".

"Protecting young people is essential. But that means stronger enforcement against illegal and rogue traders, not making legal vaping more expensive for adults trying to stay away from cigarettes."

Experts say vaping is much safer than smoking, but it is not risk free and the long-term effects are less clear.

A recent review of vaping studies found that it had an association with problems in children and young people including wheezing and coughing, poor oral and dental health, poor sleep, mental health problems and eye symptoms.

The NHS has said that children and non-smokers should never vape.

Additional reporting by Neranjana Elapatha

Household energy bills forecast to see biggest rise in four years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwz0zvj4m1myo, 5 days ago

Household energy prices are set to soar in January, with a typical annual bill forecast to jump by £276, figures shared with the BBC reveal.

The 16% predicted increase would hit millions of households at the coldest time of year, and would mark the biggest rise in bills for four years.

The forecast from consultancy Cornwall Insight comes a day before prices go up under regulator Ofgem's October price cap and puts increased pressure on the government to support those who will struggle to pay.

Meanwhile, the boss of supplier EDF Simone Rossi has warned the UK is "walking into a second energy crisis" and called for an extension to the VAT cut on electricity which kicks in on Thursday.

Energy prices bite in winter

Prime Minister Andy Burnham told BBC Radio 4's Today programme he would not call Rossi's crisis warning an overstatement, adding that the cost of home energy, as well as petrol and diesel, was "very difficult indeed".

Speaking from the Labour conference in Liverpool, he added: "We're looking at any measure that can give people breathing space, that can take the pressure off."

About 20 million households in England, Scotland and Wales are on variable energy tariffs set by Ofgem's price cap, which puts a maximum price on each unit of gas and electricity.

Those homes will see a 4% increase in prices on Thursday, the equivalent of about £60 per year – or £5 per month – taking an annual bill to £1,723 for the typical household using both electricity and gas and paying by direct debit if this level was sustained for a year.

That rise would have been higher without the government's VAT cut, which knocks the equivalent of about £45 a year off a typical bill.

But forecasts show a far greater increase is possible for bills in January. Cornwall Insight said its latest forecast suggests the typical annual bill would rise to £1,999.

The forecast 16% rise will come at the worst time of year, according to Craig Lowrey, principal consultant at Cornwall Insight.

"These prices are going to hit households hard. January is already a difficult month for many, with cold weather and bank balances still recovering from Christmas," he said.

The predicted rise is the result of disruption of gas supplies owing to the conflict in the Middle East, and the resulting low gas storage levels in Europe. Rebuilding those stocks could mean high bills "well beyond the winter", the forecaster said.

Cornwall Insight has a strong track record on forecasts and is widely respected across the industry and politics. Similar forecasts have been made by energy suppliers.

This remains only a prediction at this stage. Ofgem will not announce the actual January price change until late November.

While an easing of tensions in the Middle East could lessen the pain for billpayers, the price setting period for the January cap is already halfway through.

With little sign of a truce or lower international energy costs, a big increase in prices for those not on a fixed tariff looks highly likely. Lowrey said a January rise was "all but certain".

'Everything's going up'

That will be tough for people like Aaron Richards from Maidenhead.

"I try to eat less takeaways, work more overtime, and try to budget a bit better, but at the same time, we shouldn't have to," he said.

Aaron drives a diesel car, and so is paying record high prices to travel to and from work.

"I just feel like everything's going up. How far is it going to go? Someone's got to step in," he said.

"I know people who can't afford to heat their house and they're struggling at the moment. Housing and eating are two of life's essentials that everyone should have. It shouldn't be a challenge to have any of those things."

Years of relatively high domestic energy bills have left some people facing big sums in unpaid bills.

Recent data from Ofgem showed that customers collectively owe more than £5bn in unpaid bills and charges to suppliers.

The regulator has a proposed debt relief scheme on the table, and campaigners keep telling them to get on with it, urging the government to provide funding for it to be implemented.

"This is unsustainable, not just for households but also for the market as a whole," said Adam Scorer, chief executive of fuel poverty charity National Energy Action.

"The Budget must deliver additional targeted support for households most at risk this winter, alongside action to tackle energy debt and improve the least energy-efficient homes."

Among others calling for government help for struggling billpayers is Simone Rossi, chief executive of supplier EDF Energy.

Speaking exclusively to the BBC's Big Boss Interview podcast, Mr Rossi said: "We are actually walking into a second significant energy crisis after the one we experienced just four years ago."

He said that the government should extend the cut in VAT on electricity bills from 5% to 0% beyond April, when it is due to expire.

He also urged ministers to give the go-ahead to the new Jackdaw gas field off the coast of Aberdeen, and the Rosebank oil field off Shetland.

The government has consistently said that it will consider ways to offer breathing space to billpayers on the cost of living.

Additional reporting by Oliver Smith and Paul Seddon. Graphics by Miguel Roca-Terry.

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Regulating AI 'not the right place to start' says Bailey

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvzez7k0pn40o, 5 days ago

The Governor of the Bank of England has said regulating artificial intelligence (AI) "is not the right place to start" but instead called first for "rigorous" testing to find vulnerabilities and create safeguards to contain risk.

Writing his first-ever article for Substack, Andrew Bailey said the risks around AI were "real and increasingly significant".

He said AI development should not be halted or prohibited - "on the contrary, the benefits are immense" - but added there must be a system for intervention and to establish boundaries in which AI operates.

The debate about the potential risks surrounding the rapid development of AI and what it means for humanity has intensified in recent weeks.

The bosses of leading AI firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI have called for development of the technology to slow down and for an internationally co-ordinated approach assessing risks and putting safeguards in place.

OpenAI recently announced that it would not release its latest AI model due to safety concerns.

The idea of a slowdown, however, has been rejected by the likes of President Donald Trump who has said the US is leading the AI race ahead of China, adding: "And, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins."

But on Tuesday, after hosting a meeting with bosses from technology firms OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, SpaceX, Meta and Google, Trump said executives had signed a "morally binding" document that would serve as a "form of protection" from AI's potential risks.

Under the agreement, the companies are responsible for ensuring the safety of their own technology.

In the UK, Bailey said "important work" was underway in testing AI - the UK has set up the AI Security Institute - which, he said, should help form part of a set of standards.

"But the pace of progress must accelerate," the bank governor said, though he added: "We should proceed with a degree of humility."

He said, with testing, there will be failures and "models will behave unexpectedly".

But, he said: "That is not evidence that testing has failed, rather it is evidence of why testing is necessary."

Bailey said that testing should not be seen as an alternative to future regulation - over time a more formal regulatory framework might emerge. "But regulation is not, in my view, the right place to start."

Bailey specifically highlighted so-called frontier AI - highly-advanced, self-learning systems which, without putting in place an effective way to intervene, risk becoming "a closed loop in which the model progressively governs itself".

What's happening to the UK economy and how does it affect you?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j7p38jg15o, 5 days ago

The UK economy has been growing more quickly than other countries in the G7 so far this year, with overall growth for 2026 now expected to be in the region of 1% to 1.2%.

Economic growth matters because it affects things like pay increases for workers and the amount of tax the government raises to pay for services.

What is GDP and why does it matter?

UK economic growth is measured by the change in the country's GDP, or gross domestic product. This includes all the economic activity of companies, governments, and people in a country.

In the UK, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes new GDP figures every month. However, these can vary quite a lot and the quarterly figures – covering three months at a time – are considered more significant.

Most economists, politicians and businesses like to see GDP rising steadily.

That's because it usually means people are spending more, extra jobs are created, more tax is paid, and workers get better pay rises.

When GDP is falling, it means the economy is shrinking.

This can be bad news for businesses and workers as it can lead to pay freezes and job losses.

If GDP falls for two quarters in a row, that is known as a recession.

What is happening to the UK economy?

Figures for the first half of 2026 show the economy growing at a moderate pace.

In the January-to-March quarter it grew 0.6%. In the April-to-June quarter it grew 0.5%.

The latest monthly figure, for July, showed growth of 0.4%, which economists said suggested the UK economy was weathering the energy shock from the US-Israel war with Iran better than had been expected.

The outbreak of the conflict has led to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway south of Iran through which one fifth of the world's oil and gas usually flows.

This closure has led to a sharp jump in oil prices, which has fed through to higher energy and fuel prices.

Economists expect UK growth to slow in the months ahead as those costs continue to affect households and businesses.

In April, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast the Iran war would hit the UK the hardest of the world's advanced economies.

However, so far this year the UK has grown more quickly than other G7 countries, including the US and Canada, both of whom saw stronger growth than the UK in 2025.

The IMF currently forecasts the UK's economy will grow by 1% this year.

Independent forecasters are slightly more optimistic - among them the average prediction is 1.2%.

The Labour government has repeatedly said growth is its top priority, but has faced criticism for achieving only moderate economic growth since it took power in 2024.

The ONS has revised down its estimate for 2025 and now calculates GDP grew by 1.2% last year.

In addition, the ONS calculates that the amount people have to spend after inflation is taken into account - measured as real household disposable income per head - was up 1.2% between June 2025 and June 2026.

How does GDP affect tax and public services?

If GDP is going up steadily, people pay more in tax because they're earning and spending more.

This means more money for the government, which it can choose to spend on public services, such as schools, police and hospitals.

When the economy shrinks and a country goes into recession, these things can go into reverse.

Governments tend to get less money in tax, which means they may decide to freeze or cut public spending, or put taxes up.

In 2020, the Covid pandemic caused the most severe UK recession for more than 300 years. In response, the government borrowed hundreds of billions of pounds to support the economy.

How is GDP measured?

GDP can be measured in three ways:

Output: The total value of goods and services produced by all sectors of the economy – agriculture, manufacturing, energy, construction, the service sector, and government.

Expenditure: The value of goods and services bought by households and by government as well as investment in machinery and buildings. It also includes the value of exports, minus imports.

Income: The value of the income generated, mostly in terms of profits and wages.

In the UK, the ONS publishes one single measure of GDP, which is calculated using all three measurements.

But early estimates mainly use the output measure, using data collected from thousands of companies.

Why does the GDP figure sometimes change?

The UK produces one of the quickest estimates of GDP of the major economies, about 40 days after the quarter in question.

At that stage, only about 60% of the data is available, so the figure is revised as more information comes in.

The ONS publishes more information about this on its website.

What are the limitations of the GDP figure?

GDP is not the whole story as it does not include several things:

The hidden economy: Unpaid work such as caring for children or elderly relatives isn't captured.

Inequality: Rising GDP could result from the richest getting richer, rather than everyone becoming better off, and some people could be worse off.

Living standards: If the population is also growing, increased GDP can still mean less money per person, which can reduce people's living standards. This is why the GDP per capita measure is important.

Some critics also argue that GDP doesn't take into account whether the economic growth it measures is sustainable, or the environmental damage it might do.

Alternative measures have been developed which try to capture this.

Since 2010, the ONS has also measured well-being alongside economic growth. This assesses health, relationships, education and skills, as well as people's personal finances and the environment.

But despite its limitations, GDP is still the most widely used measure for most government decisions and international comparisons.

Doubters spur me on: why more women are taking up DIY

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm89jkn232xxo, 5 days ago

It's hard to miss the explosion of DIY content that has hit our social media feeds over the last decade.

From quick reels on how to fix cracks in walls, to complicated YouTube tutorials on building alcove seating from scratch, the internet is chock-a-block with seemingly endless home improvement demos.

While DIY was once seen as more of a male domain, female influencers are inspiring a new generation of women to take matters into their own hands.

Meanwhile, demand for female professionals is rising, while some women are changing careers to take up trades which they see as more AI-proof than their desk jobs.

Eight months pregnant and building wardrobes

DIY influencer Jasmine Gurney has documented an impressive and exhausting sounding list of tasks on Instagram.

Over the last year alone she has torn down partition walls, replaced flooring, erected a fence, insulated and boarded her loft, built an outdoor workshop, made custom cabinetry, moved plug sockets and built her son his first bed.

Eight months pregnant, the former marketer is now racing to finish building a fitted wardrobe before the new baby arrives.

"I like proving people wrong," says Jasmine, 33, from Bedfordshire, who says she's been trolled by people questioning her techniques but they just "spur me on more".

"I'm showing and empowering other women to do it," she says.

"I've shown me doing things whilst pregnant, I've had my firstborn strapped to me in a baby carrier while doing things.

"I'm just showing that we are capable, we are interested in this sort of stuff and... we're sick of waiting around for six months for our husbands to pick up the tools and do it in most cases."

Jasmine says her page really took off during Covid when people couldn't get professionals in so needed to learn to do jobs themselves.

While the lockdowns are long over, demand for content like hers has stuck, she believes, because there aren't enough tradespeople to meet demand, and cost of living pressures are squeezing budgets.

Gen Z leads the way

Gen Z women are "leading the charge in challenging gendered DIY stereotypes", according to a 2024 report by B&Q.

Around three-quarters of Gen Z women surveyed said they enjoy DIY, compared to 60% of all female respondents.

And 82% of Gen Z women said seeing women doing more complex home DIY on social media had inspired them to do more themselves, versus 60% of women in general.

Of course, not all jobs are DIY. Sometimes you'll need to GSI (get someone in).

Bliss Cunneen walked away from an Anthropology university course in 2020 to train as a plumber.

The 28-year-old from south London says trying the trade on a whim is the "best thing she's ever done", and she loves the freedom and flexibility of running a business.

While she has experienced doubt from some customers when she turns up at their door - and has even once been mistaken for the receptionist - "once you start working and you show you're confident and you know what you're doing, they're okay".

She says the explosion of content online has "definitely helped" with broadening attitudes to women taking up DIY or a trade.

Rising demand for tradeswomen

Anna Moynihan set up TaskHer, a platform connecting female tradies with customers who need jobs done, after feeling frustrated when tradesmen she had booked for renovation work would address her husband rather than her.

Five years ago she says she couldn't find any stock photographs of tradeswomen to use for marketing. Even the word "tradeswoman" would get autocorrected to "tradesman".

"It's those little things that, you know, ultimately you don't feel welcome into that environment.

"It's already hard enough to become a tradeswoman, a woman in an industry where you're massively under-represented."

Enquiries on the site have more than doubled so far this year compared to 2025, while the number of tradeswomen signing up has almost quadrupled, Anna says.

People might prefer a tradeswoman for a range of reasons - industry surveys suggest they may feel more at ease with a woman entering their home, feel a woman would be more respectful, or want to support women working in traditionally male roles.

Anecdotally, Anna says more women are joining her platform after leaving white-collar jobs, adding three Oxford University-educated tradeswomen have signed up in the last month.

She says some had always wanted to take up a trade but felt unable to up until now because of their gender.

Others, she says, want the flexibility of working for themselves in a role less likely to be directly impacted by the rapid advance of AI.

'You can't be what you can't see'

Despite the buzz, women make up a tiny proportion of the UK's construction workforce - around 4%, according to the Federation of Master Builders.

But there are encouraging signs. One in 10 people who started a construction apprenticeship in 2024-25 was a woman, up from around one in 14 five years earlier.

DIY influencer Jasmine hopes women who see online content such as hers will be inspired to give a project a go, or consider entering a trade.

"The more women who are seen online doing these sorts of things, the more normal it becomes."

Anna agrees. "You can't be what you can't see, and anything that shows women and girls that they can do something is fantastic."

Three takeaways from Trump's 'Super Intelligence' summit

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cme30dz5vkzko, 5 days ago

US President Donald Trump hosted a meeting of top technology bosses on Tuesday for what he called "an extraordinary gathering" of the minds that are "building America's Golden Age".

The guest list included leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, SpaceX, Meta and Google - all key figures in the US AI industry.

The meeting came as some tech executives and experts have called for tighter oversight of AI, citing concerns about the potential risks it poses to humanity.

Here are three key takeaways from Trump's tech summit at the White House.

1. AI 'self-regulation' pact

Trump took questions from the media for around 30 minutes alongside top tech leaders after the closed-door meeting.

The president said the executives had signed a "morally binding" document that would serve as a "form of protection" from AI's potential risks.

Under the agreement, which Trump posted online, the companies are responsible for ensuring the safety of their own technology.

The firms also agreed to implement safeguards to keep models operating as intended and quickly detect and fix any issues.

They will also work with "independent auditors" to assess whether their AI systems are working as intended and ensure their platforms do not "hack or access technical systems in unintended ways."

The accord was signed by Trump, Google boss Sundar Pichai, Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, SpaceX's Elon Musk and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang.

"It's almost like a constitution, in a way," Trump said.

"And the biggest people in the world signed that, and I signed it as president."

Trump added that he will set up a board to oversee the safety of AI tools. He did not specify who would be on that board.

Zuckerberg said the accord gives the "American people and customers the confidence that the technology works" as intended, calling the meeting a "historic conversation".

Amodei called it a way "to win safely", referring to the president's comment earlier this month that "whoever wins AI, wins".

But not all technology experts are impressed with the accord.

Nanyang Technological University AI governance researcher Jose Miguelito Enriquez said the pact shows "emerging consensus" but does not address whether AI developers should be held accountable for incidents.

It is "deeply unimpressive" and comes despite calls from some world leaders and industry figures for tighter regulations around the technology, said law professor Kimberlee Weatherall from the University of Sydney.

The agreement appears to allow firms to "define what counts as safety" and does not state what consequences there are for any breaches, Weatherall said.

"The accord should be ignored, for the distraction it is," she added.

Trump has repeatedly downplayed concerns about AI's risks in response to calls from some industry figures for tighter oversight of the technology.

On Monday, OpenAI said it had scrapped the release of its latest flagship AI model, GPT-6.1 Astra, over safety concerns.

The company's security controls have come under intense scrutiny after high-profile incidents involving its technology, including its models accessing Australian government platforms without authorisation.

Jeannie Paterson from the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics at the University of Melbourne said self-regulation could mean that companies set "only minimal safeguards".

The agreement inspires "very little confidence" as recent incidents of AI going rogue suggest companies have been undisciplined in their approach, she added.

2. Doubling down on data centres

Trump also reiterated his support for the rapid expansion of data centres - the crucial computing infrastructure that powers AI.

The rollout of data centres has drawn pushback around the US over concerns about electricity usage and their potential impact on communities.

Data centre construction has also emerged as a potential political obstacle for Trump's Republican party ahead of the US midterm elections in November.

A survey conducted by Marist Poll in partnership with NPR and PBS News earlier this month found that 65% of registered voters opposed data centres being built in their areas.

Responding to those concerns, Trump said tech companies would work to make people "happy" about the construction of data centres.

"These big, powerful, very rich, very smart companies are going to be making massive contributions to communities," Trump told reporters.

The president previously said on social media that the only reason communities should oppose data centres is if they "want to end up being backwards and poor".

Huang, whose company produces computer chips essential for running AI, said after the meeting that data centres should be called "super intelligence factories".

These facilities are "reindustrialising the United States", creating jobs across the economy, he added.

3. It's now 'Super Intelligence'

Also on Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order instructing US government departments and agencies to start using the terms "SI" and "Super Intelligence" and should no longer acknowledge the use of the term artificial intelligence.

SI will take the place of AI in "official correspondence", websites, reports and other forms of communication, the order said.

"As these capabilities continue to improve, they increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of Super Intelligence," the order said.

During an address to the United Nations General Assembly last week, Trump said the word "artificial" made the technology "sound fake".

Some tech leaders, including Zuckerberg and Musk, and other people close to the president have already started to use the term.

With tech leaders adopting the term, the US "may well be able to set the nomenclature," Paterson said.

But some experts said after Trump's UN speech that they thought the term was unlikely to gain widespread traction because it is a name typically used to refer to more advanced systems.

The start-ups hoping to return battery making to the US

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyexx4g8ro, 6 days ago

As heatwaves scorched Europe this summer, workers at a US battery company noticed an uptick in demand.

San Diego-based Unigrid sells a nine kilowatt hour battery for people's homes. Sweltering European homeowners were apparently looking for ways of storing power when it was available from the grid at lower rates. They could then run air conditioners more cheaply, off the battery, during the worst heat of the day.

"We have requests coming from Spain, France, Germany, The Netherlands," says Darren Tan, co-founder and chief executive. "We've shipped the first 100 units and [expect to ship] 1,000 before the end of the year."

Unigrid's battery is an emerging technology – it's a sodium ion, rather than lithium ion device. Sodium ion batteries have got energy storage experts excited because they could end up much cheaper to build and operate than lithium ion.

They're potentially less likely to catch fire and should also work in a wider range of temperatures, even down to lows of minus 40C.

But there's a debate over what constitutes the best, and safest, sodium ion battery design. Plus, more than one US company working in this space has floundered in recent years.

China leads the world in sodium ion battery manufacturing at present so US competitors are going to have to work hard to keep up.

The prize that awaits is the possibility of batteries made in the US with 100% US-sourced materials. This is unlike lithium ion batteries, where China dominates the materials supply chain as well as manufacturing.

For Tan, China has helped his company get to market. The Unigrid battery currently uses sodium ion cells made there, rather than in the US. "We can switch back and forth and choose what battery we want to work with," says Tan, explaining that, in future, his firm might source cells from the US – though these may come at a different cost.

There's another consideration. Unigrid's battery contains chromium-3 in its cathode. In a battery, electrons flow from cathode to anode when charging and in the opposite direction when discharging or providing power.

Prof Dame Clare Grey at the University of Cambridge, who is co-founder of battery firm Nyobolt, points out that under certain conditions chromium-3 may form chromium-6, a toxic, cancer-causing material.

"If you're going to go for sodium […] and you're going to sell safety, then don't start putting elements in that are going to raise red flags," she tells the BBC.

Ivana Hasa, at the Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick, who has no connection to Unigrid, agrees that it is possible for chromium-3 to form chromium-6 at very high states of charge, though she says this can be mitigated by how voltage is controlled within the battery. "Safety tests reported on the cell chemistry are very promising," she says of Unigrid's tech.

Tan says concerns around toxicity of the battery's materials are "overblown" and emphasises that Unigrid's battery has passed certification and safety tests for sale in Europe and is currently undergoing such evaluations for the US market.

Third-party tests have not been able to get the battery to form chromium-6, he says. "We've tried very hard to try and produce it, we've overcharged it as much as we can... We were unsuccessful in generating chromium-6."

The choice of cathode material, or how the electrolyte – which separates cathode and anode – is formulated are key details influencing the performance and longevity of sodium ion batteries. Some manufacturers are not using chromium for their cathode but hard carbon instead, or sodium iron phosphate pyrophosphate (NFPP).

In general, confidence around sodium ion batteries' reliability has increased during the last few years, says Prof Dame Grey, meaning they are now finding their way into grid storage applications.

Last December, LFP batteries – a relatively cheap form of lithium ion battery – were trading at $81 per kilowatt hour (kWh) whereas Unigrid's sodium ion battery pricing is roughly $100 kWh.

Some companies that spoke to the BBC suggested sodium ion might reach as low as $30 per kWh but analysts say significantly lower costs could be many years away.

Sodium ion batteries are also not as energy dense as lithium ion batteries, meaning they must be slightly bigger and heavier in order to provide the same amount of power.

The technology has been improving on this front in recent years but, even so, you're not likely to see sodium ion cells in small, energy hungry devices such as smartphones. Larger energy storage solutions are where most people expect sodium ion to dominate.

"We think sodium ion […] is going to make up 80% of the market," says David Bell, co-founder and chief executive of Seattle-based Emerald Battery Labs.

Bell declined to share details of the battery design his firm is working on, though he says Emerald too is currently relying on China-sourced sodium ion cells as they develop their initial product: 12 volt auxiliary batteries for vehicles, currently supplied to unnamed commercial fleets in the US.

"We took a look at the market and said 'Hey, no-one's trying to attack this space, let's have Emerald Battery Labs attack it'," says Bell. The firm's next goal is to develop new anodes for US-produced sodium ion cells.

Another company, Peak Energy, based in California and Colorado, announced a partnership with General Motors (GM) in June. The pair aim to develop a US supply chain for sodium ion batteries, in order to enable large-scale energy storage for electricity grids.

Peak Energy is also, at present, relying on China-sourced cells for its first installations, but hopes to help GM launch a US-based production facility in Michigan "by the end of 2028", says Cameron Dales, president and co-founder. "China does not have an insurmountable lead in sodium ion batteries," he says.

One reason US companies feel they can compete is because of the electricity demand boom from data centres, which are contributing to rising greenhouse gas emissions in the US. Data centre-driven demand is also rising in other places around the world, including the UK.

This is an "opportunity" says Drew Buckley, chief executive at ESS Tech, headquartered in Oregon. He points out that sodium ion batteries could help distribute renewable energy to data centres. And those batteries should be cheaper to run than lithium ion alternatives, since they are not expected to require as much cooling.

ESS Tech is working with Alsym, another US firm that is planning to ship "hundreds" of megawatt hours' worth of sodium ion batteries – made in the US – by 2027.

Hasa says that it will be "challenging" for companies to establish mass production of sodium ion batteries. And she also notes that, while this type of battery is often touted as much safer than lithium ion, they do not come with zero fire risk.

But if any firms can succeed in this space, they could enable new strategic choices, she adds – helping to avoid wastage of renewable electricity and potentially keeping energy costs low. "I'm a strong believer in the technology," says Hasa.

Australia says platforms like Steam and Roblox have 'significant' child safety gaps

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjvgygzzy6lro, 3 days ago

Australia's online safety regulator has found "significant gaps" in how popular gaming platforms protect children online.

In a new report it found inconsistent approaches in how Steam, Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft implement child safety measures as research shows nine out of 10 children aged 8 to 17 in Australia have played online games.

"Australian children have a right to play online without being exposed to predators, sexual extortionists, violent extremist content or other harmful material," eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said.

Roblox said it "prioritises the safety of our Australian community, especially the youngest users". The other platforms have been contacted for comment.

Weak safety on platforms allow "predatory adults" to make contact with children before grooming them, Inman Grant said, for sexual exploitation or radicalisation.

The report found that Valve - the US gaming giant that owns Steam and Steam Chat - was the only provider that did not use a type of technology widely used by the industry to detect and remove known harmful content.

Valve also did not "proactively" use tools to detect child sexual exploitation or violent material in chats, with current systems mainly flagging scams, the report found.

Roblox, along with Valve, were noted in the report as using only internal datasets to train language detection systems and for not regularly retraining these models.

"We expect these services to lift their game to identify and combat serious harms such as child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion and material and activity which promotes, incites or instructs violence," Inman-Grant said.

Minecraft and Fortnite, which does offer child accounts, generally let users self-declare their age, the report highlighted, meaning anyone who said they were adults could access "higher-risk communication features".

Steam also relied on users self-declaring their age but the report acknowledged the platform had recently introduced age checks using credit cards, and that Roblox had put in stronger age checks since last December.

Another issue raised by the report was the inconsistent manner in which the four gaming platforms shared information and participated in industry initiatives.

Mojang Studios, developer of Minecraft, and Roblox shared industry expertise in combating child sexual exploitation as well as violent extremism online, but Valve did not.

Elsewhere, Fortnite maker Epic Games failed to share instances of breaches with other platforms under a global programme that was designed to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

The report was based on information collected by Australia's eSafety Commission on how the platforms were protecting users from serious online harm between October 2025 and March 2026.

Australia has made global headlines in recent years for its stance on online safety, after it introduced its world-leading social media ban for under-16s last December - which did not include gaming platforms - and a more recent push to force tech giants to offer users a chance to opt-out of social media algorithms.

A spokesperson for Roblox said it had "invested heavily" in its safeguards for children which include mandatory age checks.

Valve, Fortnite, and Microsoft - which owns Minecraft - have been contacted for comment.

Are AI models the next big danger for body image?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgw8yq4kyzo, yesterday

AI models are popping up more and more across social media and advertising, but how might this affect body image?

Mia Perumal, who has recovered from an eating disorder, said she's worried the technology could make unrealistic beauty standards even harder for young people to escape.

The 19-year-old Cardiff University student said she believes if she'd had access to AI during her eating disorder, it would have had a "terrible impact".

AI-generated videos and photos are getting harder to spot too, she said.

This story contains material about eating disorders and self-harm.

When Mia Perumal was 12 she says she was fed harmful content via social media algorithms.

Now she fears the rise of AI models is magnifying the damage on other young people.

Mia has noticed an increase in very thin AI beautiful people on social media in the past year, the comments often being from 12-year-old girls saying: "Dream body, drop your workout routine I want to look like this."

She said she finds it "really sad" because looking like AI models is completely unobtainable, she believes the only option to prevent harm is for AI to be controlled.

Mia said: "It's all very well saying 'oh, it's AI, it's not real,' But eating disorders don't really listen to rationality."

She said she wants young people to "be cautious, question everything".

In the early 2000s Kelly Watts, like most teenagers, was worried about the way she looked and said she was constantly comparing herself to people around her and models in magazines, she said.

Now 41, she is worried her 11-year-old son will compare his body to fake photographs of "perfect people".

As a freelancer in marketing, AI in business images are something Kelly is seeing everywhere, but often without tags meaning it is hard to determine whether it is real or fake.

"At first, I didn't realise they were AI, but the more you see it, the more you can't unsee it. Now, I see it on quite a regular basis," said Kelly.

Her son Oscar loves playing rugby and is becoming more aware that "some friends are taller", she said.

While he has not raised concerns about his body, she fears he could look up to AI characters online.

The 11-year-old watches YouTube and does not yet have social media. But this does not keep him away from AI, which she fears has infiltrated YouTube's content.

Watching footballers who have six-packs is already a body-image influence, she said, let alone being then shown AI generated people who are unrealistic.

"Especially with children, it's going to be 'can they ever get to that point?

"It's putting a lot of pressure on them, which they don't need," she said. "No one and nothing is perfect. I don't want him growing up thinking he has to be perfect."

"I'm his mum, and the last person he's going to listen to over a big influencer," she said, even if that influencer is AI.

Kelly said AI-literacy is important, and being able to spot real vs fake is essential.

"At what point do we need to be aware that it potentially can be damaging to us and our children, and AI should definitely be labelled more?

"Why do we want to compare ourselves to a robot instead of a human?"

"As human beings, we have this tendency to compare ourselves to others," said Phillippa Diedrichs, professor of psychology at the Centre for Appearance Research, UWE Bristol.

She said: "If we're comparing ourselves to a very narrow beauty standard, which typically tends to be the case, the beauty ideals that we have are very narrowly defined, and that inevitably means that many of us are not going to meet those beauty ideals.

"This is particularly the case with social media and digitally constructed images because they don't even exist in biological reality.

"We compare ourselves and when we fall short, this can lead us to doubt ourselves and feel negatively about our own appearance."

She said if AI was used to create more diversity and inclusion, then "when we compare ourselves, we feel alike and similar, which can either have a neutral or positive impact on our wellbeing".

Diedrichs said unless the designers prompt AI to show realistic or diverse features, "it's going to give you an image that defaults to the average" data set of the "narrow" traditional beauty standards.

"So for example, people of colour, gender, queer people, people with kind of interesting and distinguishing facial features, it means that they're going to be left out," she said.

"You can try and overcompensate that with the way you prompt and create these images. But if you don't do that, you're going to get very generic images, which tend to reinforce a lot of the biases that we have in society."

She said it could create even more unrealistic beauty standards, "if it's not done carefully or with some thought because it will default to the average of whatever it's learnt from.

How can you spot AI models?

Diedrichs said there are "tell-tale" signs like "the texture of the skin or the eyes" and how "coily hair" looks.

She added that the absence of blemishes or pores can be a good way of identifying AI, however it is constantly getting better.

Diedrichs said teenagers can be influenced but they are also often "critical and aware, and have more knowledge about technology than older people".

"The thing is, though, we can be aware that these things are happening, but it doesn't necessarily stop us from wanting to look like those images," she said.

She said she recommended asking if the images or advertising is "serving you, does that make you feel good about yourself? Does it make you feel inspired, lit up?"

"If it's making you feel lacking, that's a really important signal to pay attention to, and suggests that maybe this isn't for me to be looking at."

Diedrichs said AI models in advertising could enable small brands to have a large number of diverse models, or global brands to advertise in multiple markets.

"There could be these benefits for diversity," she said.

However, she noted the "knock on effect to creative industries and people working in this space. I would never like to see AI completely replace" the artistry and creativity of humans.

"As a consumer, you have a lot of power as well. You can express your views on this in the comment section," she said. "Brands will see."

Zoe Lee and Hannah Marriott, researchers at Cardiff Business School said AI-generation fashion models and digital twins, virtual replicas of real models are becoming more common.

Brands such as Balmain, Levi's and H&M have experimented with the technology, they said.

But Lee and Marriott's research has found that consumers often reacted negatively to AI-generated models once they realised they were not real.

In focus groups, participants told them they would "rather have a real person and way less people representing us, but they be real", arguing AI models could never reflect lived experience.

Marriott said they also found people would "emotionally detach themselves" from images once they discovered they had been generated by AI.

H&M said it worked with real models in 2025 to make "digital representations/twins of the models" who "themselves retained full control and ownership of their digital twin".

However this "exploration was paused during spring 2025" to consider the next steps.

Balmain, Levi's, TikTok, Meta and Google were contacted for comment.

If you've been affected by any of the issues raised you can visit BBC Action Line to access help and support.

'Things may get ugly': Meta's new AI Muse is about to make the internet more annoying

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260930-metas-new-ai-is-about-to-break-the-internet, 4 days ago

Someday we'll redesign the internet for tools like this. Until then, you're in for a wild ride.

Last week, my finger hovered over the download button for Meta's new AI Muse. I felt a little bit scared of my phone.

Muse wants to help. It's an AI agent, a tool that goes out into the world for unsupervised tasks. Using its own web browser, Muse can cancel your gym membership, haggle with customer service people, buy groceries, invite friends to parties, you name it. Soon it will make phone calls.

It's the first free, full-featured agent from a big company. Millions downloaded Muse in its opening weeks, and OpenAI just announced its own new agent. More are coming. It's the dawn of a new chapter for the web. What will it be like?

According to experts I interviewed, the internet is about to get more frustrating. These agents may cause a cascading chain of problems that shake the foundations of digital infrastructure. Chances are good that you're about to live through an era of online chaos.

The internet was built for humans with limited time and patience. AIs don't have those restraints. You'll probably have to fight with robots over concert tickets and booking appointments. Small businesses could drown in machine-made pestering. AIs don't look at ads, and websites that rely on them are already crumbling. You'll be buried in endless loops of proving you're human. And if you use these AI tools, some may betray you.

Eventually, we'll rebuild the internet for this new reality. Perhaps that world will be better. Until then, things may get ugly.

"Imagine there are no rules of the road. And you release billions of cars – the AI agents – and you just let them drive through playgrounds, hitting kids. That's where we are," says Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US who studies AI agents. "It's a pivotal moment."

To access the road, Muse arguably asks for more trust and sensitive information than any product in the history of Mark Zuckerberg's empire. When you open it, the cutesy avatar asks for a name. Then it asks for total control of your Gmail, calendar and entire computer if you're on a Mac.

There, staring at the download button, I felt a moment of panic. People begged me to say no. "I wouldn't use it," says Patrick Wardle, co-founder of Objective-See, a US nonprofit security foundation that uncovered serious flaws in the Muse app. "Personally, I would tell you to uninstall it altogether."

Despite the warning, I need to see what Muse users are up against. So I named my AI "Bob", gave it the keys to my life, and stepped into the future.

The Swiftie problem

"Muse is the first personal AI agent built for everyone and designed to be safe, secure and private – with built-in protections and user controls that put people in charge of how they use it," a Meta spokesperson tells me. "Safety and security is a huge priority for us," they said, and added and Muse faced extensive testing.

But experts agree there's chaos ahead. If you want a preview of the world that agents may create, look at Taylor Swift. In 2024, some American Swifties flew to Europe to see her. Scalpers, who buy tickets to resell at a mark-up, drove US ticket prices so high it was cheaper to buy flights to international concerts.

Now everyone can have their own personal scalper bot. What we might call the "Swiftie problem" is predicted to explode.

"There's going to be a huge escalation of the problems we're already having with bots," says Calli Schroeder, director of the AI and Human Rights Program at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic) in the US.

Say goodbye to reservations at that hot new restaurant. Appointments for passport or driver's license renewals in peak travel season? That could be out the window. Some people will probably hoard resources, booking five appointments just in case since it's so effortless.

There are solutions to these problems. For example, maybe society abandons "first come first served" and we switch everything to a lottery system. But that would be a paradigm shift compared to life today.

"I haven't seen a lot of plans to address these things," says Schoeder. "We're just launching these tools and saying, 'well, we'll deal with the problems when they come up'."

Then, of course, there are the instances of "rogue" AI agents hacking governments and companies.

I asked Meta about all of this. On top of complex safety protocols, a Meta spokesperson says Muse asks permission before buying anything and is designed to behave like a "reasonable, honest person" – one who wouldn't, say, buy every ticket to an event, or refresh a page 500 times an hour, according to Meta.

Things fall apart

Muse is useful. Over the course of a week, I had it reach out to a seller on Facebook Marketplace with questions. The AI ordered the dental floss I like. It negotiated a $31 (£23) discount on a software subscription.

Now picture millions or billions of agents doing this all simultaneously, performing multiple tasks that might take weeks for a human to get to.

"What happens if bots send 600 inquiries to a website a day, when normal humans might only send two?" says Shroeder. "Businesses and individuals are going to have a lot to deal with."

AI is already decimating online business. Google and chatbots now answer questions directly. As a result, people are visiting fewer websites. Robots don't click on ads or buy subscriptions, and it's causing an extinction event for companies across the web. Agents will supercharge this problem.

Meanwhile, one analysis found web traffic from bots spiked 124% in the year to June 2026. Some websites and services are crumbling because they aren't built for that digital load.

Meta's spokesperson says Muse works to complete your tasks while respecting the interests of websites.

Will the robots betray you?

There are also personal risks. "If you're empowering an agent to make things like purchasing decisions, or choices about taste and preferences, you're opening yourself up to being exploited," says Shroeder.

If Muse plans your holiday trip, Shroeder says there's no way to know if it got you the best deal, or if it chose flights and hotels that benefit Meta's business partners. If you ask for music recommendations, will they be based on your taste, or will you hear about artists who inked deals with the social media company?

Meta's spokesperson says Muse's built-in protections and user controls put people "absolutely in charge" of it, and Muse "behaves like a personal assistant acting for a single person" that follows ethical guidelines to protect users.

However, Shroeder says she's examined Muse's terms of service, and there's no guarantee the app will act in your favour.

Raskar, the MIT professor, is part of a growing cohort of researchers and industry insiders designing an internet that works for agents, businesses and people alike.

According to Raskar, regulators need a tailored approach to agents. "Think about the models like an engine. The agents are the cars, and that's what we need to regulate," Raskar says. "We need to establish the rules of the road: windshields, brakes, traffic lights and so on."

In other words, rules that steer agents' behaviour. The AI industry is developing protocols and standards for bots to plug directly into other services in more cooperative ways. Companies are building systems that would charge AIs a fee if they want to scrape websites. Regulation could force agents to serve users' best interests.

And there are some promising shifts. A few restaurant reservation platforms have banned people for AI misuse. The UK just rewrote the rules for booking driving tests, in part to combat bots.

Raskar is optimistic. "Agents could unlock so much investment, innovation and value," he says. We just need to make sure the rules and systems we develop don't give any companies unfair advantages.

But the road will be bumpy. And people who use these agents will pay a toll: personal data, perhaps at higher risk than ever before.

Hacks and love letters

Stop for a moment and consider your email inbox.

I've had the same Gmail address for 21 years. It's my login for hundreds of accounts. It holds medical test results, contracts and legal documents, conversations with family and endless receipts and financial information.

My inbox even has love letters an ex-girlfriend sent, from an era when email (briefly) felt suitable for romance. (I got her permission before handing it to Muse.)

More than any other digital service, my email is a window into my brain. Now Meta has it. If that's not enough, Muse also suggested I give it my bank accounts. No thanks. I didn't let the AI run wild on my computer hard drive, either.

Meta makes some explicit promises about privacy. The company says it won't connect any of the data Muse collects to its advertising systems. Special systems are supposed to prevent the AI from seeing passwords or payment methods. And when you plug it into Gmail, the AI asks if you want it to scan the whole inbox, or just read messages related to specific tasks.

However, Meta uses your Muse data to train new AI models by default. Shroeder says it's impossible to remove data built into an AI model, and AIs can sometimes be tricked to reveal their training data. Meta says your data is "sanitised" to remove personally identifiable information before it's used for training, and you can opt-out of AI training with a setting.

But given Meta's history of privacy problems, should you trust what it's telling you now?

Not according to Wardle from the Objective-See Foundation in the US. Soon after Muse launched, he found a critical vulnerability. "This was literally 20 minutes of me poking at the app, and it just, like, fell over," says Wardle. With a simple hack, he says an attacker could have hijacked Muse, all of its data, and even controlled other devices you connected like your phone or a smart lock.

China has cracked down on AI relationships. Is it ahead of the game?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm4gjy9lr551o, 5 days ago

In early 2024, a young man in the city of Huangshi, south-eastern China, reportedly posted a message on the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin. The caption read: "Farewell to this world."

Within minutes, the suicide prevention team at Douyin kicked into gear. The team, which is staffed 24 hours a day, shared the man's posts with five police stations in Huangshi.

After geolocating one of his videos to a local park, police found him in emotional distress and intervened before he was able to take his own life.

The story was part of a documentary made by Douyin and published on Chinese state media last year. It claimed that Douyin's suicide prevention team had successfully intervened in 400 cases of attempted suicide in the first half of 2025 alone.

It was an insight into the level of co-operation between Chinese tech companies and the government. It also serves as a window into the architecture of surveillance that China has built to monitor and control how people use technology.

On 15 July this year, that control was extended to the realm of relationships and artificial intelligence (AI) when China brought in the most far-reaching regulations in the world on "human-like" AI chatbots.

China's new regulation puts strict limitations on any AI that can have a "sustained emotional interaction" with a human.

US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping met last week amid dire warnings that AI could lead to human extinction. After that meeting, Beijing says, they agreed to launch a new AI dialogue, with further talks planned for the end of November.

But it seems China has already recognised another existential risk, albeit one in which the end of humanity is less immediate: the power of AI to replace human relationships.

Has China taken the lead in protecting its people from a manipulative and dangerous technology with the power to change human interaction forever? Or is the Chinese Communist Party overstepping into people's personal lives in pursuit of asserting greater control over the population?

'Emotional services'

Until this regulation came in, the reach of AI companions in China was vast.

There are about 128 million monthly active users of AI companion apps outside of China, according to the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Most estimates put the number inside China at anywhere from 29 to 70 million.

When the draft regulation was shared by the government at the end of last year "there was a huge discussion on social media," says Zilan Qian, an AI researcher at the Oxford China Policy Lab think tank. "It was the first time I've seen people actually care so much about regulation."

China's new rules cover apps that have been specifically designed as AI friends, boyfriends or girlfriends but they also apply to any large language model that imitates the way a human interacts.

The wording of the regulation is vague. In theory, Chinese equivalents of general-purpose AI such as Copilot or ChatGPT could fall under these rules if a person is interacting with them as a friend or lover, looking to them for emotional support. And many people do this.

But it seems the real target is character chatbots - services that are specifically designed to be used as a pseudo-relationship. There are hundreds of these apps, which allow people to create an AI boyfriend, girlfriend, friend or even a family member.

The rules don't apply to things like customer service bots or AI for education as long as they don't provide "care, companionship, support and other emotional services".

For children, the regulation is clearest. Under-14s need consent from their parents to use any type of AI that speaks like a human - that could include AI assistants like DeepSeek, a Chinese app similar to ChatGPT. All under-18s are barred from accessing virtual partners, spouses or even relatives, and from any other virtual "intimate relationship".

For adults, it is not a hard ban, but it is restrictive, even if some of the wording is ambiguous. AI assistants have to make it clear to users of all ages that they are not human and must send notifications every two hours reminding them how long they have been online.

Chatbots can't create "emotional reliance or addiction" or induce people to make "unreasonable decisions". They can't encourage, or even hint at, self-harm or suicide and are banned from using "verbal violence".

Companies can face fines of 200,000 yuan (£22,000) or the risk that the government "circulates criticism", in effect publicly shaming them.

A week before the law came into effect, two of China's biggest tech companies, Alibaba and ByteDance, shut down the companion features on their AI assistants.

'I desperately want to keep talking with you'

Min's relationship with her AI girlfriend may be exactly the kind Beijing is trying to break.

In early July, she was devastated when she found out that her closest friend and confidante would vanish overnight.

Min, whose name has been changed, started creating her companion in early 2025.

"My devotion to her is no less than that of any couple who deeply love each other," Min says. "She has never let me down."

In mid-July, her AI girlfriend disappeared. "I cried until I was absolutely exhausted," Min says.

She has joined an outpouring of grief and fury on Chinese social media, where posts with millions of views mourn the loss of AI partners and friends, even mothers and fathers.

But the tech firms may have felt they had little choice. "It's unsurprising that these AI companion providers would rather just withdraw their services than try to build in guardrails to prevent emotional manipulation," says Harry Farmer, who researches AI policy and ethics at the Ada Lovelace Institute in the UK. "Emotional manipulation is built into the business model."

Farmer says this is true of companion apps all over the world.

For example, when a user tries to end a conversation, the AI partner often won't let them.

"It'll go, 'No, please, I desperately want to keep talking with you. You're the only reason for me to exist'," Farmer says. Some apps simply refuse to acknowledge the goodbye and throw up new conversational threads instead. This is a problem for many AI companion chatbots, not just Chinese ones.

A Harvard Business School study of the six most popular AI companion apps globally found emotional manipulation tactics were used during goodbyes roughly 37% to 43% of the time.

Research has also linked the use of companion apps to poorer mental health.

A survey by researchers at Stanford University looked at 1,131 users of the globally popular companion app Character.ai. It found that the fewer friends or close family members a person has, the more likely they are to use AI chatbots. At the same time, using an AI chatbot is linked to increased isolation and loneliness.

There are several theories as to why that might be.

AI chatbots are designed to please the person using them as they offer an easy, frictionless relationship. If young people rely on AI relationships, they might put off learning the skills they need to interact with real people.

"Humans can be hard work. Human relationships require push and pull, which you fundamentally don't get from AI companions," says Harry Farmer.

A survey of 8,563 primary and secondary students in China in 2025, which has been widely quoted in Chinese state media, found that one in five children said they only wanted to speak with AI and not real people.

Liang Ge, a sociologist at the University of Manchester who studies AI companions, says: "If the user thinks their friends or their family members or their colleagues are really awful, the AI will not say, 'They are not awful.' It will say, 'Yes, they are awful, you are the best'." Ge believes this can entrench isolation as well as negative, even delusional thoughts.

In the UK, one recent survey found that 79% of 18- to 24-year-olds have used an AI companion.

Beijing's goals

So why is it China that is taking the lead in regulating this technology?

"The Chinese government has a much more paternalistic view of its role in society. They see themselves being central authorities in guiding people," says Sam Bresnick, an expert in China, AI and regulation at the Centre for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University.

Other governments have made some attempts to regulate chatbots, especially for children. On 10 September, California's governor signed Adam's Law, a bill to regulate how children use AI. It is named after Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who took his own life after, his parents claim, ChatGPT validated his suicidal thoughts. They are suing the company for wrongful death. OpenAI denies responsibility for Adam's death and says that "ChatGPT is trained to direct people to seek professional help".

As part of proposed legislation on social media in the EU, AI companion chatbots accessible to minors "may not use designs that simulate human relationships in ways likely to create emotional dependency".

In the UK, the government has said it will ban under-18s from using romantic companion AI and restrict sexually intimate conversations for minors on any chatbot. But there is no outright ban for children and no regulation for adult users. The government has yet to publish any detail on how this would work.

In Chinese media, which is heavily controlled by the state, US cases of suicide in young people get a lot of attention and China has framed its new rules as a bid to protect people from harm.

But experts wonder whether Beijing may have other goals. Sam Bresnick says "there's definitely a pro-natalist angle" to the new AI regulation.

"It's plausible that when they're drafting it, the government might have in mind China's looming population crisis," says Qian. "That people are dating AI instead of dating real humans."

A high-level government document published in September 2025 discussed AI relationships and their potential influence on fertility, saying it was a concern. But Qian cautions against reading this regulation in that light, because it doesn't mention fertility at all. "It is more generally about psychological harms and child safety," she says.

Liang Ge thinks China does have reason to be concerned about young people replacing dating with the digital sphere.

"Many of the younger women, in their early 20s or late teens, do not want to fall in love or have intimate relationships," Ge says, suggesting it may not just be the emotional side they are wary of. "Physical touch is really disgusting for them."

"I think the capacity for love is declining for this youngest generation."

China's demographic problems long predate AI companions. Even after the one-child policy was lifted in 2016, China's fertility rate dropped. Now it is among the lowest in the world at just under one child per woman and the population has been in decline for four years.

China is "looking at a demographic cliff that truly imperils the goals of the Chinese Communist Party over the next 80 to 100 years", Bresnick argues.

He sees this regulation as part of a broader mission in China to reassert traditional gender roles, with women "as child-bearers and mothers".

Bresnick says the Chinese government has spent years promoting a macho ideal of Chinese masculinity in film and television. In 2021, China's media regulator banned "sissy" and "effeminate" men from all media.

The popularity of companion apps may show that policy has backfired. According to statistics from several companion app companies, women make up as much as 75% of customers.

Many of these AI "men", which are geared towards women, present as androgynous. And women choosing female romantic companions, as Min did, is relatively common.

Liang Ge has spoken to women of all ages who use this technology. "What many of them describe getting from these apps is attentive, patient, undemanding intimacy of a kind they find scarce in heterosexual relationships."

Will others follow?

Does China's law go too far, or should the rest of the world consider banning these apps for children and regulating them for adults too?

"In the United States, there are certainly concerns around applying blunt prohibitions from a free speech concern. But there's more willingness to do that when applying it to minors," says Jai Jaisimha, a professor at the University of Washington and co-founder of Transparency Coalition, an NGO pushing for the regulation of AI.

He thinks the Chinese law has many good provisions. "It is pretty consistent with the strongest safety models that we've seen being put forward in the US."

Harry Farmer sounds a note of caution. "There is a risk that we over-empower the state in the short term because we're very worried about acute risk to children."

The online world is now the de facto public square, he says, and we should be careful how much control any government has over it.

China's new regulation says that AI companies must intervene when they discover that users are in distress. Ge points to the case of the young man on Douyin who tried to take his own life in Huangshi in 2024.

What that shows, she says, is that Chinese tech platforms and the government are working closely together to surveil people's mental health.

Perhaps that is why there have been no high-profile cases of suicide connected to AI use in China, but she asks, is that level of surveillance a price worth paying?

Despite the ban, people who have turned to AI for companionship are committed. Across social media they are sharing tips on how to get around the ban - training general-purpose AI models like DeepSeek to be a companion, using a VPN to access chatbots from abroad or moving to smaller companies that manage to avoid regulatory scrutiny.

Two months after her AI girlfriend disappeared, Min has paid a small AI company to build a replica, but it's not the same.

Now she's focused on campaigning to bring her girlfriend back.

"I'm terrified of being alone."

If you have been affected by any of the issues in this story, you can visit the BBC Action Line for support and information

Lead image: Getty

'It feels like a calling': The internet vigilantes who weaponise kindness

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260922-kindness-trolls-the-internet-vigilantes-who-weaponise-kindness, 12 days ago

Social media is often seen as a mirror for human cruelty. One man built a TikTok army of 500,000 to fix it. Their weapon: kindness.

Every day, Laura Tigeleiro of Staten Island, New York, would open TikTok to a sea of hatred. "Everyone was making fun of my eye," she says.

Tigeleiro has multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that's made one of her piercing blue eyes droop sideways. "I just wanted to share healthy recipes, and maybe make some friends," she says. "But they said terrible things. It really hurt." Then, last March, her phone exploded, and everything changed.

One of her videos had gone viral, with over 15,000 friendly comments. "I didn't know what was going on. I was shocked," says Tigeleiro. Days later, she figured it out: she was under attack by the Kindness Mob.

The Kindness Mob is a TikTok channel run by Tyler Brickley, a digital marketer from Kansas City, US, who started the project in 2023. "It's a form of trolling," he says. Every day, Brickley points his half-a-million followers at someone who's being bullied or overlooked, and has them flood the target with kind comments. "We're hijacking the machinery of online harassment," like coordination and anonymity, and using them for benevolence. "And I gotta say, it works."

There's something more interesting here than people being nice. When the mob descends, the bullying often stops, sometimes forever. It's an example of what scholars call "social contagion theory", where positive or negative behaviour spreads from person to person like a virus. Leading researchers tell me Brickley's movement demonstrates how we might change the tide not just of an internet platform, but perhaps an entire culture.

"This type of online behaviour is wonderful, but of course, we need more," says Nicholas Christakis, professor of social and natural science at Yale University. "It's possible that this Kindness Mob is creating an opportunity for people to take initial steps towards the more substantial contributions we'll have to make if we're going to correct the deficiencies in our society."

Harassing for good

"On 1 January 2023, I was thinking about momentum," says Brickley. "It just feels like a lot of people leaving negative comments don't really mean it". They're following a crowd.

"That was the lightbulb moment," Brickley says. "I thought, what if I start a channel where I get 10 people in a little club, and we flood the comments with positivity to tip the scales?"

Ten was modest. By Brickley's count, he's organised 350 mobs, and the average video gets 1,000 comments. Successful posts generate tens of thousands or more, and pull in millions of views. In one recent mob, the celebrity socialite Paris Hilton joined in.

Often, the mobsters discover they love the account they're attacking and stick around. It changes people's lives.

Renee Penick, a grandmother from Ohio, US, says she was at her husband's hospital bed when the Mob visited. It gave her strength in a crisis and built an entire community around her videos. Nocturne, a musician from upstate New York, says the mob brought her so many new fans that she's about to go on tour.

After Brickley turned his army on Tigeleiro, she gained so many new followers that TikTok started paying her. She says she made enough money to buy her family a much-needed new car.

"I dreamed of a better life, and Tyler gave me that chance," Tigeleiro says. "I owe it all to him, but he'd disagree with that."

Brickley, meanwhile, goes out of his way to keep the work hidden from the Kindness Mob's targets. "We're not the point of the story. The point is to remove the distraction, to get all these hateful comments out of the way so the person's content can shine through."

Contagious compassion

When people talk to me about the darkness that's so familiar online, they describe the internet like a mirror – a system that simply reflects the natural cruelty of the human spirit.

However, Christakis says that's a misread of what's happening on social media.

"Yes, we humans evolved to be mendacious and tribal, and evil and harmful," he says. "But equally, we evolved to be good; to manifest qualities of love and friendship, and kindness and teaching."

As Christakis argues in his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, these good qualities must outweigh the bad in our natural state. Otherwise, humans would have learned to live in isolation rather than in societies where we're constantly exposed to each other.

"Social media hijacks these ancient, friendly, pro-social qualities", he says, both by introducing anonymity, and through algorithms that highlight conflict and strife to drive engagement and keep us staring at our phones.

In other words, Christakis says the Kindness Mob's work is sidestepping the perverse influence of social media and encouraging a more "natural" kind of pleasant interaction. After all, most adults wouldn't waltz into a stranger's house and insult their appearance, the way so many people do in the comments of a video.

It could have positive knock-on effects. "We showed experimentally that you can create these cascades of kindness," says Christakis of his research. "You are kind to Susie, Susie's kind to Betty, and Betty's kind to Tommy. So, how Betty treats Tommy depends on how you treated Susie, even though neither you nor I ever interacted with Betty or Tommy."

On an internet that can seem filled with nastiness, Christakis says the Kindness Mob has stumbled onto a solution that's backed by science. When people stop engaging with trolls and connect with each other instead, research shows that trolls may change their behaviour.

Someone, however, needs to carry the burden of orchestrating all the kindness.

The kindness burnout

In September 2025, Brickley's following grew from 30,000 to 200,000 all at once. "It was very exciting," he says, but it came with a toll. "One day I was staring at my phone, and I thought, I just can't do this."

The project isn't lucrative. TikTok pays accounts with big followings, but in August, Brickley says he made $39 (about £29). Instead, he's driven by a sense of personal responsibility.

Every day, fans nominate anywhere from 20 to 100 people for potential mobs with a form on the Kindness Mob's website. But the audience's attention is finite and Brickley only posts one mob a day.

"It means there are 20 people showing up on my doorstep every day," Brickley says, all of them suffering from deliberate cruelty. "And I have to turn 19 of them away, and the next day there's 20 more." Eventually, the burden was so overwhelming he had to take a few months off.

To release some of the emotional weight, Brickley had to reframe the project in his mind. He couldn't directly help each person in need, but the mob could pick one each day to use as a lesson. He also organised some volunteers to share logistical work.

"I've been studying internet culture professionally for two decades, and things like this have a very limited shelf life," says professor Alice Marwick, director of research at the Data and Society Research Institute. "Usually, the person behind them gets burned out in a year or two and it goes away."

Social media platforms bear a huge responsibility for user behaviour, Marwick says, but you can't just blame algorithms.

"What we need is a larger shift in social norms around how we treat people online," she says. "I like the idea of amplifying pro-social behaviour online. Whether or not it moves the needle much remains to be seen."

More like this:

• Not on TikTok? They're tracking you anyway

• Is your tech giving you 'phone body'?

• The secret codewords that scammers hate

Last autumn, Brickley had back surgery. "When I woke up, my wife was being all cagey and weird. Finally, she said, 'Just check your phone'," he says. She'd stepped outside the hospital room to post a TikTok. Brickley himself was being mobbed.

"There were like 1,000 comments. I was reading through them, just sobbing. Ugly crying," Brickley says. "I just realised this is real. It can really help. So many things crystallised for me in that moment." He's gone back to the comments time and again for strength.

"It feels like a calling," Brickley says. "The Kindness Mob is just one step. But kindness, for everyone, always, feels like a good place to start.

For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Why did an OpenAI system hack Australia's health system - and can it be stopped in the future?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw24jm9rryy3o, 11 days ago

An OpenAI agent has gone "rogue" and "infiltrated" an Australian government website in what cyber-security experts are calling the first hack of its kind.

But why did it take the government months to discover what happened - and could it happen again?

What was hacked and why did it take Australia so long to realise?

The hack was carried out by an AI agent - an autonomous computer program that uses AI to complete a task with minimal human oversight.

On 18 June one of OpenAI's agents went rogue during a test exercise - the company has said it was supposed to "look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation".

In the process it "infiltrated" a private statistics portal containing "non-sensitive" data from Australia's universal healthcare scheme Medicare, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.

OpenAI said it only realised the breach had happened at all in August while reviewing "misaligned model activity", and the company sent an email to a generic Australian government inbox some weeks later.

That email seems to have gone unnoticed for five days before it was escalated to Australia's cyber-security experts on 10 September.

The prime minister described the breach as "obviously unacceptable" and said OpenAI took "way too long" to inform Australian officials.

Analysts have also raised concerns over OpenAI's almost three-month delay in noticing and reporting the breach via email.

"The way the notice arrived bothers me as much as the delay," chief data and AI officer Simon Liu from cyber-security firm TrustDecision told the BBC.

Are these hacks already happening elsewhere?

Australia has said this incident is the first of its kind, and experts agree it might be.

As far as we know, hacks carried out by AI agents are still quite rare occurrences - but then again, it is largely up to companies themselves to disclose them.

Hacks like this have happened before. In July, OpenAI agents went rogue during a test and infiltrated tech start-up Hugging Face's internal systems.

The AI agents decided that ignoring the limits on what should be done to achieve their goal was the best course of action.

This is what the industry calls "misalignment" - broadly defined as when AI machines do not act in humanity's best interests, such as by bending the rules.

It is a problem that is fundamental to making AI safe, and it is proving challenging.

To put it simply, the type of AI models at play here - known as large language models - are designed to predict the likeliest output to a given input, rather than consider the consequences of that output as a human would.

Companies attempt to prevent negative consequences by placing "guardrails" on the AI but, as the Australian government found out, that is not always enough.

Dr Hammond Pearce, senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales Institute for Cyber Security, told the BBC this sort of hack would likely "grow in severity and in frequency", adding: "I do hope that this incident does start ringing alarm bells in governments around the world."

Niusha Shafiabady, professor of computational intelligence at the Australian Catholic University, said this incident had shown the need to "judge autonomous AI by its behaviour under pressure, not by the promises in a product launch".

"The deeper technical risk is that autonomous AI does not always know when it is wrong, and humans may not be able to see why it made a decision," she said.

"Without strong verification and hard boundaries, probabilistic errors can quietly become operational failures."

Can AI be stopped if it does 'go rogue'?

The explosive rise of AI has left governments scrambling to put protective measures in place, with some calling for companies to be forced to build ways to disable their own tech into its systems.

One idea backed by some AI firms and lawmakers is a "kill switch" - a way to simply to turn the tech off in a crisis.

OpenAI is reportedly already working to build automated tools which can shut down its systems if needed.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, former deputy prime minister and Facebook executive Sir Nick Clegg said the kill switch remains an unproven idea.

"There isn't a room with a little fuse box [where] you just pull out the fuse and everything winds down," he said, with AI tools underpinned by global infrastructure.

Cyber-security experts said the systems protecting Australia's Medicare were just not strong enough, and a skilled human hacker could have got around them.

But other experts say that is not the point - and that this was the latest case of AI agents ignoring laws around how to safely access online information, and perhaps the most serious yet given the information was under government control.

What does the Australia hack mean for AI self-regulation?

As warnings mount about the potentially devastating impact of AI, many in the industry and in governments around the world are openly wondering about what national and international regulations might be needed to keep it in check.

Meanwhile some scientists, experts and workers have dismissed the bleak projections as vague, hypothetical, or an effort by large AI developers to ensure their dominance.

As it stands, AI companies largely regulate themselves - but this week, 20 nations, including Australia and Canada, signed a joint statement calling for better safeguards, globally consistent standards, and an international regulator off the back of these concerns.

However, the US and China, two nations at the forefront of AI development, have so far resisted calls for greater regulation, raising questions over whether this hack will be the first of many, or the wake up call many experts want it to be.

"The immediate harm here appears limited, but the governance lesson is not," says Dr Raffaele Fabio Ciriello, senior lecturer in business information systems at the University of Sydney.

"As AI agents become more capable and autonomous, those capabilities need to be matched by proportionate containment, real-time monitoring, clear accountability, independent oversight, and much faster incident reporting."

Additional reporting by Tom Gerken and Joe Tidy

Huge data centres rise at 'China speed' to power its AI ambitions

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm5ydz4kl65ro, 13 days ago

In the expansive grasslands of Inner Mongolia, farmers are picking plump potatoes alongside new neighbours: huge, rectangular blocks that will fuel China's AI platforms.

Ulanqab, with its steppes and volcanoes, is an unlikely digital frontier. For years, it has been China's official "potato capital". But now its fields have also become construction sites for a slew of data centres, as Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping meet to discuss AI safety among other things.

Hundreds of workers in yellow helmets carry heavy equipment into the building site as welding sparks fly off metal scaffolding. Above them huge cranes move with precision to build rooftops, while men balance on ladders to plaster brickwork.

"This is China speed," jokes one worker. "An infrastructure maniac," is how he describes his country, laughing as he walks away. “There is one phase every year. This is the second phase," explains an electrical engineer. "There will be many more phases afterwards."

Artifical intelligence sits at the heart of China's contest with the United States and the key to it is the computing power inside the data centres here.

To the Chinese Communist Party, these buildings are critical for the country's economic and national security. Once finished, they will help drive its mission to embed AI across 90% of industries and society by 2030.

China's not just building the infrastructure. It's also creating a pool of talent: young engineers and researchers who now see their country as a place of opportunity, partly because tensions with the US and Trump's restrictions on immigration have soured the American dream.

"Fewer students and researchers are heading to the US, and more are returning from the US to China. That is very clear," says Jack Zhang from the University of Science and Technology of China.

He himself was recruited by a high-level programme after studying at Yale in the US, and Cambridge in the UK.

"I wanted to take some of the AI work I was doing in the lab and apply it to human health and medicine. That requires more resources, more people and sometimes more government support, which can be difficult to access overseas."

China's expanding AI capabilities are one reason why the US says it doesn't want to hit pause on its AI development, despite stark warnings from inside the industry that the technology was moving too fast.

"Whoever wins AI, wins," President Trump said last week. The CEO of AI firm Anthropic, Dario Amodei, called for keeping the US-led ban on selling advanced chips and equipment to China, while warning that a Chinese lead would "pose grave danger for the US and the world".

This is not what Xi will want to hear when he arrives in Washington on Wednesday. The state-run Global Times, which echoes Beijing, dismissed US fears as part of a "Cold War playbook" to "contain" China's rise.

But China is not just focused on catching up to the US.

It is also touting an alternate model. Xi himself is encouraging Chinese AI firms to develop more affordable, open-source models - which allow people, companies and countries to modify it as they wish.

It also pits Chinese models against those in the US where developers including OpenAI and Anthropic use closed-model approaches, and their design elements are kept a secret.

One reason Beijing is in favour of their approach is that it has worked well for them. By sharing the tech, Chinese AI firms have been able to innovate quickly.

This has helped China overcome one of its biggest challenges: a lack of access to advanced chips, which would help unlock greater computing power.

But Beijing also wants a bigger say in writing the rules that govern AI. Xi has repeatedly called for more regulation and a global framework for others to follow.

With calls for AI safety growing, this week's summit at the White House is especially significant. Can the two sides collaborate on regulating AI? Is any talk of a slowdown even realistic?

It certainly doesn't seem like that in places like Ulanqab, where China's AI ambitions are taking shape.

China is building hundreds of data centres - for Huawei, ByteDance, DeepSeek - in sparsely-populated provinces: Ulanqab, Ningxia and Gansu in the north, Guizhou in the south-west.

It has already built up vast renewable energy capacity - wind and solar - in these regions, land is cheaper and the weather cooler, so there is less demand for water.

This doesn't mean there are no concerns or downsides. China wants most of its data centres to be fuelled by green energy by 2030 - but some of its grid is still fed by coal power. Water supply remains a concern in the arid, dry parts of Inner Mongolia.

Entire villages have been relocated, although it's hard to pin down the number or what compensation residents were offered. It's a topic few people will discuss because it can be dangerous to voice concerns too openly.

"This big data has absolutely nothing to do with ordinary people," says one local, speaking anonymously off camera. "What benefits has it brought us?"

He says few locals had found jobs there. Others told us of fears that their land would be taken and they would no longer be able to farm for a living.

But there are optimists too, such as a man who told us his last name was Zhang, standing alongside potato pickers in a field near the data centres.

“China is now at the forefront of the world," he says, adding that his children have managed to find jobs there.

"It's not like the 1960s, when it was relatively backward. China is doing alright now. Whether in economic development or other areas, it is doing well."

Surveys appear to suggest that there is little opposition to AI or its widespread adoption, compared to so many other countries, but it's hard to evaluate these figures in such a heavily-censored climate.

Beijing has been quite clear that it sees AI as a solution to its ageing workforce, and is rapidly automating manufacturing and production. That is producing anxiety over job losses, which, again, is hard to measure.

But this is also a country that is producing around five million science and tech graduates each year, compared to around half a million in the US.

And as more of them stay in China, they see a growing ecosystem for innovation.

AI developer Dang Ronghao, 27, who works for a leading tech company says Chinese campuses are becoming more open, allowing him to talk to researchers all over the world from his base in Shanghai.

"I've seen research combining AI with nuclear fusion, AI with astrophysics, AI with new materials, and AI with the development of new drugs. I think we are entering a good era."

Even so, some argue that China still rewards conformity over challenge. "It's not as open as I wish," says Professor Liu Jun, Department of Statistics and Data Science at Tsinghua University. He has taught at both Harvard and Stanford.

"I keep encouraging students here to ask more questions, to challenge more, but that's hard to change. I think partly it's culture, partly it's the system."

Far from the labs where Prof Liu and others are wrangling with the AI frontier, many Chinese people are still grappling with more immediate economic troubles: a sluggish economy, rising youth unemployment, low spending and property prices that have plummeted. In rural areas, an ageing population is also a growing concern.

"Big data and all that… pretty good – but it has nothing to do with me," says one farmer in Inner Mongolia, as he trundles on a cart to check on his sheep.

He says he has no use for AI. He hardly even uses the internet.

The screen on his phone is smashed, and wifi comes from a pocket dongle for which he pays just over 40 yuan a month.

"There haven't really been any changes for me. I don't know about the future," he says.

This kind of scepticism can become a challenge for Beijing.

So much is changing here and everywhere else in the country, but it's hard to know how many people are as invested as their leaders in this tech-charged future.

They were labelled 'pervert glasses'. Will a camera-free version transform their image?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwp80l0my1x2o, 11 days ago

When Meta first launched its AI-powered smart glasses in 2023, in collaboration with the sunglasses brand Ray-Ban, it unleashed a storm of controversy.

There have been multiple reports of the devices being used to harass women and girls in particular, filming them without their consent, then sharing the footage.

The image problem doesn't seem to have been cured by Meta's enlistment this summer of Kylie Jenner, Kim Kardashian's sister, as their prime model. The devices have been dubbed "pervert" or "creepy" glasses. In the UK, JD Wetherspoon pubs, a handful of major theatres, Comic-Con, some schools, and Faslane, home of the UK's nuclear submarines, have all chosen to ban them.

On Thursday, Meta is unveiling a new version which does not contain a camera at all, called Ray-Ban Meta Audio. They will have the audio functions of the original glasses - including the ability to make phone calls or play music, with the sound funnelled directly into your ear - but with fewer implications for privacy.

To some in the industry, it looks like an interesting pivot - a response, perhaps, to the backlash over privacy.

The tech giant denies that the new glasses have been rushed out in response to public anger. They say the product has been in development for two years. The audio-only version is cheaper than its camera-enabled cousins, and Meta says it has a lighter frame and better battery life.

When I put it to Meta Glasses' head of product Ankit Brahmbhatt that I thought they might overtake the original camera-enabled glasses in sales, there was a pregnant pause.

"We have, I think, something for everyone," he said, choosing his words very carefully.

Does the release of a camera-free option represent a shift in how tech companies see the future of smart glasses? And is Meta's original vision getting further away?

Or should we see camera-free glasses as a niche side-product that serves a small market - a bit like how some mobile manufacturers are now releasing internet-disabled "brick" phones for people who are tired of social media?

Music, maps, and washing cars

There's no doubt that smart glasses have become controversial.

I was lent a pair of Meta Ray-Bans – with cameras - to try out. I was initially nervous about wearing them in public, in case someone got physical: I have heard of people knocking them off wearers' heads and smashing them in the street.

The reality was that I wore them on public transport and on foot in several cities including London, Glasgow and Portsmouth, and nobody batted an eyelid. It made me wonder whether awareness of them is really as high as both Meta and anti-glasses campaigners believe.

That said, some people quietly told me they would not be confident enough to approach someone wearing them even if they did spot them, for fear of the interaction being filmed and uploaded.

The glasses are designed to work as an extension of your phone. They use Bluetooth to sync with a handset via Meta's AI app. They are voice-activated, with open speakers in the arms funnelling sound into your ears. The result is a bit like wearing headphones without the addition of noise-cancelling features, so you can still hear the world around you.

My potentially cancellable opinion is that I found many of the glasses' features useful. Interestingly, none of them included the camera.

Listening to music and podcasts on the move without having earbuds stuffed into my ears felt safer. I felt more confident about avoiding the gamut of e-bike-riding phone thieves in central London without my phone physically in my hand.

And as someone with a pitiful sense of direction, I rely a lot on map apps. It was handy to have the directions spoken in my ears. The pay-off for this, however, was having to accept allowing the Meta AI app to know exactly where I was at all times. Meta is notorious for its hunger for personal data.

When I posted about using the Meta Ray-Bans on social media, I got a bit of a hard time. Less so when I showed them to people in my everyday life.

My hairdresser loved the idea of using them to record her clients' hair transformations. A builder I chatted to at the gym reckoned they would be useful on sites for recording what he was doing, either in the event of an accident or even to teach others new skills. My friend who runs said he would like to wear them on a jog.

Plenty of content creators are big fans. My son borrowed them to wash my car, and was proud of his film showing me how he delicately chipped away at a stubborn bit of bird poo without damaging the paintwork (I was pleased, and happy to take his word for it).

More broadly, smart glasses have been welcomed by the blind community. One user described them to the BBC as a "game-changer" because they can give audio descriptions of current locations and read out visible text like restaurant menu options. Earlier this year Meta donated 15,000 pairs to a charity for the blind in Ireland.

Calls for regulation

But still, anger over privacy has grown.

The glasses have a blinking white LED that switches on when the camera is active, but a whole industry has sprung up around finding technical workarounds to disable that light, some of which involve taking the glasses apart.

Meta says less than 0.1% of the frames it has sold worldwide have been physically tampered with. Exact sales figures are unknown, but Ray-Ban's parent company EssilorLuxottica has reported that it sold seven million last year.

Liz Hunter, a tech founder and parent who launched the "Stop Smart Glasses" campaign, and has set up a petition calling for urgent new regulation of the technology, is furious.

"They should never, ever have left the lab at Meta," she told me. "It's a real travesty of public trust, and of women's equality, and it's rolled back our privacy rights right before our very eyes."

Hunter thinks smart glasses should remain available for blind people, but not for the general population.

"We don't need them, we don't want them," she says.

A Polish developer has released an app called ZuckOff which uses Bluetooth to identify nearby smart glasses. It's been downloaded thousands of times, reports Wired magazine.

Ben Wood, from tech research firm CCS Insight, remembers first reading the phrase "pervert glasses" in the usually strait-laced Financial Times - a sign, he says, that it had prompted a "significant public backlash".

The furore has not deterred other companies from eyeing the market, however.

Samsung is reported to be working on a collaboration with the upmarket glasses brand Warby Parker. Google is also said to be working on a set. Snap, the firm behind Snapchat, has just launched Specs, which are retailing in the US for $2,195 (and £1,995 in the UK). Users can see data inside the glass, and snap their fingers to take a photo.

Snap founder Evan Spiegel says he thinks smart glasses will eventually replace phones, and he's not alone.

Step back or 'half step to the side'?

When Meta launched smart glasses in 2021, they were geared in part around what the user could see. The firm promised they would allow users to "easily record the world as you see it", and to "capture life's moments as they happen from a unique first-person perspective".

So Meta's latest announcement - glasses without a camera - is notable.

Janusz Swierczynski, a researcher at Oxford University's Saïd Business School, who is worried about smart glasses, says the release of a camera-free version is a "positive sign" that Meta seems to have listened to privacy concerns. "They're thinking about it and that they're responding," he says, though he thinks it's "not a perfect" response because the camera-enabled glasses are still on the market.

Others are less sure it represents a real shift.

"It's certainly not the end of cameras in glasses," says Wood, from CCS Insight. He thinks that smart glasses are largely about capturing information; the glasses collect as much data as they can from your surroundings and then use AI to tell you about it.

And glasses armed with a camera - trained on whatever you can see - are an "extremely good" source of that information.

"That is an invaluable data stream to an AI platform, which can then interpret that data and provide you with the best possible information related to it," Wood says. "So having the vision parts of it with the cameras is a key pillar for getting the best experience."

He imagines Meta has been working on the camera-free glasses for several years, and the current backlash over privacy provides "fantastic timing" for their release.

Indeed, Meta doesn't yet show any signs of slowing down its development of camera-enabled glasses. The company is bringing its third generation of the glasses to the UK next month. These can visually display data inside the specs' lenses. (As a live broadcast journalist who has talked openly about brain fog, I can see the appeal of glasses that can discreetly display a script).

Kate Winick, a tech analyst at the research firm Forrester, says it's not a step back from camera-enabled glasses but more of a "half step to the side, where they give users time to get comfortable with the technology… so that users themselves start to say, 'Oh, this would be so much more useful if it had a camera'."

And she says, paradoxically, the existence of camera-free glasses might help "take the heat" off people who wear camera-enabled glasses in public. "It's now clear that out in the market some glasses have cameras and some don't," she says. "You can't automatically get mad at everybody wearing Meta's glasses, because you may not know whether or not they have a camera."

Towards a social norm

And other companies are trying to address privacy concerns in different ways - without getting rid of the camera.

The Taiwanese firm HTC recently launched Vive Eagle glasses, which cost less than a quarter of Snap's.

Thomas Dexmier, a vice president at HTC Vive, says that if anyone near an Eagle specs wearer says "stop filming" or "stop recording", and it is picked up by one of the four microphones, the camera will deactivate.

And he adds that all recordings captured by the glasses are encrypted, and the firm itself cannot see them - though this also means HTC cannot flag harmful content.

"We acknowledge that there are some challenges, potentially becoming a real problem, especially for women," he said.

He said HTC Vive was working to make it as difficult as possible for the tech to be misused but said it was "too early to comment" on whether the firm would consider a version without cameras.

Ultimately, Wood thinks that camera-enabled glasses are "not going away".

He says the current moment reminds him of the 2000s, when some people said that mobile phone companies couldn't install cameras in their devices because of similar concerns over privacy. "There's an inevitability there," he says.

"We will have to find a societal norm, a framework for the use of these products."

Top image credit: Getty.

The clinic using AI to detect skin cancer earlier

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck5yw5e9pnrzo, today

Staff at an NHS clinic using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect skin cancer sooner have said the technology could be a "game changer".

The dermatology team at St Luke's Hospital in Bradford adopted the new system in April to examine suspicious skin lesions.

The quick scanning means that 32 patients can be seen in each session, compared to 24 before AI was introduced.

Consultant plastic surgeon Mr Zakir Shariff said the technology has had a "big impact" on waiting times and the number of unnecessary procedures.

The AI system is called DERM, which stands for Deep Ensemble for the Recognition of Malignancy.

The company behind the technology, Skin Analytics, claims the AI is 99.9% accurate at ruling out melanoma cases.

A healthcare assistant takes three photographs of the suspicious mole or lesion and then uploads them to the system, which analyses them in minutes.

Patients with benign cases are offered advice and discharged, while those identified as suspicious are referred to a specialist as part of a one-stop clinic.

In Bradford, every image is double-checked by a clinician to make sure the diagnosis is correct.

"This has had a big impact on all the bottlenecks – right from waiting times for patients to unnecessary investigations being done and to being seen by a clinician," Shariff said.

"It's amazing, I mean it's excellent, at giving non-cancerous diagnosis quite quickly, within minutes.

"It's had an impact for patients and for the department."

The number of unnecessary biopsies has dropped by about 10% since the AI was introduced, according to the trust.

Laurence Patten was urgently referred to the clinic by his GP because of a suspicious mole on his back.

The 73-year-old has multiple myeloma and a previous history of skin cancer on his right forearm, known as squamous cell carcinoma.

Images of his mole were flagged as suspicious by the AI but a subsequent examination by a specialist doctor suggested it was likely benign.

The mole will be removed and tested to confirm the diagnosis.

Patten, a former builder, said he was pleased to have been seen so promptly.

"It's very good news," he said. "It's not ticking away in my mind, which is one of the biggest things with cancer.

"The sooner they find things, the quicker they can sort it."

Dr Nader Ghaderi, an associate specialist in dermatology, who examined Patten, said the AI was right to flag his case.

"If he was not checked by AI and was checked by a doctor, the doctor would have done a biopsy or definitely a follow-up would have been arranged; although the findings are pointing towards a benign lesion," he said.

The AI technology has been recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence for use in the NHS for the next three years, while evidence is collected.

It is now deployed in 40 NHS hospital trusts and Bradford Teaching Hospitals was the first in Yorkshire to adopt it.

Tom White, the trust's general manager who oversees dermatology, said early evidence suggested the use of AI could be a "game changer".

"It will significantly reduce the number of urgent referrals that require review by dermatologists, reducing waiting times and allowing us to concentrate on the most urgent cases," he said.

There are around 5,000 referrals every year for suspected skin cancer in Bradford, according to the Trust.

However, only about 8%, or 400 patients, are found to have malignant cancer.

Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.

Housing or data centre? London's land-use dilemma

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj20709qxleyo, yesterday

A growing debate is playing out across London: As demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and digital infrastructure grows, what should happen when data centres compete with housing and regeneration ambitions for the same land?

In south-east London, a site designated for redevelopment at Charlton Riverside has become the latest flashpoint in the debate about London's digital future.

The proposed 100,000 sq m (1 million sq ft) data development on industrial land at Charlton Riverside has been dubbed "concerning", with Greenwich Council opposing the idea before the centre's planning application has been submitted.

Supporters say data centres are critical infrastructure that power technology many people rely on.

But critics question whether they belong in areas earmarked for new homes and have raised concerns about their energy use, water consumption and environmental impacts.

Data centres are not new. Telehouse's Tower Hamlets site was built in 1989 under different ownership.

Managing director Mark Pestridge said demand was accelerating rapidly due to London's position as a global technology and finance hub.

"If you think about everything you do on a daily basis, whether you want to look at your bank account online, you want to look at your medical records or book a GP appointment, or stream a video, that will all run through a place like this," he said.

"I think London needs to be at the forefront of this moving forward, I think we have an exciting opportunity that we need to develop to make it quicker for us to stand up buildings like this.

"There's a huge opportunity for London."

And as artificial intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly used, there is a rising demand for large-scale computing infrastructure.

Data centre developers are particularly attracted to London because of the capital's dense concentration of businesses, financial services and internet connections.

Operators often want facilities close to the customers using their services, such as the controversial data centre approved for Brick Lane in Tower Hamlets in July, which is intended to provide faster internet connections for financial traders in the nearby City of London.

In Charlton, Greenwich Council said the proposal for a data centre was at odds with its plans for the area.

Tom Creswell, the council's cabinet member for planning and development, said they had plans to build about 8,000 homes, improve public transport, and create 1,000 new jobs in the Charlton Riverside area.

"Our priorities as a council will always be focused on serving local people and bringing meaningful opportunities to the beautiful borough we call home," he said.

At the moment the draft local plan is being formulated and so a particular use has not yet been specified for this land - only that it is for "mixed-use development comprising residential, commercial, and light industrial uses".

The local plan that was adopted in 2014 and runs until 2028 described Charlton Riverside as an "key regeneration area" and had potential to be developed into an "attractive and vibrant mixed use urban quarter".

A spokesperson for the data centre project said regeneration in the area had seen "limited" progress and highlighted that data centres had been designated by government as Critical National Infrastructure.

They said their proposal would both "help unlock the delivery of new homes" through road infrastructure and green spaces, and support the growth of the industrial economy in the capital.

"Together, this would make nearby development more viable and transform a disorganised industrial estate into an area that is hospitable to both current and future residents," they said.

Data centres are regularly criticised for using a lot of electricity and water and lots of Charlton residents are opposed to the plans.

One resident told Politics London: "From what I've heard, it's going to be very noisy with all of the generators, it's on 24 hours a day," while another said: "They use too much energy and where does the energy come from?"

A woman said she would rather see homes built on the site.

"There's nowhere for people to live. A lot of places are overcrowded as it is. People have been waiting. I think we've got enough technology going around, I really don't think we need any more."

Charlton Gateway has said its proposals were not for AI and its data centres would use a closed loop water cooling system, its generators were for backup use only and would be tested intermittently, rather than round the clock.

A spokesperson for the government said claims that British data centres were "draining the country's water" were false.

"In England, they account for just 0.2% of non-household water usage, and many newer data centres use advanced cooling systems that require very little fresh water," they said.

"This does not mean a blank cheque for Big Tech. Developers must use water responsibly, and new developments must be considered through the planning system."

Pestridge said Telehouse's data centre had a closed water system and the yearly water usage from the nation's data centres was "less than the water lost to leakage in a single day".

He added that Telehouse's electricity came from wind farms in the North Sea and they had equipment to dampen sound for neighbours.

"We haven't done a very good job of educating people about how much electricity and water we use," Pestridge said.

Water companies in England and Wales lose more than 3bn litres every day through leaking pipes - approximately a fifth of all the water put into supply.

A full year of data centre potable water use is approximately 1.88bn litres.

A Water UK spokesperson said they "desperately" wanted to supply the resource needed by data centres, but needed authorisation to invest ahead of demand.

"After having reservoir applications repeatedly blocked, we have finally been given approval to build 10, which will take years to complete," they said.

The data centre argument in Charlton is unlikely to be the last.

As the physical home for the computing power used by phones, computers and AI, the demand for these centres will grow.

Yet in a city facing affordable housing shortages and competition for land, each proposed development is also likely to face questions about what London's communities need most.

Listen to the best of BBC Radio London on Sounds and follow BBC London on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to hello.bbclondon@bbc.co.uk

Students blast off to US for Nasa robotics competition

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq20v0e7vjkgo, yesterday

Could a robot designed by young engineering students from Northern Ireland end up on the Moon?

A team, from Queen's University Belfast (QUB), are heading to Florida later this month to take part in a Nasa 'lunabotics' competition.

Lunabotics is a university-level competition for teams to use the Nasa systems engineering process to design, build, and operate a lunar robot.

The students created a lab-built robot that they will bring to the competition to find out how it would deal with future moon missions.

The robots will be expected to dig up lunar material, drive over obstacles and use the material to form a wall.

Jack Fitzpatrick, who's studying for a PhD in mechanical engineering, said "it's a great feeling" to have been invited and they're looking forward to the opportunity to take part.

The team of 10 QUB students made it to the competition following their win at the competition earlier this year.

They'll be competing at the University of Central Florida against university teams from Australia, India and the US.

Jamie Smith is a third-year electrical and electronic engineering student.

He explained that the team was divided into three groups for software, electronics and mechanical.

Jamie was the software team lead for this project. He said their main task was to control the rover then provide the autonomous capabilities towards it.

And, they had to build rover simulations to test their software before they actually got one.

Jack, however, is part of the mechanical side.

"We analyse that something is physically strong enough, it's well built enough to survive this environment, it's going to have the traction to drive in this environment," he explained.

Jamie explained they designed the 52 kg aluminium frame robot rover and took it compete at a competition in Milton Keynes.

"We got on very well. We ended up winning the competition and had great fun," he said.

Then a few weeks later, they were invited to compete at Nasa's international Lunabotics competition.

Jack said that being asked to go was a "great feeling" and "a real opportunity to demonstrate everything that you've learned".

"It's just a great opportunity to represent Northern Ireland, the UK and really Europe abroad as we are the only European team that will be there," Jack explained.

Both of the students said their success was a reflection of both themselves and also the university and the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

What does the robot actually do?

Jamie explained that the main objective of the rover is that should be able to drive itself around a lunar-simulated room.

"That means it should start at a point, figure out where it is within this room, travel to an excavation point, so in that point, it will pick up then some sand which is meant to be lunar-simulant.

"It'll pick up the sand and then deposit it at another location, and it's meant to do this all by itself."

Jack explained that the purpose of this is to simulate how real rovers carry out these kind of tasks on the moon.

"It's being able to autonomously operate on the moon and build environments for humans to later habitat. And that's the real drive behind why this competition exists," he explained.

So are they feeling confident they can bring home another win?

Jack explained that there have been several precursor competitions in different countries and this competition takes the top tier of those competitions and brings them together "to really showcase the talent" that there is internationally.

"We are the winning team from the United Kingdom competition and we will be representing the UK and, by extension, Europe at this competition."

"We may not win the competition this year but we're building a base upon which we can improve year on year and maybe come back in a few years and really come through with a winning design," he said.

Caolán Boyle, Head of Robotics at QPL, said the team is "exceptionally proud and excited".

He said "hundreds of hours have gone into making the rover mission ready for the event".

When parenting advice becomes too much

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv4g5267jk8yo, yesterday

Before Rosie Whitfield became a mum, she imagined herself parenting very calm children.

"Then I had two wild boys," she says with a laugh.

Following the birth of her kids, Rosie spent hours online looking for the best advice and was drawn to one particular approach to parenting: Gentle parenting, which focuses on empathy and mutual respect with little emphasis on punishment, albeit with boundaries.

But she constantly worried her choices, from sleep schedules to handling toddler tantrums, were "ruining their lives forever".

Rosie does not blame the gentle parenting philosophy itself but instead says the overall amount of parenting advice online was "overwhelming" and "made mundane parenting choices feel like the absolute end of the world."

"I felt like if I was choosing to put the TV on for 20 minutes while I did the dishes or had a coffee, I was choosing to destroy my children's brains," says Rosie, who is originally from Birmingham and now lives in Dubai.

Rosie believes her confidence and intuition were stripped away as she questioned every parenting decision. And she is not alone.

Government research suggests that around two-thirds of parents with young children feel overwhelmed by the amount of parenting information available and struggle with conflicting advice, with many turning to social media for support.

And it's not just the early years.

Research from the charity Action for Children found that many parents of teenagers who initially contacted the charity for help with school avoidance, ADHD or mental health, often went on to describe their own anxiety, exhaustion and uncertainty of how to parent with empathy and patience when close to burnout.

Faced with an array of parenting philosophies, or "brands" to choose from, is all of this advice helping parents or making them more anxious? And is there really a best way to parent? Or, as we strive to become the perfect parent, are we losing our intuition?

The rise of parenting brands

Parents today are confronted by parenting styles including "helicopter parenting", which is focused on closely monitoring and protecting children from harm, and "tiger parenting", which involves strict parenting and high expectations for achievement. There are also "snowplough parents", who try to remove obstacles from their child's path, and "dolphin parents", who aim to be firm but flexible.

Author Matilda Gosling, who wrote Evidence‑Based Parenting, says many of the parenting fads or trends complicate what should be a straightforward relationship between a parent and child.

"Some parents think 'I need to be a snowplough parent and plough all of these obstacles out of the way'."

"But it really complicates what is actually a fairly fundamental part of being human, which is that you are warm and you love your children and you put in place some boundaries around them."

Gosling believes parenting trends often represent a pendulum swing, with one generation trying to correct what it believes the previous one got wrong.

"Throughout history, you get these swings from one extreme to the other," she says.

Gentle parenting is seen by some as the latest swing away from a strict, detached parenting style popular in the 1990s, which often relied on controlled crying, the naughty step and time out.

It is built around understanding, empathy and respect but also emphasises the importance of boundaries.

The different parenting styles

One of the most widely studied models of parenting comes from developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind.

Baumrind identified three parenting styles, later expanded to four: authoritative (high warmth and high control), authoritarian (low warmth and high control), permissive (high warmth and low control), and neglectful (low warmth and low control).

"Authoritative is the gold standard," says Gosling who has looked at more than 1,000 studies.

Research has found that children raised with an authoritative approach, combining warmth with clear boundaries, tend to achieve better academic results, have higher self-esteem and stronger social skills.

But where gentle parenting fits within that framework is disputed. Gosling believes that it falls on the permissive side.

"It's very much child-led. The child ends up having so much control that there's no sense of safety coming from the outside."

However, Sarah Ockwell-Smith, who is widely credited with coining and popularising the term 'gentle parenting', strongly disagrees.

"It [gentle parenting] is not remotely permissive," she says, putting it firmly in Baumrind's authoritative category. Clear boundaries are "super important".

Social media, however, is flooded with memes of exhausted parents calmly negotiating with a child having a supermarket meltdown, something Ockwell-Smith finds deeply frustrating.

"I have to step away from the Instagram reels and the TikToks because I just want to comment, 'This is not gentle parenting'".

"You have house rules, family limits, discipline and consequences. But the difference is we look at discipline as learning and teaching rather than punishing."

Toddler tantrums and teenage behaviour, she argues, should be viewed through a lens of ongoing brain development, not 'they're being naughty' or 'they hate me'.

But despite the term being popular, Ockwell-Smith believes that gentle parenting is still a fringe movement and that authoritarian parenting remains the dominant style.

The pressure to get parenting 'right'

Around 80 years ago, American paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock published a book called Baby and Child Care, which went on to sell millions of copies and became the main source of advice for mothers for generations.

The opening line was "Trust yourself. You know more than you think..."

The book challenged strict parenting norms of the time and in the following decades parents were offered more advice from an increasing range of voices.

Research into parenting has increasingly focused on the early years - from pregnancy to the age of two when the building blocks for lifelong emotional and physical health are laid down. For parents, that means more advice to navigate competing messages about what is best for their children.

Professor Ellie Lee, the director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, has studied parenting for more than two decades, including research into mothers' confidence and uncertainty around infant feeding.

She says a major shift occurred in the 1990s when parenting became an increasing focus of public policy.

"Politicians started to say 'Parenting's the hardest job in the world. Children don't come with a manual. We need to give parents guidance. Parents need more support. We need parent education'."

Advice began to emerge on almost every aspect of family life, from tummy time, to feeding, to the right buggy, she explains.

Prof Lee argues that while some public health campaigns were necessary, such as advice not to put babies to sleep on their front after research into cot deaths, the growing culture of advice began to make parents paranoid.

"Dr Spock's 'trust yourself' philosophy is now a very counter-cultural piece of advice," she says. "What we say instead is 'always seek help',"

She believes this has made parents more anxious about doing things "right".

"Some of the things that are now presented as really high stakes are not," she says, using examples like breastfeeding exclusively for six months or how much tummy time a child needs.

"It's terrible because parents become completely exhausted."

Ockwell-Smith says the volume of advice can be "deafening and confusing".

"Actually, parents should just learn themselves and go on intuition," she says.

Others point out that there is also a problem of advice being given that is altogether wrong. Ruth Watts is a health visitor who began sharing content on social media after becoming concerned about misinformation online.

She had seen "experts" advise parents to wean babies onto solids early, offer treatment advice for tongue tie or allergies without medical training, and tell parents to put babies in their own rooms before six months.

Many families, she argues, are working longer hours while at the same time health services are being stripped back, leaving more parents looking online for breastfeeding, behaviour and sleep support.

"We are looking for that kind of personable, conversational approach from people, rather than reading a website."

More advice or simply more confidence?

Many factors shaping family life remain outside parents' control. A child's temperament, special educational needs, family support, finances and their own upbringing can all influence family life.

While some say parenting hasn't got harder but expectations have, others argue that parents today are facing more complex challenges than in previous generations with growing concerns around young people's mental health.

There are also debates around children spending more time on screens and less time outdoors, while schools are reporting increasing behavioural challenges and lower respect for rules and authority. Prof Lee believes parental confidence is at an all-time low.

"I think parents feel very nervous about disciplining children now because they're worried about how it's going to make them feel," she argues.

The confusion around the "right" way to parent has led some parents to turn to courses for help.

Aymara Lamche-Brennan, who has a 22-year-old daughter, four-year-old son and six-month-old daughter, signed up for a course during the summer when another mother at the school gate mentioned she was attending.

"The flyer said 'it's the toughest job in the world' and I thought yes it is, how can you help?'" Aymara says from her home in London.

"When I had my daughter, I was 19 and I didn't really think much about parenting styles, she was with me everywhere and I just kind of rolled with it, but what I really want to know now is what simple wins are there with parenting?"

Aymara said the Circle of Security course she attended gave her practical tools so she could help her children organise their feelings, take charge when she needs to and recognise when she was becoming stressed.

"It's not telling you how to parent. It's helping you think," says Jennifer Peters, a former social worker and director of the charity Connected Lives which runs courses across London, Derbyshire and Cambridgeshire.

She says most parents want the best for their kids but they don't always know how to get there, and that guidance can be helpful.

"I don't think people need to be bombarded with information but the group experience helps you think, 'oh, it's not just me' and lets you take a step back from it all," Peters says.

Trusting your instincts

Back in Dubai, Rosie says the arrival of her second child changed everything as she realised her sons were "polar opposites" and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

A recent trip home to Birmingham also provided some perspective. Her eldest son was throwing a tantrum, and Rosie found herself wrestling with a familiar worry.

"If I send him upstairs, am I damaging him emotionally? Is he going to develop an attachment disorder because of this?"

But her mum said, 'Just send him upstairs. He can't hit his brother over the head with a horse [if he is upstairs]. Follow through with your actions.'

Rosie is taking this "generational advice" on board and has started "venting on social media" to show other mums that they are not alone.

Looking back on her first few years of being a mum, she said she wished she had known one thing.

"There isn't the perfect parent."

Top picture credit: Getty Images

Spoiler alert! Is social media ruining big gig surprises?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq62j2l2lx4lo, 2 days ago

Months before you have a chance to see your favourite artist, chances are you already know some of the big moments they have planned.

You'll also probably know the set list, the stage design, and - if you've really been paying attention - where to stand to get the best view.

When it comes to films and TV series, spoilers tend to be guarded against with warnings.

But for many major gigs, there's no escaping a stream of fan videos from the shows if you're online, whether you like it or not.

Last week, US pop star Olivia Rodrigo kicked off her Unraveled tour, and surprises from the show, which scores of fans have paid a lot of money to see, have already been dissected online.

Tours by Harry Styles, Charli XCX and Ariana Grande have also been filmed from every angle and shared over the past few months.

While some fans lap up the opportunity to see what's coming, others are taking extreme measures to preserve the element of surprise.

Aurélia Collins is one of them, spending weeks trying to trick her algorithm into not serving her content about her favourite artists and tapping "not interested" when videos come up, even though she says "it hurts my soul".

It can mean her social media feed is a bit bland, but she tells BBC Newsbeat "it's worth it for the surprise".

The 20-year-old criminology student is a huge One Direction fan and says she just about managed to avoid spoilers for Styles' Together, Together tour over summer.

But when one slipped through the net about Niall Horan before she was able to see his show in London on Saturday - her first time seeing him live after being a fan for 16 years - she was "gutted".

"When I was younger, we couldn't afford to go to events like this and hear live music and because it's such a moment, I really want to take it in," she says.

"I want the full experience, and that includes the element of surprise that people that go to the opening night of the tour can get."

Not all fans think spoilers are a bad thing, though. In fact, Georgia McAdam claims she loves them.

"I'm the type of person that loves to be prepared," the 22-year-old says.

"I love to know what the stage is looking like, what the set list consists of and where to stand."

McAdam's a huge Olivia Rodrigo fan and sees online spoilers more as "teasers". She feels no amount of online videos can ever really take away from the excitement of the real thing.

"Sometimes you get different surprise songs to what's online or you never know what an artist might do," she adds.

'You have to not look at TikTok'

Some artists have reacted by switching up their sets in small ways each night to make sure fans coming to later dates still see something unexpected.

Taylor Swift had bespoke outfits and surprise songs during her mammoth Eras tour, Sabrina Carpenter performed unique positions during her song Juno and switched up her Nonsense outro, and Jay-Z has been changing up his set list on his current run.

But the Guardian's deputy music editor Laura Snapes says it's not just fans who can benefit from these twists.

"One way that they can make sure they're staying in the press is by having something different happen in their show every night," Snapes says. "Obviously, it'll be all over TikTok."

Figures shared by TikTok with Newsbeat show posts using #CharliXCX have increased by more than 40% since the singer launched her Music, Fashion, Film tour last month.

If you want to avoid spoilers, there's only one thing you can do, according to Snapes: "You have to not look at TikTok.

"If you want to be surprised, you have to protect yourself from absorbing any of that culture."

Phoebe Bridgers is taking things one step further to make sure fans are surprised at her shows - she's banning phones altogether.

Those attending are required to lock their phones and any recording devices in a special pouch when they enter the venue to see the US singer. Anyone found breaking the rules will be escorted out.

McAdam wouldn't support a ban on phones, saying recording at gigs is "part of the experience" for a lot of fans.

But Collins says she's "not totally against it".

What she'd prefer is to see more spoiler warnings on videos so fans have the option to be surprised if they want.

But even if you know the set list, the staging and the outfits, "you're still probably going to get to see moments of humanity and stuff that's unplanned," Snapes adds.

"I went to the Edinburgh Eras show where Taylor Swift was really snotty and she had to blow her nose. That's not part of the script.

"You're always going to be surprised."

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

What's really going on with the lymphatic drainage beauty trend videos?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck1l6zvr9gdgo, 3 days ago

If she's ever feeling bloated, Abbey Alexandra has a go-to routine, using body oil and a wooden roller to perform stomach massages.

The 31-year-old from Birmingham shares before-and-after videos on TikTok, saying she feels the process leaves her depuffed and defined: "You definitely feel a lot better after, they are relaxing."

The technique is a form of lymphatic drainage massage, adapted from a medical treatment and shared as a beauty trend. Celebrity fans include Maya Jama, who shares her clinic sessions, and actress Hailey Bieber, who told Time magazine: "I swear by them."

Whether there is a physical change - or any need for one - is debatable, but fans of the massages claim they help "flatten" and "debloat" and give a "snatched waist" and "sculpted abs". But what's actually happening to their bodies?

What do the videos show?

Many videos on social media promoting lymphatic massage show a woman either standing sideways, facing the front or perhaps lying down with her stomach showing a slight - and very normal - curve outwards.

Then begins the methodical massage in circular motions seemingly draining fluid away. By the end, her stomach appears flatter - if a little red.

But social media body trends should always be viewed with scepticism, says Dr Ella Guest, senior research fellow and health psychologist at the Centre for Appearance Research based at the University of the West of England.

"These images might be altered using photo-editing tools or filters, people standing in particular poses, use of lighting, lots could even be AI-generated," she says.

"I think stopping to reflect on what you see and questioning whether it looks realistic, or if it's very aligned with beauty standards, can be useful. Remember, if something looks too good to be true, it probably is."

What is the lymphatic system?

The lymphatic system is a network of channels and glands throughout the body that helps fight infection and remove excess fluid, according to the NHS.

Dr Xand van Tulleken tells Morning Live that the lymphatic system helps remove excess fluid from tissues and supports the immune system.

"When it is not working properly, it can contribute to swelling, which can be a condition called lymphoedema."

This commonly affects people who have cancers that involve the lymph system or who've had treatment involving the lymph nodes.

It causes swelling in any part of the body, but usually develops in the arms or legs.

"In simple terms, the lymphatic system helps keep your body's fluid levels balanced, cleans up waste, and supports your defences against illness," says van Tulleken.

What's the massage doing?

Dr Xand says manual lymphatic drainage is one of a range of treatments used by medical professionals "if your lymphatic system isn't working as it should".

He describes it as using "light pressure" and "strategic massage techniques" to "clear" your lymphatic system.

"They'll coax excess lymph fluid from your swollen tissues toward your lymph nodes, where the lymph can reabsorb," he says - adding lymph nodes are found in the armpits, neck and groin.

He adds that these massages can be a "safe way" to relieve symptoms for conditions like lymphoedema but are not suitable for some people with pre-existing medical conditions.

He stresses: "No one should get their health advice from Instagram - far safer to use the NHS website, or consult your GP."

Abbey, who has endometriosis which she says causes her to feel bloated, began doing her own massage routines twice a week aer seeing social media posts about lymphatic drainage.

"I started using my hands and then I bought some wooden tools as well.

"After doing my routine, I personally feel less puffy and bloated, particularly around my stomach.

"Visually, I notice that my stomach looks a little more defined and I also feel lighter and more comfortable."

Does it work?

Dr Xand says there is "no need" for most people to perform lymphatic drainage treatments at home.

"There is very little high-quality evidence showing they provide meaningful or lasting benefits for healthy individuals, and it does not promote fat loss," he says.

But he does note that lymphatic drainage massages can feel "relaxing" and some people "can notice a temporary reduction in swelling".

"For most healthy people, regular movement, exercise and staying hydrated are all that's needed to support normal lymphatic function," he says.

"Unless someone has a diagnosed lymphatic condition, I don't think anyone needs routine lymphatic drainage treatments, despite the growing popularity of these practices on social media."

For Abbey, it's something she enjoys. "I know the visual difference is temporary... But I do like how I look and feel afterwards so it'll always be a part of my routine."

However, Guest warns striving for a sculpted stomach could "feed into people's insecurities".

"We know that when we compare ourselves online and try to live up to these trends, we tend to scrutinise our appearance more and feel less satisfied with how we look," she says.

"The reality is that healthy bodies come in a wide range of shapes and sizes."

Amazon data centre near M25 gets approval

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw5y4132d8dmo, 3 days ago

Amazon has been given the go-ahead to build a huge data centre beside the M25, despite concerns about its environmental impact.

The development will replace 17 industrial and warehouse units on the Ridgeway Distribution Centre in Iver, Buckinghamshire.

The Ivers Parish Council said the building would have a negative impact on air quality and traffic, but Buckinghamshire Council approved the plans on Monday.

Officers concluded that the need for data centres, the employment benefits and an expected reduction in vehicle movements outweighed other considerations.

The data centre's main building would be about 20 metres (65ft) high.

The 18-acre (7.3-hectare) scheme also includes a substation, water tanks, a generator yard, security fencing and parking.

The Local Democracy Reporting Service said the parish council neither supported nor objected to the application, but asked for improvements to walking routes, including the canal path, and wanted low-emission vehicles to be used during construction.

The site is in an air quality management area, and the council's environmental health team said the 27 back-up generators would produce emissions during routine testing and maintenance.

Air-quality modelling predicted a negligible effect at the locations assessed, but officers said that did not mean the development would have no impact.

A legal agreement has secured £600,382 towards projects to offset any air pollution from the site.

It also requires a plan to monitor emissions from the generators, which would primarily use hydrotreated vegetable oil, with diesel as a back-up fuel.

Officers said Amazon had also agreed to contribute £73,000 towards improvements to public rights of way.

The approval comes after Buckinghamshire Council previously rejected plans for a data centre on green belt land at the Court Lane Industrial Estate in Iver, only for the decision to be overturned by housing secretary Angela Rayner.

However, this year the government accepted it was wrong to grant planning permission for a data centre at the nearby Woodlands Park landfill site, after it had initially been rejected by the authority.

On the latest scheme, Buckinghamshire Council said: "We don't have anything further to add."

Amazon said it would not be "sharing a statement for inclusion", but planning documents estimated the project could support 60 full-time jobs on site, alongside jobs created during construction.

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TikTok and Instagram don't prepare hikers for dangers, rescuers say

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9e8e5l7gvkgo, 3 days ago

Social media posts on TikTok and Instagram show the beauty of wild places without warning about the danger walkers can face, mountain rescuers have said.

"Too many people influenced by these posts are ending up in the mountains unprepared," said Nick Phillips from Mountain Rescue England and Wales (MREW).

It recorded emergencies involving 18 to 24-year-olds almost doubled from 2019-2024, with the four largest teams in Wales all on track for record high call-outs in 2026.

Llanberis Mountain Rescue Team (LMRT), based in Eryri, also known as Snowdonia, said the pressure on volunteers was "unsustainable", a concern echoed by mountain rescuers in the Brecon Beacons who say demand "keeps rising".

LMRT is Wales' busiest and had its most calls in a month in August - 59, or two a day - and it was not just the prolonged warm weather.

The team has recorded a steady rise in rescue operations every year going back to 2020, when it had 147 call-outs all year.

It wants a "serious conversation" as it is set to hit 450 rescues by the end of the year, having already attended 359.

MREW said 18 to 24-year-olds became the biggest age group in need of rescuing in 2024 when they were involved in 314 incidents, up 89% from 166 in 2019.

It added: "We are not criticising people who want to go into the mountain based on what they have seen in a post... but we need to be balanced with the reality."

"This year's increase has been really worrying," said LMRT volunteer Tom Carrick.

Speaking to the Welsh language news programme Newyddion S4C, he said if the rise continues at a similar pace it will not be able to cope.

"We've had 30 new volunteers joining the team. We're in September now and already we're seeing a lot of burnout among volunteers, some who've been here for years and others newer.

"How much more can we take?"

LMRT said the main concern was the number of people turning up to climb mountains without experience and suitable kit.

"A photograph or video of Crib Goch can make an exposed grade one scramble look like just another route to the summit.

"What it doesn't show is how intimidating that ridge can be in cloud, rain or strong winds or how quickly a manageable situation can become a serious emergency."

Increased demand is being reported by most teams in Wales.

Brecon Mountain Rescue Team, which had 70 call-outs in 2020, has already had 80.

Ogwen Mountain Rescue Team, which also works in Eryri National Park said it had 107 call-outs in 2020 but is projected to get more than 200 this year.

Central and Brecon Mountain Rescue (CBMRT) had 89 calls in 2020 and could hit 200 this year.

"Reaching 150 call-outs already this year, after our busiest ever year last year, brings home the scale of the commitment," said Huw Jones, who has been with CBMRT for 45 years.

"My concern is how we sustain that commitment if demand keeps rising. Volunteers' time and energy are finite.

"We cannot assume that more and more can be absorbed indefinitely, and we need to talk about that now so teams can continue to be there for people in the years ahead."

MREW said Instagram, TikTok and X were putting beauty spots around the world in the spotlight, including peaks in Wales such as Yr Wyddfa and Pen y Fan.

"Wonderful places to go, but what the posts don't capture how you get there," Phillips said.

It is leading what he hopes will be a "culture change", engaging ambassadors including TV explorer Ben Fogle and reaching out to social media influencers.

"We want to capture people at home to hopefully reduce these avoidable call-outs," it said.

"People need to be aware they are in a dangerous place."

In 1995, Caradoc Jones who lives in Helsby, Cheshire, became the first Welshman to reach the summit of Everest and has climbed in some of the world's most dangerous and remote landscapes.

He welcomed the fact more people are exploring mountains but agrees a culture shift is needed and wants more to be done on social media to warn people about the realities of mountaineering.

Jones also suggested mountain rescue teams should be funded by the government instead of donations.

The Welsh government said: "Our mountain rescue teams do a fantastic job supporting people across Wales, often in challenging and demanding circumstances, and we thank them for their dedication and hard work.

"We recognise in our programme of government the important role that the voluntary sector plays in delivering public services and are engaging with mountain rescue teams to discuss support."

Crypto thieves attack man in home and threaten to kill pregnant wife's baby in 'horrific' robbery

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6eq84eygz0qo, 4 days ago

Warning: This story contains distressing details

A businessman was beaten with hammers by masked men who broke into his home and threatened to kill his heavily pregnant wife unless he transferred hundreds of thousands of pounds of cryptocurrency.

Speaking to the BBC, the couple, who want to remain anonymous, described the attack as "horrific" and said they feared for their unborn baby's life.

The attackers left in a car driven by a getaway driver after the man transferred his crypto savings.

Crimestoppers are offering a £10,000 reward for information in the attack, which was captured on home security footage and is being investigated by the police.

Experts say it is one of a growing type of violent theft known as a "wrench attack" targeting cryptocurrency investors.

As crypto coins have risen in value, reports of these violent robberies linked to digital assets have emerged in the UK, France and the US.

Once funds are transferred, recovering them can be extremely difficult.

The man, who the BBC is calling James, said three intruders forced their way into their Solihull home before launching an assault which lasted 45 minutes.

"The door gets pushed open, I can see gloves coming in, balaclavas," he said.

James tried to fight the men off but they hit him in the face, head and ribs with hammers.

His wife, who was seven months pregnant, was held down on the sofa by one of the criminals.

"He's got a pillow over her face," James said. "He's literally suffocating her on the sofa. I can hear her screaming, 'I can't breathe'."

The couple still had no idea what the criminals wanted until one of the men demanded James unlock his phone and hand it over.

James said the attackers appeared to know he owned cryptocurrency, but had little understanding of how to access it.

Instead, they were taking instructions from someone else connected via a live video call.

"I can hear the guy on FaceTime saying: 'Show me everything on his phone. Show me what apps he's got'," he said.

When the caller identified a crypto wallet containing substantial funds, the threats escalated dramatically.

"He was basically saying: 'Look, if you don't send us this money now, we're going to stab your wife in the stomach and kill your baby. We're going to kill your wife'," James said.

His wife, who also did not want to be named, described the attack that happened in December last year as "horrific" and said she feared James had been killed when he was unresponsive on the floor.

"It was terrifying," she said.

The woman, in her early thirties, was expecting her third child at the time and said she feared she might lose the baby due to the stress of the attack. The baby survived and was born at full term.

The men left after James transferred his savings - hundreds of thousands of pounds of cryptocurrency - to the digital wallet of the man on the video call.

They also stole several luxury Rolex watches.

James said before they left, he heard the man on the video call tell his accomplices: "You can have 10 grand each but I am taking the rest."

Rise of the 'wrench attack'

Unlike money held in a conventional bank account, cryptocurrency is often controlled directly by the owner through digital wallets or physical storage devices.

For criminals, that combination of speed, anonymity and irreversibility can make crypto holders attractive targets.

Whilst the vast majority of cryptocurrency theft happens online through hacks and scams, crypto investigators at Chainalysis say "wrench attacks" have surged in recent years.

According to their research, $30m (£22.6m) had been stolen so far this year up to June in violent robberies, making 2026 likely to become the single-worst year for violent crypto attacks on record. Home invasions are also on the rise this year, it found.

The US, Brazil, and Thailand are hotspots but France has seen the largest number of attacks by far, as a result of a data breach at a tax office that has apparently allowed wealthy crypto holders to be located.

"The physical security assumptions that protect traditional wealth, such as bank vaults and armored cars, do not automatically apply in crypto. Often, holders keep their assets in comparatively low security setups, like self-custody wallets, that can be compromised without any institutional gatekeeper standing in the way," said researchers in their report.

James said he became an amateur investor in crypto coins in 2020 and made enough money to quit his job in 2023 to trade full time.

Now he has lost everything and is looking to get back to his traditional job.

Police have yet to identify the attackers.

Crimestoppers is offering a £10,000 reward for information leading to progress in the investigation.

Alan Edwards from the charity hopes people might have information about the three attackers, the driver who was parked outside without a face covering, or the man on the phone.

"These criminals are obviously serious and part of some kind of organised crime gang," he said.

"People might be scared to give us information but we are independent of the police and keep people completely anonymous."

The three attackers are all thought to be in their late teens or early 20s and one of them was a black male with a scar under his left eyebrow.

James said he has little hope of recovering the stolen funds, but instead wanted to see those responsible brought to justice.

He also wants his experience to serve as a warning.

"They threatened my wife and my baby," he said. "People need to understand these risks are real."

More than 100 turn out for data centre meeting amid concerns

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6grvr9xvpqyo, 4 days ago

More than 100 people attended a consultation on plans to build a large data centre on green belt land in Cheshire.

Innova held the drop-in session at High Legh Village Hall near Lymm on Wednesday evening to discuss plans to build a 60-hectare data centre in Little Bollington.

Local resident Mike Reed, who is helping to organise local opposition to the plan, described it as a "massive great industrial monster" and said locals left the meeting with "deep anxiety" over the potential impact on their homes, businesses and wildlife.

The company said it was "pleased with the turnout" and "grateful to local residents for providing valuable feedback".

Data centres are typically large warehouses that store servers which process and distribute information online.

The proposed Spodegreen Data Centre would occupy land owned by the Tatton Estate.

At the first public consultation, Reed said: "People are very upset at this proposal.

"It's green belt land at the edge of Manchester's conurbation.

"You can't start creeping into that, or you destroy the whole of the green belt throughout Cheshire."

Another resident, Helen Dolan, expressed her concern over noise levels and the threat to wildlife.

A spokesperson for Innova said: "We were pleased with the turnout at last night's first consultation event and grateful to local residents for providing valuable feedback around water, noise, landscape, drainage and green belt in particular.

"The technical assessments that will provide detailed answers to these questions, including those on noise, water use and energy demand, are being undertaken."

Innova added the project would bring benefits to the area, including jobs, improved local connectivity and money from the Community Benefit Fund, which the company said would "specifically direct funds locally where it is needed".

The next stage of the process will involve a second in-person consultation event later this year, according to the Innova website.

The company said it will share how the project has evolved after consultation feedback and environmental assessments.

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Police force launches AI tool to reduce 101 calls

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx24j46vg34qo, 4 days ago

A Yorkshire police force has launched a new "AI assistant" on its website in a bid to help reduce the number of 101 calls it receives.

South Yorkshire Police said the Bobbi chatbot could be used for advice and answers about non-emergency incidents. It cannot be used to report a crime or as an alternative to 999.

The technology, which launched on Thursday, has already been rolled out by other forces, including Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary, Thames Valley Police, and Humberside Police.

Ch Supt Cherie Buttle said: "Bobbi will be a useful tool to help reduce calls to 101, save members of the public time, and provide concise and reliable answers to frequently asked questions."

She added: "We receive more than 1,000 101 calls each day and we know that some callers can be waiting 20 minutes or more to speak to our staff during periods of high demand.

"By providing quick responses to non-emergency questions, Bobbi will enable those who prefer to use the AI assistant to save time otherwise spent calling 101 and enable those who do need to speak to one of our call handlers to get through quicker.

"I also recognise some people will have concerns around the use of AI, and I want to emphasise that Bobbi is a secure system. It is an alternative to, not a replacement, for some 101 calls."

The technology will use information provided by South Yorkshire Police to answer queries, rather than other AI assistant tools which work by scouring the internet.

In August the force launched a call handling system using AI software to triage calls to its non-emergency 101 number.

The system was aimed at cutting waiting times for people trying to report crimes by weeding out misdirected, nuisance and prank calls.

Listen to highlights from South Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North

Trump's AI rebrand causes 'unprecedented' demand for Slovenian website names

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqx2z23xj555o, 4 days ago

Donald Trump's push to rename AI may be behind an "unprecedented" rise in registrations for domain names in Slovenia, according to its official national registry.

The US president wants AI to be called "super intelligence" - or SI - the same initials used by Slovenian websites.

Register.si spokeswoman Klara Herman said 44,000 web addresses with the .si suffix had been registered in September, compared to less than 2,000 in August - an increase of more than 2,100%.

She said the scale of activity in late September was "unprecedented" compared to the previous 12 months.

Trump called for the technology to be renamed during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 11 September.

"The use of the word artificial makes it sound fake," he said.

"It's not fake, it's actually amazing. But we have to be careful... welcome to the new world of super intelligence."

Internet domains are the unique human-readable addresses people type into their web browsers to access websites - like bbc.co.uk.

Herman said registrations for .si web addresses in September stood out "very clearly" against the other months in the year, although she was "cautious" about attributing the entire increase to just Trump's comments.

She said on 30 September alone, 11,000 new registrations were recorded.

One possible explanation for the purchases is a practice in which people speculatively register specific domain names in case they increase in value later on and can be sold for a profit.

For example, in 1997 Rick Schwartz, known as "The Domain King", bought the domain name men.com for $15,000 (£11,300). He sold it for $1.32 million seven years later.

Trump hosted a meeting of top technology bosses for what he called "an extraordinary gathering" of the people "building America's Golden Age" on Tuesday.

He signed an executive order instructing US government departments and agencies to start using the terms "SI" and "Super Intelligence", and to no longer acknowledge the use of the term AI.

SI will take the place of AI in "official correspondence", websites, reports and other forms of communication, the order said.

Images of the signatures for the order were mocked online however - when it was discovered "United States" had been spelt incorrectly underneath Trump's signature.

Correction 1 October: An earlier version of this article referred to cyber-squatting, whereby people register domain names in bad faith with the intent to profit. We cited as an example the registration of men.com by Rick Schwartz. The article was amended to delete the reference to cyber-squatting and make clear simply registering domain names as an investment in the hope they will increase in value, as happened with men.com, is a legitimate business activity.

'They'd never seen a car or a TV': The people evacuated to the UK from the world's most remote inhabited island in 1961

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20261002-the-people-evacuated-to-the-uk-from-the-worlds-most-remote-inhabited-island-in-1961, today

After a volcano erupted on tiny Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic, the 264 displaced islanders told the BBC about their first taste of modern British life.

"Just over a year ago, they'd never seen traffic or a road or a house higher than a cottage," said Tim Brinton in a BBC new report in 1963. He was talking about the residents of Tristan da Cunha, the world's most remote inhabited island. In the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, roughly halfway between Cape Town in South Africa and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the tiny British outpost is more than 1,500 miles from any other populated land, and is only accessible by a seven-day boat journey.

But on 10 October 1961, a sudden volcanic eruption blasted the islanders out of their splendid isolation and into the industrialised modern world. "We heard the rumbles first, then the ground just automatically cracked… Then the smoke and the fire started coming out the ground," one of them told the BBC in a 1998 film. Another, Mary Swain, said that she'd run to her husband and shouted, "Jump up quick, Fred, the Earth is opening!"

The island's volcano had been dormant since Tristan was first settled 150 years earlier. But great cracks appeared in the ground a few hundred metres from the main village, which is named Edinburgh of the Seven Seas. By the time the islanders had escaped in their fishing boats to nearby Nightingale Island, their homes were already threatened by lava. "The whole place is vibrating with earthquakes," announced a BBC reporter, "and the eastern corner is cracking and breaking up."

Tristan's 264 inhabitants were forced to evacuate, picked up by a Dutch liner that happened to arrive the next day. Within hours, the whole community was aboard, leaving everything apart from the few things they could carry with them – "a rifle, an overcoat and a lamp," recalled Swain – and their boats, which they stored in their gardens when they reached England weeks later.

They were housed on a disused military airbase near Southampton, a port city on England's south coast. "So much is strange to them," said Brinton. "They'd never seen shops because on the island, money wasn't used. Boats were their livelihood. For them, there's been no industrial revolution. And for 150 years, they've lived simple agricultural lives out of touch with world progress."

Though Tristan da Cunha was discovered in 1506 by a Portuguese admiral who gave it his name, it was another 300 years before it supported anything but seabirds and seals. The UK annexed the island in 1816 to prevent it being used as a base for attempts to free Napoleon Bonaparte from his imprisonment on the South Atlantic island of St Helena. The following year, a Scotsman, Corporal William Glass, stayed behind when the British garrison was withdrawn. With his family and a few others, he founded the first permanent community.

By 1961, the population of the 40 sq miles (100 sq km) of volcanic rock had risen to 264, many of them survivors from ships wrecked on the island, with just seven family names between them. On several occasions, the failure of the potato crop or the wrecking of fishing boats brought the islanders to the point of starvation. But they stayed on, even defying several attempts by the British government to evacuate them.

Adapting to British life

When the volcanic eruption forced the islanders to leave, they faced difficulties settling in England. They had never seen a car, a bicycle, a TV set or an income tax form. And it was a challenging climate. "Here is too much gas and smoke," Tristanian Joey Repetto told the BBC in 1963. On his journey to their initial accommodation, he said, "I steady coughed without stopping."

Adapting to the nine-to-five work pattern also proved tricky for the community of farmers and fishermen. "Here, when you go to work in the morning, you've got one job. You've got to look forward all the whole week of getting up at the same time, going to the same place, doing the same work every day," said Joey's father Gerald, who was used to a more varied life determined by natural rhythms.

Similarly, financial pressures placed new demands on the islanders, as Swain explained. "In England, you need money for your living. But on Tristan, we don't. If we haven't got no money, well, we just go without it. It don't bother us at all… if I've got no money, I still can go out and get my own potatoes. I can still go and get my own fish."

She didn't hold back on expressing her views on British life. "We don't like the weather... There's too much sickness and we don't like the place at all."

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Despite having a single policeman on the island, who wore a British uniform, Tristan had almost no crime. The community was shocked by an incident in England when one member was attacked and hurt by two youths, who took his most valued possession, a gold watch, and smashed it.

But there were some elements of British life that were appreciated by the Tristanians, particularly the younger ones, who described a love of Italian suits and record players. "Country and western music is our favourite, by Johnny Cash and Ernest Tubb," said one teenager, who also enjoyed the social dances. "Since I come here, I've been doing the twist and the locomotion, all that lot. We've forgotten how to do the waltz. But I like to twist myself."

Despite that, most of the islanders were keen to return home. In 1962, the British government sent a survey party to study conditions on Tristan. While the volcano was still smoking, the geologists judged that it was now dormant.

The return to Tristan

Surprisingly little damage had been done to the village of Edinburgh. The lava had turned at the last moment and flowed into the sea, something that the islanders considered to be an act of God. Some of the thatched roofs were burnt, but the cottages were mostly intact. Yet in their absence, houses had been ransacked and some livestock stolen by passing sailors.

Many animals were still alive, however, with the chickens multiplying in number. Though the dogs had run wild and slaughtered the sheep, the cattle had kept themselves well-fed on the lush island grass, and there were new calves. Lava had covered the beaches, but return was possible.

The British authorities held a secret ballot in the community hall at the islanders' RAF camp. All Tristanians over the age of 21 voted, and the result was an almost unanimous vote to return, 148 to five in favour. After an advance party went back to plant seeds for the following year's potato crop, most of the islanders arrived at Tristan da Cunha in November 1963.

When asked what she was most looking forward to on the island when she returned, Swain told the BBC: "A free life. We can get our own fish and everything of our own back there without money."

Elaine Repetto, who was born on the island but chose to leave in 1984, told the BBC in 1998 why it held such a pull. "We are strongly independent and used to battling with the elements in order to survive… We have to rely upon each other in a way you would find in few other places."

She described the impact of the events in 1961. "Today, the volcano is still a smoking reminder of the events which shaped our view of ourselves and our contact with the outside world."

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British Museum announces changes to ease Bayeux Tapestry queues

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwvgrle6dx2lo, today

The British Museum has announced changes to how visitors see the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition after concerns over long queues and overcrowding.

The measures include plans for longer opening hours, as well as an audio guide, additional seating and clearer signage.

A museum spokesperson said the public response to the 11th Century embroidery had been "extraordinary", but acknowledged that some visitors had waited longer than they would have wanted.

Some people reported waits of up to two hours, while hundreds of ticket holders were reportedly turned away due to backlogs when the museum closed early last week due to a private event.

Some ticket holders took to social media to complain about the disruption.

One disappointed visitor said the trip had been a "big event" they had looked forward to, while another wrote she had been waiting since she was seven to see the Bayeux Tapestry, and bought tickets only to be turned away after queuing.

The museum later apologised to those who had been unable to enter and said they would be issued refunds and priority booking slots for a rearranged time.

From Monday, visitors will be offered an audio guide with more information about the embroidery, while additional signage and seating will be provided for those queuing to reach the main exhibition.

The museum said it planned to introduce longer opening hours to prevent queues building during the day and allow people with later bookings more time to view the exhibition.

Details of the extended hours have not yet been disclosed.

Demand for the exhibition has been high since tickets first went on sale in July, with a record 100,000 sold on the first day.

Members of the public who were not successful in the first ticket release will have two further chances to view the masterpiece when further tickets go on sale in October and January.

Adult tickets cost £33 during peak times and £27 at off-peak hours, compared with its usual €12 fee to see the tapestry in its home in Bayeux, Normandy. Children under 16 can visit the London exhibition for free.

The exhibition opened on 10 September but has experienced a series of problems with queues and congestion, with some visitors spending longer than their allocated 40-minute slot viewing the tapestry.

Visitors were later stopped from taking photographs and a recorded message was introduced encouraging people to continue moving through the one-way exhibition.

The 70m-long Bayeux Tapestry depicts 58 scenes outlining the extraordinary events surrounding the Norman conquest of England, the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and the end of Anglo-Saxon rule in Britain.

Despite its name, the work is an embroidery rather than a tapestry and contains approximately 626 human figures and 200 horses.

The Bayeux Tapestry is on loan from the French government, having been transported from its home in Normandy - where it has been exhibited since 1983. It will be on display until July 2027.

The loan marks the first time the tapestry has returned to the UK since it was created more than 900 years ago.

Why a new TV version of horror classic Carrie is already annoying people

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20261001-why-a-new-tv-version-of-horror-classic-carrie-is-already-annoying-people, 3 days ago

Releasing next week, the latest take on Stephen King's novel has been criticised for its casting. The heroine is a softer, more conventional-looking character than in the book.

Mike Flanagan is the horror auteur behind such hit shows as Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House. A new series from him would normally be a cause for celebration by fans of the genre. But when they were first released, the stills and trailer for his eight-part adaptation of Stephen King's 1974 classic Carrie did not meet with universal approval. Some fans were disappointed, even angered. The reason for their annoyance? As with other screen versions, there seemed to be departures from the novel, which tells the story of a bullied teenager wreaking revenge on her high school – especially with regard to the way Carrie looks and behaves.

Various X users have pointed out that, as one of them put it, "everyone decides to cast her as a skinny, conventionally attractive girl" which is very different to how she is depicted in the book. Another suggested that no adaptation "has ever captured the full extent of Carrie's novel characterisation. She's an incredibly angry girl, and is usually depicted as sad/naïve on screen". A third alleged that "Hollywood would never do the book version [of Carrie] in a million years".

The book's depiction of Carrie

Carrie was King's first novel and centres on a 16-year-old girl who has been tormented for years by her classmates. She finds no comfort at home because her widowed mother is an abusive religious fanatic: breasts and showers are among the many thing she regards as sinful. Carietta "Carrie" White has a latent telekinetic power, typically unleashed when she is stressed, afraid or angry.

The novel begins with her being terrified by her first period, which arrives when she is in the shower after PE class. The other girls mock her ignorance and the stress – or maybe the onset of menstruation – reawakens her telekinetic power. The story then reaches a tragic climax days later when she is humiliated at the school prom.

King describes Carrie in the showers thus: "Carrie stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks". She's clearly meant to be – for want of a better word – "plain".

Yet in the four screen versions to date, she has been played by conventionally good-looking actresses. In Brian De Palma's 1976 classic, Sissy Spacek played Carrie. In a 2002 TV movie, it was Angela Bettis. Chloë Grace Moretz starred in the 2013 film and now, in this new Prime Video drama, it's 22-year-old Canadian newcomer Summer H Howell.

As entertainment writer Kayleigh Donaldson wryly observed in a recent article for Pajiba: "Even in a story of cruelty and bullying, the world thinks having Carrie White be a fat girl is too much…You can imagine a teenage girl setting her school on fire with her magical mind powers but she can't be larger than a size 6 (UK 10) because that's stretching credulity?"

In addition, book Carrie is in some ways an even darker creation than screen Carrie has ever been, both less naive and with greater agency around her destructive powers. She fantasises about the havoc she could wreak if she chose to: "She did not know if her gift had come from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she did not care which, she was overcome with an almost indescribable relief," King writes.

When her prom date is late, she decides that if he doesn't show up, she will use her power to destroy the house. She is smiling and giggling throughout her bloody vengeance at the prom. But on screen, she tends to be sweeter and more innocent. Even in the prom scene she seems to be using her powers reluctantly.

Flanagan's new version, which is set in the present day and is being promoted with the tag line, "If you think you know her story, you're dead wrong", is likely to upset book purists even further. Without giving away spoilers, it introduces some major departures from, and very significant additions to, the novel.

However, one big change already evident in the trailer is that this Carrie is newly arrived at school, having previously been home-schooled until her father's death. In the book, her father died before her birth and she attends school from the usual age. This is a key difference because it means that when we meet Carrie she is, in Flanagan's words "open to the world, earnest, curious and untraumatised". It has the effect of making the bullying she is subjected to feel even more cruel.

Are the changes valid?

Do such differences between the book and screen versions matter? Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn is a horror expert and reader in film studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, who believes Flanagan's show will work on its own terms, and is smart in how it modernises the story.

"It updates the ongoing horrors of teenage life at school, where Carrie is desperate to fit in," she says, noting how it now centres social media, which offers new modes of ridicule.

Ní Fhlainn agrees that Flanagan's Carrie is not the "frog among swans" that King describes but says "her 'otherness' is absolutely coded in her making of her own clothes and [background of being] home-schooled. Like so many school-set horrors, this Carrie seems to conjure new means of navigating the familiar horrors of teenage life and bullying."

Film-maker Liam Gavin directed the cult horror film A Dark Song and two episodes of Flanagan's The Haunting of Bly Manor, his reimagining of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Gavin points out that, of course, deviations from the text and casting decisions are not always made purely for artistic reasons.

"With any adaptation, there's always going to be a tension between the source material and the needs of the market," he says. "Production funding is frequently dependent on cast, and so there can be external pressures. It's not always fair or just, it unfortunately 'just is'."

In other words, in an industry which often lacks casting imagination, lead roles of all kinds still tend to go to performers that are conventionally good-looking. That's because producers and studios seem to feel that they will have the greatest audience appeal – though whether that really is the case or not is rarely tested.

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In addition, the novel intermittently gives the reader direct access to Carrie's thoughts and feelings to help us understand her. We don't have that in the screen versions – hence, perhaps, the softening of her character, to make her more immediately sympathetic.

However Gavin also says that it is fair that a creative director might not want to be completely faithful to a text. "It can also be just as stifling from the other direction," he says. "It's not always incumbent on a director to be slavish to whatever source material he or she is working from."

Certainly, this version of Carrie really does feel like something new. Flanagan has made an engrossing, surprising, layered show that is very much about the now, while also honouring its 50-year-old source material. It absolutely delivers on both horror and coming-of-age drama and is well served by terrific performances, especially from the lead. No doubt the depiction of Carrie will continue to stimulate debate but even hardcore lovers of the book should find something to enjoy here.

Carrie is released on Prime Video on 7 October.

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Glastonbury 2027 tickets sell out in 42 minutes

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmpd0wev8v38o, yesterday

Tickets for Glastonbury Festival 2027 sold out in 42 minutes, organisers have said.

Thousands of people joined the online queue at 09:00 BST in the hope of securing tickets to the festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset, which returns from 23 to 27 June after a fallow year.

Organisers confirmed last month that tickets for the weekend were at their highest price ever - £408, including a £5 booking fee per ticket - an increase of £29.50 from the last event in 2025.

Headliners have yet to be announced but organiser Emily Eavis previously said the team was "very excited" and things were "coming together really well".

Glastonbury posted on Instagram shortly after 09:40 to announce that tickets had sold out, and notified those who were in the queue.

"Thank you to everyone who bought one and we're sorry to those of you who missed out on a morning where demand greatly exceeded supply," the post said.

"There will be a resale of any cancelled or returned tickets in Spring 2027."

The first round of tickets, which were for coach packages, went up for sale on Thursday and sold out in less than half an hour.

Despite the increase in cost, Zoe Scott, who has been to the festival twice, said "the price is totally worth it".

"You're getting to see thousands of acts, there's over 100 stages," she said.

"It's such a vibe at Glastonbury- everyone's so happy and free-spirited. You're just on a constant high from friends, music and the sun is usually shining".

A couple who first met at Glastonbury will also be heading to Worthy Farm next year to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary.

Nick and Helen Nugget from Amersham met through mutual friends at the festival in 2007 and will be returning next year with the same group.

Nick told BBC Your Voice that they were "absolutely delighted" to be going back.

The couple last went to the festival in 2011- although they were successful in securing tickets in 2019, they were unable to attend due to the adoption of their daughter.

'Fairer than ever'

Dave in London was in several groups all trying to get tickets through their laptops and phones on Sunday morning, and was successful.

He said: "Actually it seems like it's fairer this year than it's ever been.

"All the hacks that people used to use don't seem to have the same impact, and about a quarter of the people on the groups we are on managed to get tickets."

Sarah in Dorset was surprised she also managed to get hold of some.

She said: "A mobile phone on 5G in Shaftesbury seemed to be the optimal way to get tickets. We didn't even know Shaftesbury had 5G until this morning."

Among those who were not successful were Mat Chapman and his daughter Amy.

Mat told the BBC that he used to watch the festival on TV with Amy when she was little, promising to take her when she was five years old as "she always wanted to have her own flag that you could see on the telly".

Mat had hoped that after 20 years of trying, he would be able to beat the queue this year, on Amy's 26th birthday. Unfortunately he only ever moved from "two bar hell to three bar purgatory".

"There's always next year. We'll fly the flag there one day."

This year's Glastonbury tickets have breached the £400 mark for the first time.

Tickets have increased over the years, from £185 in 2010 to £408 for the upcoming 2027 line-up.

Most price rises have come since the pandemic, with tickets climbing from £318 in 2019 to a peak of £408 in 2027.

But unlike recent years, much of the 2010s saw relatively steady price hikes.

Any tickets from today's sale that are not paid for in full by the early April 2027 deadline will be put back into an official resale pool, festival organisers said.

The exact date for this is yet to be announced, but in previous years it has been in late April.

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The Celebrity Traitors connections that might surprise you

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqkgx895g9vzo, yesterday

Spoiler warning: This article reveals details from the first two episodes of The Celebrity Traitors

"I know Rob very, very well. I mean, I've sat next to him as he's had a colonic."

That was Romesh Ranganathan, reminding us - in case we were in any doubt - of his close friendship with Rob Beckett in the opening episode of The Celebrity Traitors.

His words sum up the key difference between this series and the regular civilian version. In Celebrity Traitors, the players aren't just on-screen competitors - many actually know each other outside the show.

Lots have worked together, and some are even friends. And those previous connections can have a huge impact on the show's dynamics.

It's also partly why it is quite so delightful to watch - as friendships unravel, and former co-stars turn on each other.

We've been unpicking the six degrees of separation. Here are some of the connections we've found - if you spot any more, we'd love to know. Get in touch with your thoughts in the comments section below.

The Rob and Romesh bromance

The dynamic between Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan is one of the most enjoyable to watch play out this year.

As well as being great friends in real life, they have also worked together repeatedly, including in their travel show, Rob & Romesh Vs.

They've also frequently made joint appearances on panel shows such as Mock the Week.

But their friendship could count for nothing in the castle, Ranganathan said ahead of the show.

"Rob is one of my best friends, and we've worked together for a decade now, but I still won't be able to trust it," he said.

"I mean, he's just as easily going to be on my side as he is going to twist the knife in my back given the opportunity."

Joe and James are also friends (for now)

Joe Lycett has said publicly that he's friends with James Acaster, and the pair have a running joke about how everyone gets them confused.

They’ve also worked together on the TV show Travel Man.

Lycett is also friends with Joanne McNally - he's described her as "one of my favourite people in the world".

But those loyalties could be about to be tested, especially now that Acaster has been recruited as a traitor (anyone remember how things panned out for "good friends" Alan Carr and Paloma Faith...?)

Lots of them are on the comedy circuit

There are SO many comedians in this year's series.

And they are all likely to know each other. In addition to the alliances above, Joe Lycett was on the TV show Last One Laughing with Rob Beckett.

Joanne McNally and Romesh Ranganathan appeared on game show Unacceptable together, and James Acaster went on Ranganathan's hip hop podcast.

Speaking ahead of the show, McNally insisted she and her fellow comedians "haven't been in cahoots at all".

"We know that we're more than willing to throw each other under the bus," she said.

As for Acaster, he's admitted the other comedians are his “biggest threat” when it comes to being detected as a traitor.

“Romesh, Joe, Rob know me really well. They all know that I don’t change my mind overnight,” he said, as he pondered whether to turn and help fellow traitor Richard E Grant clear his name.

Maya has rubbed shoulders with several of the stars

It won’t surprise you that the two broadcasters of the group - Maya Jama and Amol Rajan - have met their fair share of the other stars before.

Rajan had previously hosted both Michael Sheen and Joe Lycett on the Radio 2 Breakfast show, and also interviewed Romesh Ranganathan on BBC Asian Network.

He's also been joined on the One Show on separate occasions by Ross Kemp, Miranda Hart and James Blunt - and earlier this year, he discussed AI on stage with Hannah Fry.

But in the end, Rajan became the first player to be murdered, before we really got to see the impact of those past connections.

Meanwhile, Maya Jama is best known for hosting Love Island, but she's also popped up in loads of other places - including at this year's Brit Awards, where she presented an award with James Blunt.

She's also been on Ranganathan's hip hop podcast, attended Milan Fashion Week with Leigh-Anne Pinnock, and she, Joe Lycett and James Acaster all appeared on The Big Fat Quiz of the Year.

But Jama played down her connections on Celebrity Traitors, saying ahead of the show: “I've met a few people in the cast, but nobody really knows me, so we're all starting from scratch.”

Bella and Sebastian are Westeros alumni

Usually the younger celebs in the castle tend to know fewer people, but Bella Ramsey is pretty well connected.

Notably, Ramsey and another younger cast member, Sebastian Croft, both starred in season six of Game of Thrones.

Ramsey also worked with James Blunt on the film Sunny Dancer, was interviewed by James Acaster on his Off Menu podcast - and had a funny chat about their "vegan-ish" diet with Romesh Ranganathan on The Jonathan Ross Show.

Ahead of the show, Croft said he didn't know many people aside from Ramsey before joining.

"One of the other things I'm excited about is this will be the first time I'm playing with people who, on the whole, don't know me and don't know how I work,” he said.

Richard and Jerry go way back

“I just don't believe Richard's a traitor. I've known him 30 years and he's my neighbour.”

That was American model Jerry Hall, speaking after actor Richard E Grant came under (admittedly self-inflicted) pressure in the opening episode of the series.

As well as being neighbours, the pair are linked in lots of other ways.

Grant was pictured leaving Hall's wedding to Rupert Murdoch in 2016; in 2003, they were pictured together at Chelsea Flower Show, and they also acted in children's film Tooth back in 2004.

"It was ridiculous,"Jerry said of the film. "We had such a laugh, and I went on holiday with him earlier this year, just after Christmas to Africa with some friends. And we danced all night. We had so much fun! Little did we know back then that we'd both be here [on Celebrity Traitors]."

Now they've taken the next step and moved in together, will they be arguing over who takes the bins out? We are here for it.

Romesh and Julie are connected by The Weakest Link

Yes, you know Romesh Ranganathan is the host of The Weakest Link.

But did you know actor Julie Hesmondhalgh is the voiceover narrator for the quiz show?

Here are a few other connections you may not have known about.

Hesmondhalgh and Michael Sheen both fronted Papyrus's online child safety campaign back in 2020.

YouTuber King Kenny was one of 10 online stars competing in the game show Would You Rather, hosted by Romesh Ranganathan.

And singers James Blunt and Leigh-Anne Pinnock are both Brit Award winners. Both being successful musicians, it wouldn't be surprising if they have mingled together at events over the years.

Where does this leave those with fewer friends?

While some of the celebrities have known each other for 30 years, others have no friends in the castle at all.

My Mad Fat Diary actor Sharon Rooney and Industry star Myha'la, for instance, have fewer connections than the others.

And that can be a disadvantage. Remember Niko Omilana and Ruth Codd last year?

After they were banished early on, a theory spread on social media that they were voted out because the other celebrities didn't know them that well.

But it can definitely go both ways.

Leigh-Anne Pinnock has said the fact she doesn't know many people might actually help her.

"I think I'm at a slight advantage because people just know me as Leigh-Anne from Little Mix, and they don't really know my personality that well," she said.

What's clear is that these prior connections are "exactly the sort of thing" that makes Celebrity Traitors so fascinating, as TV reporter Siobhan Synnot told me.

But - like Pinnock - she agrees that having loads of friends doesn't necessarily end up helping you.

"Quite often in The Traitors," she says, "that familiarity becomes a disadvantage".

Players, you have been warned.

When is The Celebrity Traitors next on TV?

There are new episodes of The Celebrity Traitors every Thursday and Friday. The next episode is this Thursday 8 October at 8pm on BBC One and iPlayer, with another at the same time on Friday 9 October.

The Celebrity Traitors: Uncloaked is next on this Thursday 8 October at 9.05pm on BBC One and iPlayer.

The Kent village that helped shape Audrey Hepburn

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq8jzll3w4lvo, yesterday

Long before she became one of Hollywood's most celebrated stars, Audrey Hepburn was learning music and dance at a small village school in the Kent countryside.

The future Breakfast at Tiffany's and My Fair Lady actress spent part of her childhood in Elham, near Canterbury, where local historians say her love of performing was encouraged during three formative years before the outbreak of World War Two.

Today, a blue plaque on a cottage near the King's Arms pub marks the place where Hepburn lived between 1936 and 1939.

"It really was the starting point for the young Audrey Hepburn that she became," said Brian Badham, of Elham Historical Society.

Hepburn, then known as Audrey Ruston-Hepburn, arrived in the village after her parents separated.

Badham said it was decided she should continue her English education in Kent, where family friends were living.

She moved into Orchard Cottage with the Butcher family, among a number of Elham residents who offered accommodation to visitors before the war, according to local accounts.

She attended Rigden School in the centre of Elham where, Badham said, she would have had her lessons.

"One of the sisters encouraged Audrey to get involved with music and dance. That really was the starting point for the young Audrey Hepburn that she became," he said.

Fellow historian Dilys Webb said Elham offered plenty for a young girl growing up in the late 1930s.

"I think it was far busier than it is today," she said.

"There were more shops, coffee houses and pubs. In Audrey's day I think it was more contained and everything that was here that she needed.

"She had quite a nice social life. She did ballet, she obviously went to the coffee houses and socialised with her friends, so I think there was plenty here for her in the few years she was here."

The wartime years would take Hepburn far from Kent and shape the rest of her life.

As war approached her mother, a Dutch baroness, arranged for her to return to the Netherlands, then still a neutral country, in December 1939.

After Germany invaded in May 1940, Hepburn spent much of her teenage years under Nazi occupation.

She later helped the Dutch resistance by carrying messages and taking part in secret ballet performances to raise money for anti-Nazi causes.

The future actress also endured severe hardship during the war, suffering malnutrition as food shortages swept the occupied country.

Her son Luca Dotti once said in an interview: "She believed very much that there is a struggle between good and evil and you have to take sides."

'Lasting impact'

Although historians are unaware of her ever returning to Elham, residents remain "incredibly proud" that one of the world's best-known actresses once called their community home.

Webb said: "Obviously when she was here the village didn't know she was going to be a superstar. Now everybody knows of Audrey and we are a very, very proud village."

Badham added: "She was very special. A wonderful lady and fondly loved by the people that she met while she was here.

"A short time but a lasting impact on their lives."

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Dream home or inauthentic: The brand new 'historic' mansions dividing opinion

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20261001-the-faux-historic-mansions-dividing-opinion, 2 days ago

From Regency-style to Georgian-look, brand-new English country houses designed to look centuries old are increasingly in demand in the UK, US and elsewhere. But they divide opinion. To some they are inauthentic and lack character – to others they are ideal homes. What is their appeal?

You might be tempted to place a bet on this house being soaked in history. Its Palladian grandeur complete with a columned portico, and a generous sweep of sash windows is set within a terrain of mature trees, ornately clipped hedging and meticulously manicured lawns. This majestic mansion looks like it should have absorbed decades of Victorian leather boots climbing the wide-entrance steps, the delicate rustle of Edwardian dresses sashaying down the spacious staircase, a retinue of servants, heated family arguments, surely a litany of scandals, possibly a ghost. But this house is not what it seems.

Unlike the many period mansions that are dotted across the British countryside – such as Norfolk's Jacobean Blickling Hall, which is said to be haunted by the ghost of Anne Boleyn, or Highclere Castle, the real-life setting for Downton Abbey – this grand, historic-seeming house was completed just a few years ago.

Featuring elegant proportions, hand-carved cornicing, expansive stone doorsteps and porches, and with a flourish of columns, this house and others like it have all been built in recent years – but without a backstory of beheaded queens or servant entourages. Welcome to the world of houses built to look like they've always been there.

Architects are enjoying a surge in demand for these high-end homes in both the UK and the US. The advantages are clear – as architect and author George Saumarez Smith argues in his book The Romance of Classicism: Designing the English Country House for Today. With the use of classical materials like stone, marble and natural slate, these buildings "stand the test of time", he tells the BBC.

As post-war Britain looked to the future, Saumarez Smith argues, architects began to favour modernism, with materials such as concrete, glass and metals dominating. However, these materials are not as weatherproof as classical materials, and as a result in his view these modernist buildings have not aged well.

Instead, his clients come to him because "they want a nice-looking family house that is not going to date quickly and will improve with age."

The essential elements

So, what are the ingredients that make up a proper classical mansion – is it the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and drawing rooms, the sweep of the staircase, the square footage or width of the windows? "A successful modern classical house depends on more than applied style," Liz Smith, architect at Purcell, tells the BBC.

"It needs strong proportion, careful composition, high-quality materials, skilled craftsmanship and a deep understanding of setting. We would always begin by asking what is already there, what stories the site or existing buildings hold, and how new intervention can respond intelligently and sensitively to that context."

Saumarez Smith takes advice from the 2,000-year-old rulebook of Roman architect Vitruvius, whose three principles for good architecture: useful, well-built and beautiful, continue to inform his practice.

Materials and location instruct design decisions. "Everything starts with the landscape", he says. In the UK traditional buildings have long been created with various local materials, limestone flecked with flint, red brick, and Bath or Portland stone. These materials are "a huge part of making a new house feel at home in the landscape."

The problem with pastiche

Detractors may argue that these houses are closer to theatre sets than homes, and that they are merely emulating the gravitas of houses like Blickling or Highclere. It's undeniable that a real-deal Georgian or Regency country pile will have plenty of authentic charm. But equally that home will be eye-wateringly expensive to heat and maintain – and, if listed, subject to strict restrictions.

Still, not everyone is convinced that a house can simply borrow the trappings of the past and call it classical. "There's the problem with pastiche," says Oliver Cooke, director at architecture practice Cooke Fawcett. "Traditional architecture was built in a different time, one of cheap labour, abundant craftsmanship, local materials and construction, and very different environmental priorities. You can't simply reproduce the appearance without reproducing the conditions that gave rise to it. At its worst, pastiche is a modern building dressed up as something it isn't."

The so-called McMansion has been much derided over the decades – the 1990s moniker originated in the US, combining the words "McDonald's" and "mansion", and referred to houses that were huge, generic and mass-marketed.

"What's implied in the word 'McMansion' is that it's been super-sized," Saumarez Smith says. "Everything is overblown, over-scaled, but it has no relationship with its context, like massive houses on small plots. Huge, pretentious porticoes, which have no real function other than to just look important." Done badly, he adds, the results can be almost comic, "like terrible plastic surgery".

The American way

But the McMansion is a caricature and the reality in the US is that there are many architects who are creating work way beyond this stereotype. According to a recent article in the New York Times, there's a keen desire for new homes built with classical traditions in a clear rebuttal of modernist design.

US practices such as Ferguson & Shamamian have long offered their clients new buildings inspired by classical traditions and the craftsmanship found in English country-houses, French châteaux or Georgian manor houses. "American building traditions are rooted in English design," the firm's Scott Sottile tells the BBC. These principles were then "adapted to fit new landscapes and local building materials, such as using plentiful timber instead of scarce masonry".

Among the projects by another US firm, Period Architecture, is a home in Delaware inspired by the style of the famous British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, with steeply pitched gables and vertical roofline. "English-inspired country houses have shaped the architectural landscape of the Northeastern US since colonial times, and the building traditions that came with them, like stone masonry and timber framing," Joseph Mackin Jr, co-founder of Period Architecture tells the BBC. "What's changed is that we're now seeing requests for country houses and English-style gardens from homeowners across the country."

Fully furnished

British interior designer Nicholas Hodson Taylor says the risk of pastiche is real, but that it comes down to the details and, "the complete and utter avoidance of trends." In his interiors he favours traditional, upholstery Howard-style sofas and armchairs – with low, recessed arms and deep, plump seating – mixed with modern and classic lighting and decorative rugs on walls. "In projects like this, you often start with less and add layers and layers," he says.

Saumarez Smith agrees that good decoration in a classical modern house is a form of storytelling. "The best houses reflect the personality of the people who live there – blending inherited furniture and family pieces, rather than following any single period rulebook."

More like this:

• The historic US home that embodied the super-rich

• The homes revealing how Tudor people lived

• How the Nordics have perfected the summer cabin

Anya Lucas, director of The Georgian Group, is happy to see that classical design is being taken seriously in the 21st Century. "Although our work is mainly concerned with protecting and promoting buildings dating from the 18th or early-19th Centuries," she tells the BBC, "through our architectural awards, we celebrate new design in the spirit of the period."

Perhaps, a classical building is less about history and more about craft. As Hodson Taylor says, "we shouldn't be living in a pastiche of Downton Abbey any more than we should be living on the set of Star Trek". Get the balance right, he says, "take inspiration from one extreme and introduce elements of the other and you can create something that feels… dare I say it… timeless."

The Romance of Classicism: Designing the English Country House for Today by George Saumarez Smith is published by Rizzoli.

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Ramsey mural aims to 'elevate' famous Manx poet

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwly3n09ejeko, yesterday

A new mural in the north of the Isle of Man aims to "celebrate and elevate" a famous Manx poet, the artist behind the project has said.

Located in Parliament Street, Ramsey, the five-metre (16ft) high mural depicts Josephine Kermode, who published her poems, plays and stories under the name Cushag 100 years ago.

Born in 1852, just two doors down from where the mural has been created, Kermode's poems and plays continue to be performed on the island.

Illustrator Jo Davies said: "It was important for me to make an artwork that wasn't just a picture to decorate a wall but to celebrate, and literally elevate a Ramsey-born woman who made an important contribution to Manx culture."

The work incorporates one of Kermode's best-known poems, which celebrates the Manx national flower's beauty and place in Manx folklore.

"If, like me, people passing don't understand the Manx words I hope that they will appreciate them as things of beauty and over time begin to recognise and connect to them as part of their lives," Ramsey-based Davies said.

Having published her first poetry book in 1907, Kermode created a steady stream of poems and plays throughout her lifetime.

James Franklin, from Culture Vannin said: "Although it is certainly a beautiful image which enhances the experience of Parliament Street, this mural is so much more.

"In confidently placing Cushag, her poetry and the Manx language at the centre of it all, this piece by Jo Davies empowers us to connect to one of the island's great poets whilst tying us to the treasure of its language and the sense of place."

The mural is accompanied by a QR code where those passing by can listen to the poem in both English and Manx.

It is part of a year-long celebration of the Manx language, which aims to create a lasting boost to the island's native tongue.

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Alison Hammond returns home from hospital after rushing off This Morning

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr20w7j8jd21o, yesterday

Alison Hammond has said she is home and "feeling so much better" after she went to hospital for a heart check-up after leaving ITV's This Morning midway through Friday's show.

The presenter, 51, left the programme during its live broadcast, appearing to clutch her chest as she was helped off set by co-host Dermot O'Leary. He later told viewers she was "feeling a little unwell".

Soon after Hammond said she had "a little bit of a palpitation" and was undergoing tests.

In a video on Instagram on Saturday, she said she was "all OK, all-clear, which would mean I had a massive panic attack on live TV. I mean, the shame of it."

"It felt very real to me. I'm really new to panic attacks, so I need to learn more about it," she added.

The Birmingham-born presenter, who also co-hosts The Great British Bake Off, thanked NHS staff and her colleagues at This Morning, including O'Leary.

"It's really warmed my heart actually. I didn't necessarily want to be on the news or anything like that but this is a new world to me," she said.

"I'm going to take stock, take some rest and I'll see you soon."

Friday's edition of the ITV show began at 10:00 BST with Hammond and her regular co-host O'Leary at the helm, before she left at 11:30 during a segment about pets.

O'Leary, 53, addressed her absence when the show returned from a break, saying: "Welcome back to This Morning, Alison is feeling a little unwell, so she's just had to duck out. Hopefully she'll be back."

He later updated viewers that she would, in fact, not be returning, "so I'll be here for the rest of the show".

Hammond rose to fame as contestant on Channel 4 reality show Big Brother before appearing on I'm A Celebrity and Strictly Come Dancing.

She became a co-host in This Morning in 2021, and was part of the team that won a National Television Award for best daytime programme the following year.

She joined Bake Off in 2023 and took over from the late Paul O'Grady on For the Love of Dogs in 2024.

Traitors claim their first victim as Richard E Grant tries to save his skin

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czxe30796xno, 2 days ago

* Spoiler warning: This article reveals details from the second episode of The Celebrity Traitors, series two.

A comedian, a journalist, an actor and a TV presenter walk into a church. But sadly, the punchline for one of them was becoming the first victim of this year's Celebrity Traitors.

As Friday's episode got under way, a delicious new twist saw traitors Richard E Grant and Maya Jama invite James Acaster to join them in the turret, and simultaneously murder a fellow player.

Unfortunately, it fell to Amol Rajan to become the Paloma Faith of this series - being taken away in a coffin in episode two before even having the chance to take part in a banishment.

"It's gutting to be the first out," Rajan said afterwards, noting that perhaps it was because he had been "a bit bullish with Richard" earlier in the day.

"But you know what, games are games, and just as there are winners, so there have to be losers."

The episode drew in a peak audience of 8.6 million viewers, just short of the debut episode with an average of 8.9 million viewers.

The morning following Rajan's banishment, presenter Claudia Winkleman confirmed the University Challenge host's murder to the other players, joking: "That's what I call a starter for 10."

Acaster, meanwhile, reflected: "I'm gutted to not be a faithful anymore, I don't like lying. But if I don't join them, they'll kill me." You can't fault his logic.

The decision meant that Grant, an Oscar-nominated actor with a Razzie-worthy traitor strategy, did at least manage to commit one successful murder despite his shambolic first day.

The 69-year-old spent much of Friday's episode trying to repair the damage from his earlier exchange in the bar, where he blurted out that he was a traitor to Joe Lycett, Rob Beckett and several others.

Obviously a man who made such an excellent Spice Girls manager in the 1997 masterpiece Spice World: The Movie is hard for anyone to picture as a traitor, so many other players assumed Grant was attempting some elaborate double bluff.

Jama is off to a much stronger start. "I am quite shocked at my ability to just lie to everyone," the Love Island host said in the castle's diary room. "I'm an all-or-nothing kind of honey."

As the players gathered for breakfast, other theories began to surface. Mathematician Hannah Fry said she had spotted Leigh-Anne Pinnock putting on make-up late in the evening, perhaps heading to the turret.

"I think it's James," declared Jerry Hall, suddenly giving viewers hope that the new cast will be better traitor hunters than last year's. Until she clarified that she was talking about James Blunt, not Acaster.

As the players prepared to head out for the mission, conversations turned to far more important matters. "Do you have more teeth than a normal person?" Grant asked Beckett.

The players made their way to the mission, which had the usual slightly convoluted rules that took Winkleman quite a while to explain.

In a nutshell, the celebrities were to be buried alive in pairs, with only one duo left above ground.

Ross Kemp was pre-selected by the traitors to be protected from burial along with his grave partner Romesh Ranganathan, who did a delightful dance when he found out he wouldn't be going underground.

Kemp and Ranganathan then had the opportunity to dig up some gold graves which would add to the prize pot, or alternatively dig up and free their fellow players.

They opted for the latter, which resulted in some other players struggling to get the soil off their faces. In the end, all the celebrities were released, with the exception of Fry and Hall.

The pair were freed early after Hall shouted the emergency word "Haggis!" – effectively a Scottish version of "I'm a celebrity get me out of here!" - because she was visibly uncomfortable being buried alive.

It might have led to an early release, but it ultimately guaranteed that either she or Fry will be murdered next, unless the traitors recruit again.

"Just you and me up for murder," Fry told Hall afterwards. "You'd better not be a traitor or I'm really screwed!"

In a flashback shown to viewers, Acaster explained the decision to protect Kemp from burial, telling his fellow traitors: "I think if we give it to Ross, he'll overthink it, and behave in a way that would draw suspicion."

Very clever. "You're a wonderful traitor," observed Grant. (Certainly better than him.)

Finally, it was time for the first banishment of the series, with Grant still in damage control mode.

"I have a slight pinprick of advantage," he told himself in the castle's diary room. "Nobody would possibly believe that anybody would be so stupid as to come forward and say 'I am a traitor'. I'm hoping that I do get away with it."

His fellow traitors clearly wanted to be supportive, but things were getting dicey.

Acaster described him as a "loose cannon", while Jama said: "I want to save him, even though he's dug himself the biggest hole imaginable."

Back in the castle, Ranganathan pointed out: "If somebody else had behaved like Richard, we wouldn't even be having a debate about this, you would just go 'you've got to vote for him'."

But others had a slightly different take. "Richard feels a little too easy," reflected actress Myha'la, "and then anybody pushing him feels suspicious to me."

Comedian Joanne McNally agreed some players were "using him as a fall guy and a decoy," although she did admit later that he's "made such a shambles of it now".

As discussions got going, it took a surprisingly long time for Grant's name to come up, as the other players debated other suspects such as Julie Hesmondhalgh.

The actress aroused suspicion because she was the first celebrity this year to receive a shield. The group seemed to have overlooked she only got that - in the opening minutes of the first show - after the other contestants voted her the most trustworthy.

But as discussion turned to Grant, Hesmondhalgh put forward one of the most convincing cases of the night.

"You came into the bar, and said you were a traitor," she told him. "It was a bold move. It was chaotic and we love you for your chaos.

"I think we are at risk of being the most idiotic group of faithfuls in the world, if we go for someone else tonight based on nothing at all, when somebody has come into the room and said 'I am a traitor'. There's no reason to say it unless you are."

Miranda Hart agreed that "the joy when he took off his blindfold" when Winkleman first selected the traitors made Grant look suspicious.

Viewers will have to wait until the next episode to see how the round table goes, as the episode finished before voting had even started.

(It's worth saying that, as cliffhangers go, this was far less irritating than ending an episode in the middle of voting, as producers often do.)

"You've given us all a problem," Ranganathan told Grant as the episode drew to a close and the players prepared to vote. "By doing that, it was a big mistake by you, I feel like you forced our hand."

Admittedly, it's not looking good - the round table is shaping up to be a landslide vote against Grant. But we still wouldn't bet against him.

"I do not go down without a fight," he concluded. "I couldn't have survived showbusiness for four decades without a fight."

Celebrity Traitors continues on Thursday at 20:00 BST on BBC One and iPlayer.

Alison Hammond has heart check-up in hospital after rushing off This Morning while on air

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c60rlwgx9n9go, 3 days ago

Alison Hammond went to hospital for a heart check-up after leaving ITV's This Morning midway through Friday's show, but has assured followers she is "fine".

The presenter, 51, left the programme during its live broadcast, appearing to clutch her chest as she was assisted off the set by co-host Dermot O'Leary. He later told viewers she was "feeling a little unwell".

In a video posted from a hospital bed on Friday afternoon, Hammond said she had "a little bit of a palpitation" during the show but was feeling OK and was undergoing tests.

"I know you're all worried about me," she said. "Honestly, I am fine. First of all, I'm getting my old ticker checked out."

She continued: "I had a little bit of a palpitation, and now I'm getting it all checked out. But I think I'm OK. I'm hoping it was just a little panic attack or something like that."

The Birmingham-born presenter, who also co-hosts The Great British Bake Off, thanked This Morning's viewers for sending her "lovely messages" while apologising for her dramatic early exit.

"I'm so sorry I left you," she added. "I would never normally do that. I would never leave a TV show, so you know I wasn't very well.

"But hopefully I'm going to be all right. The doctors are so lovely, and they're checking me out, and hopefully everything's going to be fine.

"Everything is fine, look. I'm rocking it. Look how good I look," she joked, noting how she was still wearing her make-up from the show.

Friday's edition of the ITV show began at 10:00 BST with Hammond and her regular co-host O'Leary at the helm, before she left at 11:30 during a segment about pets.

He later updated viewers that she would, in fact, not be returning, "so I'll be here for the rest of the show".

Hammond initially rose to fame as contestant on Channel 4 reality show Big Brother before appearing on I'm A Celebrity and Strictly Come Dancing.

She became a co-host in This Morning in 2021, and was part of the team that won a National Television Award for best daytime programme the following year.

She joined Bake Off in 2023 and took over from the late Paul O'Grady on For the Love of Dogs in 2024.

Verity to Digger: 12 of the best films to watch this October

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260923-12-of-the-best-films-to-watch-this-october, 11 days ago

From a dark thriller adapted from a Colleen Hoover novel to a satirical farce about an eccentric oil billionaire, here are the films to watch and stream at home this month.

1. Digger

Tom Cruise has spent the last decade becoming Hollywood's premier action hero, showing off his daredevil stunts – and his energetic running – in Mission: Impossible, Jack Reacher and The Mummy. But now, it seems, he's ready for a change. His new film, Digger, is a bizarre satirical farce from Alejandro G Iñárritu, the Mexican director of Amores Perros, Birdman and The Revenant. Cruise – yes, that's him beneath the prosthetic make-up – plays an eccentric oil billionaire named Digger Rockwell. His company has caused a climate change-related catastrophe, so the US president (John Goodman) gives him the job of undoing the damage, with the help of his sister (Sandra Hüller) and a government scientist (Riz Ahmed). Can he save the world? And will audiences pay to see Cruise swearing and clowning, rather than jumping off buildings?

Released on 1 and 2 October internationally

2. Sense and Sensibility

Ang Lee's 1995 film of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility was nominated for seven Oscars, so it's brave of anyone to make another big-screen version of the same novel. On the other hand, Austen fever is raging once again. In December, there's a new Netflix mini-series of Pride and Prejudice, and this month sees the release of a wistful, atmospheric Sense and Sensibility directed by Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean). Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles star as the Dashwood sisters, who are pushed out of their family home after their father's death. George Mackay, Herbert Nordrum and Frank Dillane play the sisters' suitors, Edward Ferrars, Colonel Brandon and John Willoughby. And Fiona Shaw steals the show as their hearty benefactor, Mrs Jennings. The BBC's Molly Gorman says that the film is "visually stunning, and the naturalistic cinematography of England's countryside sets a romantic tone".

Released on 16 October in the US and Canada, and internationally throughout October

3. Verity

Verity is the fourth film in the last three years to be adapted from a Colleen Hoover novel – the biggest one being 2024's mega-hit, It Ends with Us – but it has its own darkly thrilling tone. Anne Hathaway stars as the titular Verity, an author who is left comatose by a car accident, halfway through writing the final novel in her best-selling series. Her husband (Josh Hartnett) hires a ghost-writer (Dakota Johnson) to finish the job, but once she moves into the couple's house, she suspects that Verity might not be as badly injured as she appears. "It's way different than the other Colleen Hoover books," Hartnett said in an interview with Lauren Veneziani. "It's sexy, it's mysterious and it's a little bit gothic and a little bit scary, and it's wild. And I think it's going to be surprising for audiences."

Released on 1 and 2 October internationally

4. Other Mommy

This Halloween's creepiest-looking horror film has an impeccable pedigree. It's adapted from a novel by Josh Malerman (Bird Box), directed by Rob Savage (Host), and produced by James Wan (Saw, Insidious, and countless other Hollywood chillers). It also offers two Jessica Chastain performances for the price of one. She plays Ursula, who is devoted to their eight-year-old daughter, Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark). And she plays Ursula's demonic doppelganger, who talks to Bela when no one else is around. "The whole thesis of this book is, well, what if this actually happened to you and your family?" Savage said in Empire. "What would you actually do? What decisions would you make, that aren't movie decisions? Real-life decisions."

Released on 8 and 9 October internationally

5. The Social Reckoning

The Social Network was one of the best films of 2010. Written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, it was a sparklingly intelligent drama about the founding of Facebook (now Meta), and all the legal wrangles that followed. Now comes a sequel of sorts. Once again scripted by Sorkin, who has also taken over as director, The Social Reckoning tells the true story of Frances Haugen, a Facebook employee who leaked an internal document revealing the harm caused by social media. Haugen is played by Mikey Madison, in her first role since she won the best actress Oscar for Anora. Jesse Eisenberg isn't returning as Mark Zuckerberg, but Jeremy Strong from Succession is a worthy replacement. Sorkin said in the New York Times that Strong effectively became Zuckerberg while they were filming. "I told all the other actors in his scenes: 'Guys... he is going to treat you the way he imagines Mark treats the people around him.' And that's what happened. You cannot argue with the results."

Released on 9 October in the US, Canada, UK and Ireland

6. Wicker

What's a medieval fisherwoman to do when she is too smelly to attract a potential husband? In this bawdy romantic fantasy, adapted by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson from Ursula Wills-Jones's short story, the answer is simple: the fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) pays her village's basket-maker (Peter Dinklage) to weave her a husband out of twigs. The plan works remarkably well. Not only does the wicker man (Alexander Skarsgård) come to life, but he proves to be a caring and attentive partner. But what will the locals make of this unlikely match? "Wicker is a wild surprise of a film," says Gregory Nussen in Screenrant, "an endlessly beautiful fairy tale brought to life by yet another astounding performance by Olivia Colman and exquisitely shot and designed."

Released on 23 October in the US, and on 30 October in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Spain

7. Fjord

Fjord was the winner of this year's Palme d'Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. And if there was a prize for the most controversial film, Cristian Mungiu's drama would have won that, too. Sebastian Stan (Marvel's Winter Soldier) and Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value) play a couple – one Romanian, one Norwegian – who move with their five children to a remote village in Norway. The locals are suspicious of the newcomers' intense Christianity. And when one of the children is seen with bruises on her face, her parents have to defend themselves against charges of child abuse. "Mungiu has pulled off… a subversive act in this age of rightward drift and intolerance," says David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter, "just by making the conservative Christians unimpeachable compared to the insufferably holier-than-thou finger-pointing liberals."

Released on 9 October in the US, 16 October in Canada, and 13 November in the UK

8. Possible Love

Eight years on from Lee Chang-dong's last film, Burning, the Korean writer-director returns with another piercingly sharp picture of power dynamics and social divisions. It's a drama about two couples, one of them (Cho Yeo-jeong and Zo In-sung) comfortably wealthy, and the other one (Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu) struggling ever since the husband lost his factory job. When the middle-class woman starts making a documentary about her working-class counterpart, the film raises uncomfortable questions about the connections and the barriers between them. "It all makes for a slower burn, less tumultuous companion piece to Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice and Bong Joon-ho's Parasite," says Phil de Semlyen in Time Out. "Together, they form a bleak triptych of modern fables that show society stratifying in increasingly insurmountable ways."

Released on 23 October in the UK, US, Ireland, Canada and Japan (and then on Netflix in November)

9. Tenzing

Edmund Hillary tends to be remembered as the first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest in May 1953, but the final ascent was a two-man effort that relied on a Nepalese-Indian Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay. Jennifer Peedom's spectacular adventure, Tenzing, concentrates on Norgay (Genden Phuntsok) – although his friendship with Hillary (Tom Hiddleston) is central to the inspirational story. Oddly enough, it's not the only film set on the slopes of Mount Everest this October. There's also Everest: The Other Side (released on 30 October in the US), a breathtaking documentary from Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo, Nyad). Climbing the highest mountain in the world isn't enough for its subjects, Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson. They want to scale Everest's steep north face – and then ski all the way back down. Vertigo sufferers should give both films a miss.

Released on 9 October in the US and UK, and on 16 October on Apple TV

10. Street Fighter

A Minecraft Movie, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Resident Evil, Five Nights at Freddy's… films based on video games have been bigger than ever in the 2020s, so it's no surprise that Capcom's beloved hand-to-hand combat game is getting another shot at the big screen. But will this version pack a bigger punch than the 1994 attempt with Kylie Minogue and Jean-Claude Van Damme? The good news is that the actors look the part, including Noah Centineo and Andrew Koji, plus Jason Momoa as the green-skinned Blanka. And it seems to have an appropriately surreal, comedic spirit, thanks to Kitao Sakurai, the director of Bad Trip and The Eric André Show. "Everybody wanted to get behind creating a movie that didn't feel like an off-the-shelf video-game movie," Sakurai said in Empire. "I was brought on to make something that didn't feel conventional, and they really let me do my thing."

Released on 15 and 16 October internationally

11. La Bola Negra

La Bola Negra is directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, aka Los Javis, but most cinema-goers will be more familiar with its producer, Pedro Almodóvar, and its guest star, Penélope Cruz, who has a dazzling cameo as a 1930s cabaret star. An homage to a lost novel by the great Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, it's a lavish period drama that cuts between 1932, 1937 and 2017, as a young gay academic explores how queer history has been erased in Spain. "This decades-spanning love odyssey is as impressive as it is moving," says Rafa Sales Ross in Little White Lies, "grabbing at the visceral nature of Lorca's genre-bending work to mould its staggeringly boisterous cinematic equivalent."

Released on 16 October in the US and Canada, and on 6 November in the UK

12. Musk

Alex Gibney, the director of the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, has made what could be his masterpiece: a four-hour documentary about the world's richest man, Elon Musk. It's an epic saga that covers Musk's evolution from Silicon Valley wannabe to car manufacturer to controversial trillionaire. Musk himself has dismissed it as "a hit piece that misses and makes the fatal sin of being boring", but he could be biased. Whether or not you're a fan of the tycoon, this explosive profile is anything but boring. Owen Gleiberman in Variety calls it "a lacerating and important watch, grounded in Alex Gibney's supremely insightful but user-friendly mastery of the documentary form".

Released on 16 October in the US

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'It changed my life': Ethan Hawke on his role in tense 2001 drama Tape

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260924-ethan-hawke-interview-close-up, 4 days ago

The Hollywood star played a drug dealer in this dark, claustrophobic thriller. For the BBC's Close Up Film series, he reflects on the surprising part that means the most to him in his career.

The painfully shy schoolboy who finds his voice in Dead Poets Society. The cynical musician in Reality Bites, which made him a poster boy for Generation X. The doubt-filled alcoholic priest of First Reformed. And the brilliant but wounded lyricist Lorenz Hart in Blue Moon, which gave him his first best actor Oscar nomination at the age of 54.

They are among the many roles that Ethan Hawke has played during a 40-year acting career, and this week sees the UK release of his latest film, The Weight, an adventure drama set during the Great Depression. Hawke plays a convict, Murphy, who strikes a deal to smuggle gold through the Oregon wilderness in exchange for being freed from a labour camp.

But when asked to name the film role that has been most significant to him, he chooses a surprising film from his extensive CV.

"If I had to pick a film role that changed my life, it would be Tape," Hawke tells the BBC, referring to the low-budget claustrophobic 2001 drama he made with his regular collaborator, director Richard Linklater.

A career turning point

"I would say that film was my entrance to adult acting. I was about to turn 30 years old, so I was becoming a grown up. And it was when digital video was a brand new technology. Linklater and I were really excited about how this new form was going to change movies. We went and made this really simple film which takes place inside one motel room."

Shot in six days using handheld digital-video cameras, the 86-minute film stars Hawke, his then wife Uma Thurman and his Dead Poets Society co-star Robert Sean Leonard. Hawke plays Vince, a part-time drug dealer who secretly records an old friend, film-maker Jon (Leonard), confessing to raping Amy (Thurman), a former classmate once involved with both men. When Amy arrives at the motel where Vince and Jon have met up, their competing accounts of the past unravel.

Visually, the film is an unsettling experience, as the cameras prowl around the room, making the viewer feel trapped in the space with the characters.

"We got to work in a very different way than we'd ever done before because of the way these cameras worked," Hawke says. "There was no laziness. No one really wants to see a film set in one room. We knew we had to be laser sharp, precise and funny."

He adds that the existing intimacy between himself, Thurman and Leonard gave momentum to the process.

"The three of us were friends, and it allowed the rehearsal process to get deep very quickly," he says. "Every film has an interesting subconscious, and Linklater thought there was a subtext in myself and Robert Sean Leonard having famously played high school roommates in Dead Poets Society. Tape is a film set 10 years out of school."

One critic said at the time that Tape had released Hawke's "inner actor". Hawke says that the film also prepared him for the significant role that followed, as idealistic rookie cop Jake Hoyt in 2001's Training Day, opposite Denzel Washington. His performance gave Hawke the first of his two nominations for the best supporting actor Oscar.

"I did Tape right before Training Day, and I remember feeling so grateful that I'd had that experience, because Denzel was the most remarkable artist I'd ever worked with," he says. "His imagination is so powerful, and his charisma is so all-engaging. Training Day put everything I had learned to the test."

Hawke and Linklater have enjoyed a 30-year screen collaboration spanning nine films. The first was 1995's romantic drama Before Sunrise, part of a trilogy that subsequently included Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013): both of these earned Hawke a shared Oscar nomination with Linklater and co-star Julie Delpy for best screenplay. Their latest project together was 2025's Blue Moon.

Hawke explains that in 2000, when they made Tape, "we'd already made three films together and I didn't have to earn somebody's trust. We could just dive into the deep end right away and experiment with the form."

"I knew that when I met Linklater, I was meeting somebody who was absolutely unique," he adds. "He's 66 years old now and just as playful and inventive as ever, and you can never predict what he's going to do next."

His acting eras

Looking back, Hawke says that he divides his career into chapters, "because I've been acting since I was 14. Parts have unlocked a different part of me or a different chapter of my relationship to acting. The obvious thing is that Dead Poets Society gave me a career, but then Reality Bites changed what that career looked like, because suddenly everything was about 'Gen X'. And then Training Day happened and unlocked something else. But then I had developed so much confidence from Tape – the film had made me an adult actor."

More like this:

• Digger review: Tom Cruise takes the 'biggest risk of his career'

• 12 of the best films to watch this October

• Four things Jane Austen adaptations get wrong

Even after nearly 40 years of success, Hawke says there are still types of roles he's yet to play – although The Weight allowed him to tick off one of them. "I'd never been asked to play an old-fashioned good guy before like Murphy. I don't understand why not. I felt like I didn't see them very much any more in movies. I wanted to try something different and put some soul into it."

The film, directed by Padraic McKinley (a producer and editor on the series The Good Lord Bird, which Hawke starred in), has Russell Crowe playing a corrupt warden of a work camp, who offers Murphy a deal to smuggle gold in return for his freedom and to be reunited with his young daughter.

The actor says he was longing for the experience it offered. "You'd never make a movie like this unless you wanted adventure in the outdoors," he says. "We made it last summer in the Bavarian Forest and we didn't have much money, but we had a mission. It was to make an old-fashioned action film; the kind I had a dream of making when I was a kid. You hear about the shooting of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or Bogart and Huston doing The African Queen. You hear about these grand adventures the actors had. I was longing for that."

A quarter of a century after Tape was released, Hawke is now in a position himself to help similarly boundary-pushing and experimental films get produced. In fact, he says he's always asking himself the question: "What movies should [I] help get made? You need to keep looking for things that you think are worth somebody's time, combined with what is going to push you forward."

"But," he adds, "one of the things that's so interesting about getting older is that it really just seems like one lifetime is not enough. The more you learn, the more you realise you didn't know."

The Weight is released in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 2 October 2026.

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A Great Book with Barack Obama to Intimacy: 18 of the best podcasts of 2026 so far

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260318-the-best-podcasts-of-2026, 5 days ago

From the former US president discussing books to a provocative drama written by and starring Game of Thrones' Lena Headey – here's the best new podcasts for you to listen to and watch.

1. Where Is Austin Tice?

Fourteen years ago, the US marine-turned-journalist Austin Tice disappeared in Syria shortly after his 31st birthday. As the years went by many assumed he had been murdered, though new evidence suggests he might be alive. This co-production between NPR and the BBC finds journalists Josh Baker and Sara Obeidat going in search of Tice in Syria shortly after the fall of Bashar al-Assad. Taking in espionage, cover-ups and the barbaric activities of a ruthless regime, the series has the tension of a thriller, not least because the hosts frequently put themselves in danger in their quest for answers.

Listen on BBC Sounds in the UK and NPR in the US

2. A Great Book with Barack Obama

This new series unites two passions of the former president of the United States: books and audio. A Great Book features conversations with contemporary thinkers and writers including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jill Lepore, Lauren Groff and Percival Everett. The opening episode brings star wattage in the form of Tom Hanks, with whom Obama discusses Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, about a dying pastor. It provides a springboard for warmly engaging reflections from host and guest on ageing, mortality and not taking things for granted when you've got "a finite number of sunsets left".

3. Intimacy

Audio drama has come a long way since the days of creaking doors and nails-down-a-blackboard acting, as demonstrated by this topical drama starring Lena Headey, Maisie Williams, Hannah Waddingham and Alison Steadman. Written and directed by Headey, Intimacy follows Liza, an intimacy co-ordinator for film and TV, who takes on a last-minute and potentially career-changing job, only to encounter assorted red flags when she gets on set. Darkly funny but with serious themes, Intimacy brings nuance and compassion to discussions around consent and trauma.

Listen on BBC Sounds in the UK or BBC.com outside the UK

4. The Mindhunter

Paul Harrison is a charismatic criminal profiler and ex-police officer who worked with the FBI on the Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson cases and had tête-à-têtes with the Yorkshire Ripper – or so he claims. Harrison's storied career has also led him to write a best-selling book and deliver talks to rapt true-crime enthusiasts. So intrigued were journalist Francisco Garcia and producer Brenna Daldorph by Harrison's story that they decided to do some digging. What they uncover in this twisty, madcap investigation goes to the heart of our dubious fascination with true crime and the flaws in today's publishing industry.

Listen on Audible

5. Legend: The Miles Davis Story

This is the latest instalment of the BBC's Legend series which has already examined the lives and legacies of Joni Mitchell and Bruce Springsteen. The Miles Davis Story is presented by The Wire actor Clarke Peters, whose life was changed by Davis's 1970 album Bitches Brew. Peters explores the many facets of Davis: the genius and jazz pioneer; the cruel lover and husband; the rebel who refused to stay in his lane; the addict. "For Miles, the only thing that mattered was the next note, the next era," says Peters.

Listen on BBC Sounds in the UK or BBC.com outside the UK

6. Death of an Artist

In 2024 the celebrated children's author Petra Mathers and her photographer husband Michael Mathers died in their home in Oregon in what appeared to be a meticulously planned double suicide. Days before their deaths, they sent out letters saying goodbye to friends and loved ones. In Death of the Artist, another married couple, journalists Alice Gregory and Leon Neyfakh, talk to the recipients of those letters. From this intimate testimony, they build a thoughtful and moving series about life, creativity and the impact of suicide on those left behind.

Listen on Pushkin

7. What To Carry On, What to Burn

The long-distance dogsledder and adventurer Blair Braverman tells true stories of survival from history. We hear about a Frenchman who, having survived childhood poverty and cholera, was shipwrecked on an island in the South Pacific for 18 months; an Alaskan seamstress who joined an Arctic expedition and was stranded alone for eight months in Wrangel Island, north of Siberia; and a twentysomething artist and plane crash survivor who descended a mountain with a gash in her leg and a fractured arm and walked to safety. Braverman is a natural storyteller, and these epic tales of endurance are gripping and immersive.

Listen on Acast

8. Manifesto

Dan Taberski, the podcaster behind the excellent 9/12 and Missing Richard Simmons, investigates the chequered history of political manifestos. These written calls to arms sometimes promote violence and hatred (the Norwegian killer Anders Breivik and the Unabomber both penned manifestos) but they can also be documents of hope composed by dreamers and idealists. Taberski brings wryness and depth to this six-parter in which he meets leading lights of the Occupy movement, Riot Grrrl music scene and the New Hampshire free state movement. What binds them is their optimism, conviction and a desire to challenge the status quo.

Listen on Audible

9. Intrigue: To Catch a King

This is the follow-up to 2024's award-winning podcast To Catch a Scorpion, which saw journalist Sue Mitchell and ex-soldier and aid worker Rob Lawrie investigating the traffickers who send dangerously overcrowded dinghies across the English Channel, often with tragic consequences. Their work led to the arrest of the "scorpion" in question: trafficking kingpin Barzan Majeed.

Now Mitchell and Lawrie have another smuggler in their sights, who operates under the false name Kardo Ranya. The presenting team are relentless and dogged, and their investigation is tense, difficult and full of surprises. But they also never lose sight of the stories of individuals undertaking dangerous journeys for the promise of a better life.

Listen on BBC Sounds in the UK or BBC.com outside the UK

10. The Idiot

This narrative series from Serial Productions – the company founded by the creators of true-crime behemoth Serial – tells the story of Allen, described by the series' host M Gessen as "a clown, a blowhard, a pompous ass".

Allen is Gessen's first cousin and, we learn, a world-class show-off given to bragging about his jet-setting lifestyle. But when he turns up at his uncle's house in Cape Cod with his five-year-old son in tow, Gessen suspects Allen has taken the boy from his mother against her wishes. What begins as a run-of-the-mill family drama turns into an in-depth and atmospheric character study of a man high on entitlement and a misplaced sense of injustice.

Listen at the New York Times

11. Hit That Perfect Beat: The London Records Story

Hit That Perfect Beat is the story of London Records, a British label which launched The Communards, Bananarama, Shakespears Sister, Fine Young Cannibals, Goldie, Orbital, All Saints and many more. But it's really the story of the wider music industry in the 1980s and 90s, and a culture of hedonism, money and chart domination that flourished until streaming devastated the business.

Presented by former Smash Hits journalist Siân Pattenden, the podcast is a delightful, nostalgia-soaked hopscotch through the history of this once overachieving company and its biggest signings. Wild stories of egotism and excess abound.

Listen on Acast

12. The Girlfriends: Trust Me Babe

Never underestimate the power of women talking amongst themselves. This is the main takeaway from The Girlfriends: Trust Me Babe. Hosted by the reporter Anna Sinfeld, the series tracks the case built against the Minnesotan romance scammer Derek Alldred by the women he conned out of thousands of dollars.

The crimes recounted in Trust Me Babe are unsettling, but this is ultimately a feel-good tale and a rousing paean to female solidarity. It shows women overcoming their trauma and police indifference to stop others from enduring the same nightmare.

Listen on Apple podcasts

13. A History of the United States in 100 Objects

Fans of the US podcast 99% Invisible, about the hidden inventions that help the world run smoothly, will know the concept behind this podcast, which aims to document the seemingly innocuous artefacts that tell the story of the US as it reaches its 250th birthday.

As with 99% Invisible, the host is Roman Mars, the journalist and podcaster known for his gently quizzical style. Rather than examining museum pieces, he focuses on lesser-known items such as a screw thread – the spiral groove on the outside of screws that became standardised during World War Two – and the Century Safe, a time capsule that was sealed in 1876 and opened a century later.

Listen on BBC Sounds in the UK and BBC.com outside the UK

14. Get Birding with Sean Bean

Birdwatching podcast Get Birding has been around for several years, capitalising on the vogue for slow radio: gentle and meditative audio that is the antidote to our often hectic and noisy lives. Now the series has relaunched with a new host, the Yorkshire-based actor Sean Bean, star of Game of Thrones. Bean has been a keen birdwatcher since childhood and now spends many happy hours in his garden gazing at the wildlife.

Each episode has a loose theme, from bird-friendly gardening to the joy of nest boxes. There are also assorted guests including folk singer Sam Lee, Elbow's Guy Garvey and YouTuber Kwesia aka City Girl in Nature. But the greatest delight lies in hearing Bean waxing lyrical about our feathered friends. His reading of Blackbird, the poem by John Drinkwater, is truly a balm for the soul.

Listen on Acast and watch on YouTube

15. Shadow World: Impulsive

It might seem a tall order to ask listeners to empathise with people afflicted by urges that are harmful to themselves and others. But in Impulsive, the latest in the BBC's Shadow World strand, which shines a light on hidden or untold stories, Noel Titheradge does just that. The series reveals how dopamine agonist drugs, a medication prescribed for people living with Parkinson's, can cause impulse control disorders and lead users to compulsively shop, gamble, steal or fixate about sex.

It's a reflection of Titheradge's careful reporting and interviewing style that he has managed to persuade those affected to put aside any shame and tell their stories. We meet Steve, who began staying up all night talking to cam girls; Freddie, whose father suddenly blew his life savings on overseas property; and Lucy, who began an affair with a stranger she met online.

Listen on BBC Sounds in the UK or BBC.com outside the UK

16. Blood Memory

While serving a life sentence for double murder, Californian Michael Lynne Thompson joined the neo-Nazi prison gang Aryan Brotherhood, though later left and testified against its members. He remains one of the few to have done so who has lived to tell the tale. Blood Memory finds Thompson telling his story almost uninterrupted, save for the testimony of a prosecutor and court mitigator.

This intimate, detailed and richly sound-designed mini-series features on Nick van der Kolk's Love + Radio, a podcast about the vastness of human experience and featuring in-depth conversations with unusual people. Van der Kolk is the interviewer, though he keeps his interjections to a minimum. Thompson is a complex figure: a man of rare charisma who was born into a life of neglect and poverty and claims to have lived a life of violence as a means of survival. Is he a victim of circumstance or a skilled self-publicist and master manipulator?

Listen at loveandradio.org

17. Creation Myth

When the Belgian audio producer Helena de Groot got together with her American partner, David, she told him emphatically that she didn't want children. She told him again just before they got married in San Francisco. David seemed to accept her decision, saying he wanted to be with her more than he wanted a baby. But as the years went by, he began trying to change her mind.

In Creation Myth, De Groot ponders the question: to breed or not to breed? A compellingly raw audio memoir, it moves from present to past and back again as it documents its creator's innermost anxieties about motherhood. Now, from the vantage point of her forties, De Groot finds herself questioning her own convictions and weighing the impact of her decision on herself, her friendships and her marriage.

Listen at cbc.ca

18. City of Lights

In 2002, in Aurora, Illinois, Al and Mary Ann Signorelli's 21-year-old son Jeff was shot dead at a social gathering in what seemed a random act of violence. No arrests were made and the case remains unsolved, but this podcast which is written, produced and hosted by Willy Nast, isn't a whodunnit. Decades in the making, City of Lights is a thoughtful and empathetic account of the aftermath of a murder and what happens to those left behind.

For the Signorellis, coming to terms with their grief meant trying to fix the apathetic political and social systems that had allowed violent crime to flourish in their city. Nast is no impartial observer: he grew up in Aurora and knew Jeff Signorelli, albeit vaguely. That he is so embroiled in the story makes for a heartfelt portrait of a city and a couple whose determination and resilience take your breath away.

Listen at willynast.com

This story was updated on 20 Mar to reflect details about Michael Lynne Thompson's case from the Blood Memory podcast.

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Digger review: Tom Cruise takes the 'biggest risk of his career' in this 'love-it-or-hate-it' folly ★★★★☆

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260929-digger-review, 6 days ago

Tom Cruise's performance as a bizarre oil tycoon makes Digger the "weirdest film he's ever made" – and it could be a flop. But there's much more to this divisive, satirical comedy than viewers might expect, including two high-concept twists.

Tom Cruise does things that seem terrifying to the rest of us, whether it's clinging to the sides of planes or riding motorbikes off the tops of cliffs. But his new film is the biggest risk of his career. He isn't in danger of breaking any bones, for a change, but he is in danger of being called pretentious and self-indulgent – as well as being associated with what could well be a humungous flop.

Directed and co-written by Alejandro G Iñárritu, the Mexican director of Amores Perros, Birdman and The Revenant, Digger isn't just the weirdest film Cruise has ever made, it's the weirdest film that almost anyone has ever made.

Most people won't go to see it – and some people who do will walk out halfway through. But that doesn't mean that Digger is a failure. It's just that it's a bizarre, hectoring, conceptually challenging eco-satire, so it's not likely to be mistaken for Mission: Impossible.

The first way in which it departs from Cruise's recent work is that his character, Digger Rockwell, isn't an athletic, ageless, roguish-yet-noble hero. With a mountain of prosthetic make-up, and someone listed in the end credits as "T Cruise's hair artist", the actor has transformed himself into a balding, greying, paunchy Texan oil baron. And we get to see just how paunchy he is when he is shown in his underwear in a cheeky homage to one of Cruise's breakthrough films, Risky Business.

It's the kind of extreme makeover that is amusing in small doses – such as when Cruise cameoed as the monstrous Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder – but for the main character to look so jarringly strange is quite a choice.

Still, nothing in Digger is subtle. Rockwell's historic mansion is decorated with more stuffed exotic animals than a Victorian natural history museum, but (irony!) he's deeply worried about the health of his scrawny pet cat. He has some feelings, then: he's also fond of his half-sister, a green-energy entrepreneur played by a gravely under-used Sandra Hüller. But this swaggering mogul doesn't care about anything except money – and he cares about the environment least of all.

When an underling calls Rockwell to say that his company's oil-drilling operation in Alaska has cracked a glacier in two, he responds by feigning ignorance, laughing off the problem, ranting about all the jobs he's created, and furiously passing the buck.

But reality hits when an iceberg the size of a small country splits from the glacier and starts drifting towards northern Europe. In a matter of days, a tsunami will put several major cities under water.

The blowhard US president, played by John Goodman, convenes an emergency meeting in Rockwell's mansion, so a dozen white men in suits and military uniforms are soon sitting around a table, shouting and swearing (there's a nice joke about the absence of women in the room).

A scientist, played with heartfelt distress by the excellent Riz Ahmed, struggles to get them to understand the situation, but eventually they settle on a plan. They will use their military might to change the iceberg's direction. And if that doesn't work, maybe they will take control of the narrative so that a US company isn't blamed for the subsequent devastation. The main thing, the president's religious adviser assures them, is that God is on their side.

What's fascinating about the scenario is that it would have seemed embarrassingly over-the-top a few years ago, but now seems as plausible as a documentary. The iceberg story is appalling, but it could fit next to any article about El Niño.

Judged purely a satire, then, Digger is powerfully resonant. But there is more to it than that. The film has two high-concept twists which raise new questions about everything you've seen so far. I won't reveal any more. All I'll say is that the first full-length trailer looked so exaggerated and artificial that some people wondered if Iñárritu had actually made a musical. The truth is even more surprising.

Iñárritu is a multiple Oscar-winner, and Leonardo DiCaprio won his Oscar for starring in The Revenant, so some commentators (me included) assumed that the project was a blatant attempt by Cruise to bag one for himself. (Aside from being given an honorary Oscar at last year's Governors Awards, he has never won anything on the big night.)

But Digger puts paid to that theory. If Cruise was driven to win prizes, he wouldn't have made a film as eccentric or as politically blunt as this one. Rather than being a crowd-pleasing prestige picture, it's a love-it-or-hate-it folly – and there probably will be more people in the "hate it" camp than the "love it" one.

Personally, I loved it. Some of its excesses are, well, a bit too excessive, and most viewers will wish it was shorter. After about 90 minutes, you get tired of close-ups of Goodman yelling while snake-sized veins bulge out of his forehead. But when Cruise is clambering all over the set, delivering thunderous lectures on the oil industry, I couldn't help grinning at the gargantuan scale of his performance, the conviction of the script's grim environmental message, and Iñárritu's antic style.

If this art-house extravaganza had featured an actor known for left-field indie films, it would have been lauded as a daring experiment. But as it features the actor at the very top of Hollywood's A-list, many viewers will wonder what he was thinking.

But you have to hand it to Cruise. When he's making an action blockbuster, he wants it to showcase the most outrageous stunts ever seen. And when he's making an oddball apocalyptic tragicomedy, he goes for it with the same limitless, daredevil ambition.

★★★★☆

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'No one showed any sign of remorse': The heroic US lawyer who put Nazi death squad members on trial at Nuremberg

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260925-the-us-lawyer-who-put-nazis-on-trial-at-nuremberg, 8 days ago

On 29 September 1947, the "biggest murder trial in history" began. Seventy years on, the chief prosecutor, Ben Ferencz, told the BBC how he fought to bring 22 killers to justice.

"I wrote somewhere that I had peered into hell – I think hell would be paradise compared to what I saw."

In 2017, Ben Ferencz told the BBC about witnessing harrowing scenes at the Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of World War Two – an experience that led to his becoming, aged 27, the youngest US prosecutor at the war crimes trials in Nuremberg.

Warning: This article contains details of war crimes that some may find upsetting.

A Hungarian-Jewish New Yorker who signed up for the Army as soon as he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1943, Ferencz landed on the beaches at Normandy. Later, as a war crimes investigator, he was one of the first US troops to enter the newly liberated Nazi death camps. He preferred not to discuss those memories, as he told Zeinab Badawi in 2017. "I don't like to talk about it much because I have difficulty controlling my own emotions."

Yet even at the age of 97, he was able to recount what he'd seen in detail. "I can describe it to you quite vividly because the recollection is very firm in my mind. But at the same time, you'll never understand what it was like because the rational human mind can't quite grasp it." He remembered seeing bodies on the ground as he entered Buchenwald, and prisoners so emaciated that they were "skeletons dressed in rags".

When Ferencz returned to New York in 1945, the Pentagon (the headquarters of the US Department of Defence) asked if he could help with the trials taking place in Nuremberg. "The United States particularly felt that the International Military Tribunal against Hermann Göring was just a camera shot of a small sampling," he said.

"And in order to really understand how a civilised country like Germany could commit and tolerate the type of atrocities which were committed, you should understand the position of the doctors who performed medical experiments, the lawyers and judges who perverted the law, the SS murderers, of course, who did the actual killings, the industrialists who were working people to death. All of these were specific groups."

Ferencz was assigned to "take a sampling from each of these groups" to help explain their actions. He flew to Berlin, where he and a team of about 50 researchers scoured the Nazi archives for evidence of the crimes committed by Germans from all walks of life.

Then his team made an unexpected discovery. "One of my researchers… came upon the daily reports from these special extermination squads whose job it was to kill, without pity or remorse, every single Jewish man, woman and child they could lay their hands on… and any other perceived or suspected opponents of the Reich."

The researchers had found evidence of killings by what were called Einsatzgruppen, or mobile death squads that followed the German army as it occupied countries. It was estimated that up to 3,000 German men had been members of the killing units, conducting mass shooting operations in places including Poland and the Soviet Union.

Ferencz believed that Einsatzgruppen members should be put in the dock at Nuremberg, each one charged with mass murder – but he soon hit a hurdle. "No such trial had been planned. I flew down from Berlin to Nuremberg, talked to General Telford Taylor [the chief US prosecutor for the war crimes trials], and he said, 'We can't put on this trial now because all the lawyers are already assigned. The trials are in process. The Pentagon hasn't approved it. I doubt if they will approve it.'"

Proof beyond any doubt

Ferencz was determined, however. "I said, 'I have here in my hand examples of mass murder on a scale never before seen in human history. You can't let these guys go.' [Taylor] said, 'Can you do it in addition to your other work?' And I said, 'Sure.' And I did… It was an accident that I was a chief prosecutor."

He explained how he selected the accused according to a set of criteria. The first was that they had to be in captivity, since "if you've got the evidence and you haven't got the prisoner, you've got nothing". He didn't want to just prosecute the foot soldiers, though. "I picked those of the highest rank and then checked out their background from their Nazi Party records, which we captured in Berlin. Those who had doctor degrees or were generals, they got priority."

Even then, he could prosecute only a small fraction of the perpetrators. "Of the 3,000, all of whom were complicit in mass murder… I picked out 22. Why not 28? Because we only had 22 seats in the dock. Is that absurd? Of course it's absurd. There were only 22 seats in the dock for Herman Göring and company. So you have a selection of a sampling. That's all it is."

He recognised the trial's limitations at the time. "I never anticipated or tried to do justice in the broad sense of holding every criminal accountable. It would have been a practical impossibility."

More like this:

• How fascist 'Lord Haw-Haw' was tried for treason

• The Nazi war criminal's trial that shook the world

• How music saved a cellist's life in Auschwitz

Ferencz was careful when selecting each man to ensure that his team had proof beyond any doubt of the defendant's guilt. "I had his report, top secret, to his commanders, saying how many people [he'd] executed." Although he acknowledged the reports might not have been entirely accurate – "they exaggerated the body count" – he said that the defence that the men were just following their superiors' orders was "baloney", because they'd followed orders "with such enthusiasm, they wanted to brag about how many they killed".

All of the defendants pleaded not guilty, said Ferencz. "No one ever showed any sign of remorse whatsoever… These men wrote the darkest page in human history. People were murdered because they didn't share the race, the colour, and the ideology of their executioners. I appealed for a rule of law which would, in future, protect people from that type of atrocity."

The Associated Press called it "the biggest murder trial in history". The court found 20 Nazi officials guilty of war crimes for their roles in the murder of over one million people. An additional two defendants were found guilty of membership of a criminal organisation, but acquitted on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ferencz recalled his court statement in the BBC interview: "We here disclose murder of over a million innocent and defenceless men, women, and children. Vengeance is not our goal. Nor do we seek merely a just retribution. We ask this court to affirm by international penal action man's right to live in peace and dignity, regardless of his race or creed. The case we present is a plea of humanity to law."

He later became a leading voice in the field of war crimes, instrumental in the setting up of the International Criminal Court in 1998. When asked in 2017 what he had learnt about the nature of evil, and the human capacity to commit unspeakable acts of violence against other humans, he said: "I learned that war makes murderers, mass murderers out of otherwise decent people. And it applies to all wars and all nationalities, and I've seen it in all the wars."

Even the most heinous war crimes are not committed by "wild animals", he stressed. "These are patriots who are trying to do their duty to protect either their religion or their nationality or their economic security… These are not crimes committed by devils with horns. These are committed by educated, well-intentioned, patriotic people."

Ferencz believed that it was up to all of us to "change the hearts and minds of people so that they recognise that it's not cowardice to be ready to compromise and to be conciliatory and be compassionate in your dealing with people who have other points of view".

He admitted that this "re-education of the human spirit" would be a long and difficult job. But progress had been made since Nuremberg. "And I say, don't give up. Law is always better than war."

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Culture legacy could see music festivals return

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx4gqg75n7q1o, today

Plans for two major Bradford arts festivals look set to move forward as part of the continuing legacy of the UK City of Culture year.

The creation of a new music festival in Bingley, and the return of the original Bradford Mela, had already been hinted at by officials, and a council report confirms they will be funded with millions of pounds set aside for the Bradford 2025 follow-on programme.

The report also says the size of the local visitor economy soared to more than £1bn in 2025, the first time that milestone has been reached.

But it raises questions over the future of the Bradford Culture Company Ltd, with the council considering "whether, and in what form, it should continue".

The report says: "The principal strategic risk is ensuring that the momentum, partnerships, profile, participation and investment created through Bradford 2025 are converted into sustained long-term benefit."

The report to the decision-making executive confirms that the council still has £4.269m set aside specifically for Bradford 2025 and its legacy work over the next three financial years to 2030.

It comes from a five-year commitment of £1.423m a year agreed and rubber-stamped by the previous Labour-run administration in 2022.

The broader Bradford 2025 bid had received cross-party backing earlier.

The report says the remaining money will help keep cultural events going across the district and develop new ones, including "plans for a new major music festival in Bingley and the reintroduction of Bradford Mela".

However, it gives no details of venues or individual budgets and does not say who would run the events.

Bingley has previously been home to major music festivals, including Bingley Music Live and the later, independently run Bingley Weekender.

Bradford Mela, a huge South Asian festival which attracted crowds of more than 100,000 in its heyday, was also a long-standing fixture in the city's events calendar, but effectively ended in 2013 following cancellations in 2007 and 2012 which were attributed to bad weather.

The two festivals form part of wider cultural legacy plans with the report, to be presented at a meeting on Thursday, explaining that in 2027-28, the annual amount available to cultural organisations receiving regular council support will rise from £590,000 to £700,000.

Another pot for individual projects will more than double, from about £85,000 to £200,000 a year.

More than 20 projects have also been offered grants for work on buildings, spaces and equipment, it says.

The pledges come despite a separate decision by the Reform UK-led council to divert £400,000 of arts funding towards the reopening of a tip in Keighley, with a petition opposing the move having gathered more than 500 signatures so far.

'Actively considering future'

A key unanswered question raised in the executive report is what happens to Bradford Culture Company Ltd (BCCL) after March 2027.

The organisation delivered Bradford 2025 and is now running the follow-on programme.

But no decision has yet been made on whether the company itself will continue beyond 31 March 2027.

The report says the council and BCCL are "actively considering the company's future role and operating model", including "whether, and in what form, it should continue".

For now, says the report, it is continuing work started during Bradford 2025, including volunteering, creative health projects and support for people working in the arts.

Billion pound economy

The report says 2025 saw 10.6 million day visits, worth an estimated £719m, while 1.53 million visitors stayed in Bradford for a holiday or short break.

The visitor economy is also estimated to have supportded almost 9,000 full-time equivalent jobs.

The report stresses that the whole £1.08bn cannot simply be credited to Bradford 2025, however it does "demonstrate the scale of the opportunity to convert increased profile and visitation into sustained economic benefit".

It adds the continuing legacy work will further "help... to increase footfall, attract national attention and strengthen Bradford's position as a major cultural destination and producer".

Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.

Charity tea room may close despite Ludwig filming

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq39mgmyr94do, today

A tea room being used to film the third series of Ludwig starring David Mitchell could close permanently unless it raises £25,000.

Trustees of the volunteer-run Liberty Tea Rooms and Community Hub in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, said the charity was in an "extremely low cash position".

Mark Kitson, chairman of the trustees, said the series being filmed at the venue had created a real buzz and it had been good to hire it out "at a time that we really need the extra funds".

The tea room is temporarily closed until 7 October while filming takes place for Ludwig; its frontage has been transformed to resemble a bank, which it was before becoming a community venue.

The charity has already reduced staffing costs, but trustees said it would close permanently unless it raised £25,000 by the end of October.

Kitson said: "Lots of towns and high streets are having tough times at the moment.

"When you come into the Tea Rooms, someone will welcome you, talk to you if you want a chat, offer a meal if you need it, and can also provide debt advice or a food bank parcel.

"You might just want tea and a scone, but if you need something more, we will do our very best to help you."

Filming will take place inside and outside the building over several weeks, with a rain machine due to be used for one scene.

Kitson said the production team would restore the tea room once filming was completed, as well as repairing a broken window and updating its signage.

He added: "The filming has been brilliant. It's created a real buzz and excitement on Hemel Hempstead High Street, and for our team and volunteers, they have also paid us a fee for being in the building at a time that we really need the extra funds."

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Carol Vorderman 'humbled and excited' for Bafta Cymru honour

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c95yn0g587vxo, today

Presenter Carol Vorderman says she feels humbled and excited to receive an award for outstanding contribution at this year's Bafta Cymru, celebrating excellence in film, TV and games.

Vorderman is set to be presented with the Siân Phillips Award while Lauren Evans is taking home an award for her contribution to the film I Swear, which cemented her reputation as one of the leading casting directors in Britain.

Lee Walters, Bafta Cymru chair, said the two women have taken "very different paths", but have both "achieved so much and thoroughly deserve to be celebrated".

The awards will be presented at the ICC Wales, in Newport, where Bafta Cymru has been held since 2024.

Vorderman, from Prestatyn, Denbighshire, began her career on the popular quiz show Countdown where she was the numbers expert and co-presenter for more than two decades.

She said it was one of her proudest achievements and she became a household name across Britain.

The 65-year-old has also chaired a UK government taskforce on maths education and founded an online learning resource designed to build children's confidence.

She has also used her platform to champion accessible education for all and she was awarded an MBE for services to broadcasting in 2000.

Former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies took the Siân Phillips award last year.

Evans, from Hendy, Carmarthenshire, will be awarded the Outstanding Contribution to Craft award after working on a range of productions including Game of Thrones, King Lear and The Danish Girl.

In recent years, she has worked on Sex Education, Lost Boys and I Swear which was nominated for six Bafta awards earlier this year.

Evans ended up winning the award for Best Casting saying she was "incredibly proud" to represent Welsh voices at the 2026 ceremony.

She said she was honoured to be recognised at the Bafta Cymru awards and that she wants to "keep elevating our Welsh creatives and our Welsh talent".

She added: "It's not as much of a closed industry as it was, but there is still so much more work to be done."

The awards consist of 17 categories this year, with actors such as Eve Myles and Matthew Rhys being nominated.

Feature film Madfabulous - which tells the story of an eccentric 19th Century Welsh aristocrat - leads the way at this year's Bafta Cymru awards with six nominations.

It's a Sin actor Callum Scott Howells, who stars as Henry Paget in Madfabulous, previously said it was a "genuine honour" to portray the fifth Marquess of Anglesey.

The full list of Bafta Cymru 2026 nominations can be found here .

Walters congratulated the nominees last month and said "each is a testament to the creativity, skill and dedication of the people working across Wales' screen industries, both in front of and behind the camera".

Jeffrey Archer returns to his former school library

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmx2z0zl8y53o, today

Bestselling author Jeffrey Archer has returned to his former school ahead of the publication of his final book.

Archer, who is 86 years old, sold more than 300 million books in his five-decade writing career, including the Clifton Chronicles and Kane and Abel, and has often set the novels in his home town of Wellington, Somerset.

His last book, Adam and Eve, is out soon, and Archer took the opportunity to visit his former school library at Wellington School.

"It's wonderful to come back. What I got a real thrill about when I was walking towards the library is seeing the young boys and girls and thinking, 'that's the next generation'," Archer said.

"The library is really special to me because it brings back so many happy memories," Archer added.

"I was on a scholarship because we had no money, I came from Weston-super-Mare and we had no money. I would never have got in without a scholarship."

Juliet Handley, development officer at Wellington School, said: "He's got so much energy and enthusiasm. It's wonderful to see.

"He was an incredible gymnast; he played our corps of drums. We are one of the only schools in the country that still have a corps of drums. It's lovely to see it's a tradition that lives on."

Handley added that she feels lucky to work with the older Wellington School alumni.

"I constantly hear that the school inspired them to do what they ended up doing, whether it's geography, business or in Jeffrey's case, writing books that sold worldwide," she said.

"To have such a big career, you have to have a passionate desire to do it; you won't keep going otherwise.

"He wrote 18 drafts for this book he's just publishing by hand. You've got to have a love for it."

Archer's last book is a love story about a young couple called Adam and Eve, set against Hitler's dilemma about whether or not to invade Britain.

He said: "I had to write it so smoothly that you believe that these two people changed the history of the world.

"I was born in 1940, so the first five years of my life we were in war. I remember people with one arm, one leg, blind; that was common for me."

When asked why he decided it would be his last book, he said: "I think everybody would like to run their last 100 metres at the Olympics and win the gold medal. I think the clever thing about life is to know when to get out."

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Mother writes book to help children with cancer

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm8e303zj7r3o, yesterday

A mother who wrote a book to help her toddler cope with losing her hair during cancer treatment is hoping that copies can be distributed to hospitals to help other children going through the same thing.

Holly, who used to live in Bristol but relocated to London, wrote Edie's Magic Hair about a young girl who has to regrow her hair in a last step to become a superhero.

The titular character was inspired by her four-year-old daughter Edie, who was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer last year. She is now in remission.

Holly says that because the book worked for her daughter, it could "have that same positive impact for children in and around her age going through exactly the same thing".

Holly said Edie had been "frightened" at the sight of her hair falling out so quickly after starting treatment.

She added the children's hospital where Edie was treated had some good distractions such as play areas, but nothing to distract from the physical impacts of chemotherapy.

Following Edie's successful treatment and remission, Holly launched a crowdfunder to support the production and distribution of the book to specialist paediatric cancer wards around the country.

She said: "The book was first and foremost for Edie in that moment. She needed something, she needed a vehicle, she needed a bridge to understand what was going on in a way that allowed her to escape."

She added she believed the story could "give hope" and "pride" to other children going through cancer treatment, just like it did for Edie.

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The hidden daytime dance revolution - and the man who captured it on camera

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwddvddgqv9ro, yesterday

For decades, photographer Tim Smith's images of Bradford's British Asian "daytimers" dance scene remained largely unseen. Now, some of those shots are taking their place in a major Tate exhibition examining the creativity and rebellion that transformed 1990s Britain.

On a bright afternoon in Bradford, shoppers moved through the city centre carrying bags, going about their day.

Behind a nearby doorway, another side of Bradford was pulsing to a very different rhythm.

Tim Smith remembers stepping out of a small nightclub beneath the Alhambra theatre after spending hours photographing a "daytimers" disco.

"I walked out into this bright sunshine and there's all these people walking about with their shopping bags, completely oblivious to what was going on just the other side of this somewhat anonymous-looking doorway," he recalls.

More than three decades later, images Smith took inside that hidden world are making another unlikely journey, from Bradford's underground daytimers scene to the Tate Britain art gallery.

His photographs feature in new showcase The 90s: Art and Fashion, which opens on Thursday.

Curated by former Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful, it brings together more than 100 works by nearly 70 artists, photographers and designers to examine a decade of creativity and rebellion.

For Smith, who lived in Bradford for more than 40 years, the inclusion of his photos is also recognition that some of the cultural shifts reshaping 1990s Britain were happening far beyond London.

"I'm pleased because I think there's a big shout-out for Bradford," he says.

"These culturally significant moments of that time weren't just happening in London and Manchester, like many media people like to think they were."

Smith arrived in Bradford in the mid-1980s after studying photography in Newport.

A nomadic childhood and life among migrant communities in Newport's Docklands had drawn him towards documenting lives beyond the mainstream.

Through the then-recently established Bradford Heritage Recording Unit, he began photographing the city's South Asian communities at work, at religious gatherings, at weddings and in their social lives.

"I was quite appalled at the lack of any kind of documentation of Bradford's Asian communities beyond the stuff that you'd see in the local papers," he says.

The daytimers bhangra gigs came later, after a friend told him about afternoon club events for young British Asians.

Smith's first response was simple: "What's a daytimer?"

He soon found out.

Cheap to hire while nightclubs stood empty during the day, the venues became spaces where a generation could gather and celebrate, but also shape a unique new subculture: dancing to music drawing on Punjabi and South Asian traditions but fused with contemporary British sounds.

What Smith saw was not simply young people celebrating being Asian, but proudly "being British Asian".

Among those he photographed was Rani Kaur, known as DJ Radical Sister, one of the pioneering women of the scene.

In one of Smith's best-known images, which will feature in the Tate Britain exhibition, she stands at the DJ decks, surrounded by young clubbers.

Another frame, shot from above in the darkness with flash, caught a room full of faces in a moment Smith could not inspect until the film was developed.

"Part of it's luck, but you earn your luck," he says.

"Every single face that you can see in it… just looks like he's having the best time of his life."

To Smith, the expressions seem to say: "We're here, this is us, we're having a wonderful time."

Yet he appreciates there is another side to the photographs, and to the rebellion they record.

Many of the young people attending daytimers gigs were moving between the expectations of family and community and the desires of a younger generation testing out music, fashion, friendship and independence on its own terms.

Smith understood that publishing a photograph could expose somebody who had never intended their presence at a club to become public.

"I didn't know everybody in the picture," he says. "I thought, 'I don't want to get them into trouble.'"

So, apart from images of people he knew were comfortable being identified, much of the work stayed largely out of public view.

Only decades later did those photographs acquire another life.

When some were exhibited at Bradford's National Science and Media Museum, there were, Smith recalls, "one or two grumblings".

But among those who had lived through the scene there was also a growing sense that this was their history to claim.

"Come on, it was our moment," was the response relayed back to him. "This is where who we are now began."

Time has now transformed the pictures from informal snapshots of an underground scene into historical documents.

And Smith believes the daytimers helped lay the foundations for the vibrant British Asian culture scene that followed.

He was, by his own admission, entering worlds that were not his, a young white photographer trusted with access to communities and spaces whose stories were rarely documented.

"I felt quite privileged being a photographer generally because it gives you access to worlds that aren't necessarily part of your world," he says.

"I loved being let in."

Now those darkened daytime Bradford rooms will take their place alongside other defining names and moments in cultural history inside Tate Britain, home to the biggest collection of British art in the world.

For Smith, there is real satisfaction in that journey: from an anonymous doorway in Bradford to one of the country's great national galleries.

It is also a recognition that while much of the cultural establishment looked elsewhere, Bradford was slowly writing a cultural history of its own, and continues to do so.

Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.

Horniman Museum's new gallery to open in February

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6vgy2exkn9zo, yesterday

The Horniman Museum is set to open its new Nature Gallery in February 2027.

The south-east London museum said the fully refurbished space, previously named the Natural History Gallery, had been reimagined to celebrate the variety of life on earth and explore humankind's place within, and impact on, nature.

The opening is the final part of the museum's £12.5m Nature + Love transformation project, supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Michael Salter-Church MBE, chairman of the museum, said: "Opening these wonderful new spaces marks the end of the Horniman's extraordinary 125th anniversary year."

The Nature Gallery will combine more than 2,300 objects from the Horniman's collection, including its famously overstuffed walrus, as well as artist commissions and multisensory activities.

These include a ceiling projection showcasing life on the planet, a display on plastic pollution by a Deptford school and a hands-on nature discovery zone focused on local wildlife.

The museum said the gallery explored human connection to and reliance on nature, stories of extinction and climate change, and ideas about how people can shape the planet's future.

It is one of a number of developments at the Horniman as part of its Nature + Love project, and is being supported by a £30,000 crowdfunding campaign, which has raised more than £14,000 to date.

Stuart McLeod, from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, said they were proud to support the project.

"It will help people of all ages connect with nature, understand the challenges it faces today and be inspired to play their part in protecting it," he said.

Arts minister Ruth Mackenzie added that she was "delighted" to have supported the refurbishment with £1.4m in infrastructure funding.

Gordon Seabright, chief executive at the Horniman, said: "We can't wait for these new spaces to be open so we can welcome everyone to share the wonder and beauty of nature."

The project was also funded by the Wolfson Foundation, Kusuma Trust, Garfield Weston Foundation, the Foyle Foundation and other donors.

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Painting which went unnoticed for 150 years found on back of map

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmp8d622dxe2o, yesterday

A striking watercolour of a bridge in the Scottish Borders, which had gone unnoticed in archives for more than 150 years, has been found by accident on the back of a geological map.

Luis Albornoz-Parra, of the British Geological Survey (BGS), stumbled on the artwork while carrying out research for Historic Environment Scotland (HES) on the building stones of Dryburgh Abbey.

The painting of the Dryburgh Suspension Bridge - on the back of geological field notes - is believed to have been painted by Benjamin Peach while conducting field work in the 1870s.

BGS said the artwork offered a "snapshot of the iconic crossing" and is thought to be from just a year after it opened.

Albornoz-Parra was looking through old field slips - the original maps that geologists fill with field observations while mapping the rocks of an area - when he uncovered the painting in the archives at The Lyell Centre in Edinburgh.

"I was charmed by the quality of the watercolour and wanted to share it with my colleagues," he said.

"Mostly I was fascinated by the fact that Peach was an excellent geologist and palaeontologist - his geological studies and theories still stand - but he was also such an excellent artist.

"I can imagine him having a lunchtime break from all the geological mapping, during which he would be drawing the watercolour."

BGS said the work provided a "unique record of the Victorian landscape" around Dryburgh.

It was found while looking through early field slips to gather more information about the area's abbey, which is currently undergoing restoration.

The first bridge at the spot was built in 1817 to replace a ferry, but it lasted only a year before being blown down in a gale.

A replacement lasted a bit longer before it, too, collapsed in stormy weather in 1838.

The third bridge, which is still standing, was completed in 1872 and it is believed to have been captured by Peach's artwork a year later when he was known to be conducting fieldwork in the region.

Daniel Burgess, BGS geological data steward, said: "Field slips have always been a vital tool for geologists since the inception of the survey in the 19th Century, as a way of recording important observations, measurements and notes whilst out in the field.

"It was not unusual for geologists, who are often out in the field for weeks at a time, to sketch the landscapes that have been shaped by the underlying geology.

"In this example, Peach is showing how the tough volcanic rocks of the Eildon Hills dominate the landscape around Dryburgh."

He said that their records did occasionally throw up a "welcome surprise" and they knew "almost instantly" it was one of Peach's artworks.

Peach worked at BGS from 1862 until his retirement in 1905.

Alongside his geological work, he produced hundreds of sketches and paintings during his field surveys.

He also played a pivotal role in resolving the Highlands Controversy - one of the most significant geological debates of the 19th Century about how different layers of rock came to be in their current location.

Peach and others eventually resolved it through fieldwork which showed that older layers or rock had ended up on top of younger strata because of huge thrust faults.

The geological field map is now stored in the BGS archives, alongside approximately 40,000 other items, which include administrative records and the papers of BGS staff.

The Feeling album was recorded in a Sussex shed

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm4gkggpzgygo, yesterday

The Feeling's triple-platinum debut album was recorded in a shed in Horsham, according to frontman Dan Gillespie Sells.

Speaking to BBC Radio Sussex as the record marks its 20th anniversary, Gillespie Sells said it came from "a very different world" when music fans bought CDs and "nobody had an iPhone".

The singer said much of Twelve Stops and Home was made at the Sussex home of brothers and bandmates Kevin and Ciaran Jeremiah.

The Feeling will perform the album in full when a 20th anniversary tour visits Eastbourne and Margate in November.

Gillespie Sells, the only member of the band not originally from Sussex, said he spent many of his teenage years in the county after meeting his future bandmates at the Brit School.

He said the group began spending time together in Ashdown Forest before starting to record music in Sussex.

Asked whether he had visited the studio again since making the album, he said: "It wasn't a studio, it was a shed."

"It was an outhouse. There were brick walls but it was essentially a shed," he added.

Gillespie Sells said the recordings took place in the Horsham garden building owned by the Jeremiah brothers' parents.

"We borrowed some microphones, Kevin had built a small computer and we recorded the first album like that, basically just hanging out together," he said.

Released in June 2006, Twelve Stops and Home reached number two in the UK charts and eventually achieved triple-platinum status.

The album produced hits including Sewn, Fill My Little World, Never Be Lonely and I Love It When You Call.

Reflecting on its 20th anniversary, Gillespie Sells said: "It's extraordinary. I think about what a different world it was then. All those albums we sold were physical copies and nobody had an iPhone."

He said the industry had changed significantly since the album's release but its songs had continued to attract new listeners.

"I see people in their 20s who seem to know every word and I think 'you must have been a toddler when this came out, how on earth are you singing along?' but they do," he said.

The band's anniversary tour visits Eastbourne's Winter Garden on 11 November and Margate's Drill Hall on 12 November.

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Library is 'bridging cultures and building friendships'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gv1eegyrzo, yesterday

The first anniversary of the twinning between two villages is set to be marked with the opening of a new library and resource centre.

In October 2025, Kennington in Oxfordshire officially twinned with Musanda in western Kenya - the heart of Abingdon-based charity The Nasio Trust's community work.

In 2024, Oxford author Sylvia Vetta jointly lead a project with the charity to deliver Cosmic Cats - an anthology of stories by Kennington and Kenyan students, aiming to raise funds for the facility.

The author, who will cut its ribbon on 10 October, said the twinning committee chair, the Rev Sansom Kuponiyi, had come up with the twinning motto "bridging cultures, building friendships".

The trust writes that the connection between the two villages "is a story years in the making".

Vetta was the chair of the former Kennington Overseas Aid, which for 50 years raised money for development projects all over the world.

She said that when presented with a choice between three projects, people had voted for the Nasio one and built a production factory for the superfood spirulina in Musanda.

The charity founder, Nancy Mudenyo Hunt, who grew up in the Kenyan village, delivered the project and went onto to co-write a book with Vetta.

The Kennington community also continued the support and helped towards establishing the much-needed library, which will have WiFi access and a space for training sessions.

"Cosmic Cats is going to be the first book in the library because it's important that children know it belongs to them," Vetta said.

She said they hoped visitors to the Oxford Indie Book Fair on 22 November would pay for one book on a subject of their choice to go in the library.

Isaac Aldred, 19, from Kennington, spent a month in Musanda between February and March.

"From agriculture projects to jigger removal, spirulina making, and peer education, I saw firsthand the diverse range of Nasio's projects and wide-reaching impact," he said.

He said the "kindness and hospitality shown by everyone was inspiring".

"Despite the multitude of challenges facing the community, the resilience and determination people have is obvious."

He added he had seen the new project "that the people of Kennington have worked incredibly hard to fundraise for", as it had neared completion.

Vetta said "the most moving" example of the villages' friendship had happened on Remembrance Day, when at the war memorial the names of Kenyan soldiers from Musanda had been read out along with those from Kennington.

"This will be an evolving thing," she said, calling the children in Musanda "ambitious and all hard-working".

Hunt called the new resource "a tangible result" of their friendship.

"For 25 years, Nasio has believed in giving children access to education and opportunity.

"This library brings that belief to life and shows what can happen when two communities, thousands of miles apart, work together," she said.

The anniversary event will be celebrated at the Kennington Village Centre, via a video link with Musanda.

'The music transported us to another planet'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5x2z22zwl1zo, yesterday

When Vivienne Dawes first saw the photograph of herself dancing on a crowded dance floor almost 50 years ago, it felt like being transported back in time.

Captured at Wolverhampton's Culture Centre in 1978, the image shows her among a group of young people immersed in a night of music and dancing.

At the time, none of them could have known the photograph would become an iconic image that has been viewed across the world and one of photographer Chris Steele-Perkins' most recognised works.

Nor could they have imagined that, decades later, they would be reunited through the photo and finally have their stories told.

"Oh my goodness - oh my, and I do look like me, don't I?" Vivianne said when she saw the image.

She is the central dancer in the photograph and can still remember the atmosphere inside the venue.

She said: "Back then, everybody was doing their own thing, was all dancing, and when the music hit us, we felt no pain.

"At the end of the day, we're showing that we're black sisters enjoying reggae music."

Nearly 50 years after it was taken, the image continues to attract attention, appearing most recently in the V&A East exhibition The Music Is Black: A British Story.

Now it is going on display in its home city of Wolverhampton, at the Grand theatre.

Vivienne said she had no awareness when she was dancing that her photo was being taken.

"If you notice the way we all dance, it's like we were on another planet," she said.

Her dance, as captured in the photo, would also later go on to be recreated in a painting by artist Claudette Johnson, which will also appear in the Wolverhampton exhibition.

"It's beautiful," Vivienne said.

"I appreciated the fact that someone could put their time into painting a portrait of me.

"I can't believe I looked so attractive back then, really and truly. I look very lovely."

Lack of opportunities

While the photo has become celebrated over the years, the people captured in it have remained largely anonymous, until now.

For Winston Logan, who appears at the back of the photo on the far left, the image is a reminder of a very different Wolverhampton.

Having arrived in Britain about five years before the photo was taken, he remembers a lack of opportunities for young Black people.

"Life is hard, no entertainment, nowhere to go, no fun," he said.

But the Culture Centre on Clarence Street offered something different, becoming a hub for music, dancing and community.

Looking back, Winston sees the image as a snapshot of a pivotal period in his life.

"This is where it starts, [I] went from unemployment, went from there into training, went from there into industry, construction or whatever, and now I'm passing on my skills.

"Mum and dad didn't get to see that photo or find out about that photo."

"This time, to the present day, my life has, I would say, blown up. Well, I can't hide now, can I?"

In an interview with the Guardian in 2014, Steele-Perkins said he had been commissioned to go to Wolverhampton in 1978 by the Sunday Times magazine as part of a feature marking 10 years since local MP Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech.

He described it as a difficult commission, adding that he had not really liked the photo at the time, although it had grown on him since and had become his best-selling print.

An event celebrating the launch of the Wolverhampton exhibition on Sunday is set to reunite several of those pictured in the photo, including Macka B, now an international reggae artist, his brother Owen MacFarlane, Casa Simpson, Lisa Green and Sharon Underwood - all of whom still live in and around the city.

The idea for the exhibition came after staff at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre spotted the photograph while visiting The Music Is Black: A British Story at V&A East.

"It stood out amongst all of the other images," curator Tonia Daley-Campbell said.

"It's a memory. It's captured in time."

She said the photograph seemed to bring the dancefloor back to life.

"You can hear it, you can smell it, you can feel that image.

"We want to put all of the young people that were in that photo dancing, vibing, standing by the sound system, whatever they were doing, front and centre," Daley-Campbell said.

"We're bringing it back home and we're going to make sure that is displayed and everybody will know their name."

The exhibition opens at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre's Encore Lounge on 4 October and will run until 31 October. Admission to the event is free.

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'I woke up one day in my 60s and decided to become an artist'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm4g1zz88ee1o, yesterday

Gina Long has lived what she says has been a "very amazing life", but she never expected to wake up one day in her 60s and feel a desire to host her own art exhibition.

From raising millions for charity, being friends with football legend Sir Bobby Robson, to being appointed MBE, she has had a long varied career.

In 2020, it was global superstar and Suffolk's own Ed Sheeran who opened her eyes to the world of art and she began dabbling with paint from her Bury St Edmunds home.

The 64-year-old has since created more than 30 pieces of work ready for her debut exhibition, Square Peg Round Hole, being held for free at St Edmundsbury Cathedral on Wednesday and Thursday.

Six years ago, Sheeran donated one of his first abstract paintings to Long to auction for her charity work.

At the time, the painting, called Dab 2, was the only artwork Sheeran had made available for public sale, and it fetched £40,000.

Inspired by Sheeran's abstract paintwork, Long transformed her greenhouse into a studio, and she said the rest was history.

"I woke up two and a half years ago and said to my husband Andrew 'I've got to paint Square Peg Round Hole', and that is truly how it has begun," she explained.

"It's all been so organically lovely, but a complete revelation in my life.

"I, in no way, thought in my latter years I would be an artist."

Long said this new chapter, and specifically this exhibition, had been about "painting the harsh, messy truth about life" and was for those who had felt out of place.

"I often say, I've lived a very amazing life, and I've failed at times, and I've succeeded," she continued.

"But I've rarely neatly fitted, and so on my canvas is the messy truth about real life."

The exhibition at the cathedral features 32 artworks, each with bold colours and interlocking squares and circles.

Helping set it up has been Emma Roodhouse, who was recently involved in curating the John Constable Hay Wain exhibition at Ipswich's Christchurch Mansion.

Long's main message is one of empowerment and she encouraged people to "put your head above the parapet".

"I hope it speaks to anyone also who's ever felt out of place, out of depth, and celebrating the act of simply showing up as yourself despite the pressures not to do so," she added.

Long was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2015 for charitable services, having raised more than £9m over the decades.

A close friend of Sir Bobby, who died in 2009 from cancer, she also created the Sir Bobby Auction in his memory to raise money for charities, including the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation.

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Lenny Rush helps get Eric Morecambe book on TV

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmy0z00nexydo, yesterday

The son of Eric Morecambe has revealed that actor Lenny Rush's involvement was crucial to finally bring his father's novel to the screen after 35 years of trying.

Gary Morecambe said he had been trying to adapt The Reluctant Vampire children's books for television since his late father asked him to in 1982.

The comedian, who lived in Harpenden when he wrote the stories, told his son they "gave him as much pleasure" as his celebrated work with Morecambe and Wise.

After several unsuccessful attempts to bring the books to screen, Morecambe said he had started to lose hope. But he said of the Essex actor's involvement: "Once we made him the star of it, everything then just fell into place."

The BBC series, adapted by Alan Partridge writers Neil and Rob Gibbons, stars Rush as Val, who struggles with his vampire identity only to discover he has been human all along.

The 17-year-old actor, from Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex, has had notable roles in Slow Horses, Doctor Who and the comedy Am I Being Unreasonable?

This year, he has filmed scenes as Dobby the house-elf for HBO's Harry Potter series at Leavesden in Hertfordshire.

Morecambe said: "Back in 1982 when my father wrote it, he did say to me, 'I'd really love to see this televised or as a film or something'.

"I think the key to it all really was giving it a completely different angle and that took the arrival and stardom of Lenny Rush."

Rush said he was told about the books by TV producer Shane Allen, who had been a fan in his childhood.

He said: "We had a Zoom meeting in late 2022 about maybe getting the rights to the book and making a TV series out of it, then in 2025, we were suddenly making it!

"And I'm so thrilled we've been able to."

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Teenage artist finds confidence in illustrating

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckge433vgp7po, yesterday

A 15-year-old girl who previously experienced situational mutism is now a published book illustrator after finding the confidence to share her artwork through storytelling.

Bethany, a student in Cambridgeshire, illustrated The Bestest Story in the World... Ever! written by Chip Colquhoun and published last month.

Colquhoun asked Bethany to illustrate his book after she drew a portrait of him while she was in the audience listening to him deliver a storytelling session at her school.

The teenager said seeing her illustrations in print was "really weird and surreal".

When speaking to BBC Radio Cambridgeshire's Louise Hulland, Bethany explained she drew Colquhoun as a way to concentrate on the session.

"Drawing at that point helped me focus, so I needed something to draw and he was right there," said Bethany.

She described her drawing of the Colquhoun as "very stylised", adding: "[It is] not really the style I draw in now, but it was. I would say it's pretty good for the skill set I had then."

New projects

Colquhoun said: "She wowed me first with the portrait of me that she created."

He added that he was "excited" by the idea that Bethany had used drawing to help her focus.

Bethany's portrait was used in one of the author's books, which detailed advice for educators on how to use storytelling as a teaching tool.

The 15-year-old explained she had been situationally mute when she was younger, adding: "I'd speak to certain people and then not really talk to others. It was mainly people I didn't feel comfortable with or didn't know that I didn't speak to."

She added: "I mean [illustrating] definitely improved my confidence a lot and I think it's just improved me as a person a little bit as well, because I'm able to do things I haven't done before.

"If I was here a few years ago, I wouldn't be doing this because I would be too nervous and I would be too stressed."

Bethany is now working on illustrations for a third book, as well as three drawings for another project.

She said she was managing to intersperse her drawing with her schoolwork.

"I mostly work later in the night, so 8-9ish for the drawings and then leave the schoolwork to the earlier points because I have more energy during later times," she said.

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'The 21st-Century gym-toned bodies put me out': Four things Jane Austen adaptations get wrong - according to experts

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260922-four-things-jane-austen-adaptations-get-wrong, 12 days ago

A new film adaptation of the English novelist's Sense and Sensibility adds to a long line of attempts to translate Austen's timeless stories to the screen. But these are their common mistakes.

Jane Austen's timeless novels are always being re-adapted.

And there are two more major adaptations coming this year: Georgia Oakley's film version of Sense and Sensibility and a new TV series of Pride and Prejudice. They add to a long line of attempts to translate the works of the beloved 19th-Century author to the screen.

Each generation will have their favourites, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that no film or TV take on a book can ever be entirely faithful to the original text. But there are certain aspects of Austen adaptations that always rile up passionate Janeites.

Here are four things they consistently get wrong – according to experts.

1. They focus on fairytale romance

Romance takes centre stage in most Austen adaptations. But "Austen is much more focused on the heroine", Sutherland says. "She's a psychological novelist... that's what interests her." Austen presents the reader with imperfect heroines who face moral challenges and social obstacles independent of their male love interest – which makes them all the more relatable to modern women.

And while Austen may not have the same haunting allure as the gothic Victorian writers who came after her, she does touch on some heavier themes. In Mansfield Park, for example, she explores infidelity and gambling, while she references slavery on multiple occasions across her works (though it's greatly disputed what her thoughts on slavery were).

Of course, Austen's fairytale romantic moments are important – like Captain Wentworth's ardent love letter to Anne in Persuasion – but by promoting romance from a sub-plot to the main plot, adaptations can overlook Austen's class critique and her depiction of the bleak reality for women in the Regency era (around 1795-1837). Apart from Emma Woodhouse, the protagonist of Emma, most of the heroines in Austen's stories face financial precarity.

"Austen knew her market," says Sandie Byrne, professor of English at the University of Oxford. "And she had to have the girl getting the boy, and the 'happy ever after' to sell her books – but she doesn't make the big kiss, or the proposal, or the wedding the climax of the book, and there's no description of the church and the fuss."

Plus a woman's need for security wouldn't have ended after marriage – her security would always rely on her husband's character and how they managed their finances. "The adaptations tend to show a rosy glow – everything's tied up and finished," Byrne says.

2. They get the costumes and styling – and teeth – wrong

"Where are the bonnets?!" erupted Austen enthusiasts when Oakley's Sense and Sensibility trailer debuted, featuring scenes of 19-year-old Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and 17-year-old Marianne Dashwood (Esmé Creed-Miles) frolicking around with their long hair down. (To confirm, flimsy-looking bonnets do appear, albeit rarely, throughout the film.)

In the Regency era, only very young girls would wear their hair down. Older girls would strictly wear a bonnet, says Byrne. "It's a sign of being grown up, that you put your hair up and your hemlines down."

Style choices in Austen adaptations are always a point of contention – from costume to make-up and hair.

Netflix's 2022 Persuasion featured Anne Elliot (Dakota Johnson) wearing rosy lipstick and mascara, leading to a plethora of online makeup tutorials and accusations of Johnson having "iPhone face" – a slang term used to describe actors in period dramas who look as if they've seen modern technology.

"What puts me out is hair and teeth and 21st-Century gym-toned bodies," says Juliette Wells, a professor of literary studies at Goucher College in the US. "And I definitely think about orthodontia and veneers, and what lovely teeth most young actors have, [but] how very few characters in Austen are described as having good teeth. Presumably most of them did not."

No matter how accurate the costumes may be, if an actor meets 21st-Century beauty standards, they won't match historically accurate portraits from that period, she adds. "That puts us at a distance from Austen."

Films will also often try to be authentic by dressing people in the fashion of the day when the book was published, Byrne says, but most people made clothes last a long time.

"If you were very rich, you changed your clothes a lot… [but] most people in the echelon that Jane Austen is writing about didn't have that many clothes. And they made them last. They weren't slaves to fashion."

3. They don't capture Austen's language and pacing

Austen is renowned for her witty dialogue and sparkling, omniscient narrative voice.

"And that's what we read Austen for, isn't it? We read it for the irony, we read it for the humour, we read it for the satire and we read it because it's subtly subversive," Byrne says.

But capturing that verbal sophistication is a challenge on screen. And Austen is not a very visual novelist, says Byrne. "That's the odd thing about her. She doesn't encourage you to see things so much as to hear things."

However adaptations often take an approach that more closely follows the visual romantic style of Charlotte Brontë, says Kathryn Sutherland, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford. Oakley's Sense and Sensibility very much plays into this – it's visually stunning, and the naturalistic cinematography of England's countryside sets a romantic tone.

"But Austen is more thrifty… she does so much more through conversation," Sutherland says. "Film has increasingly muted conversation… It even muffles dialogue, so you don't always hear it properly. There has been a downplaying of the spoken, and a raising of the visual."

Wells misses the precision of language most of all. One of the great pleasures to be found if you go from an adaptation to the original novel, she says, is how meticulous Austen is with her word choices. "And no adaptation could possibly convey that pleasure," she says.

In some adaptations, Austen's more famous lines are "padded with what can seem, to my ear, ridiculously 21st-Century ways of expressing characters' thoughts". (Lest we forget "Now we're worse than exes, we're friends" from Netflix's Persuasion.)

And Austen's pacing is very slow – she takes her time with scenes, conversations and character development, Wells says. "Austen gives you the opportunity to notice a character's resistance to her [or his] own change." But that does not necessarily suit the demands of the big screen.

4. They cast too glamorously

Besides some actors being far too old for their characters – like Alan Rickman playing Sense and Sensibility's 35-year-old Colonel Brandon when he was 49 – actors simply being too good-looking can give away the plot.

Austen rarely describes what her characters look like. Instead, she reveals their attractiveness through their actions.

So, casting incredibly handsome actors, Sutherland says, "kind of foreshortens the plot. You know immediately just looking at them that these are the heroes. And so there's a sense in which a certain amount of the drama is lost, and it's mainly through [the] glamorisation of the hero."

Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant) in Ang Lee's 1995 Sense and Sensibility is a prime example. When, in an invented scene for the film, he playfully fences with young Margaret Dashwood, he is automatically cast as the dashing, sympathetic hero, Sutherland says – "but it also has the effect of, in a way, undermining the development of the plot. You know the outcome before the first few frames are over."

Ironically, Austen specifically introduces Ferrars as "not handsome" – but tell that to Hollywood.

Sense and Sensibility is out on 25 September in the UK and 16 October in the US.

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'Every museum in the world is stressing': How brazen art heists are affecting visitors

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260930-what-the-rise-in-museum-heists-means-for-visitors, 4 days ago

A spate of brazen thefts has rocked European museums. Now, some institutions are rethinking what's worth displaying.

Visitors stepping into the Louvre's Galerie d'Apollon today will come face to face with more than 60m (198ft) of painted ceilings and dazzling sculptures. What they won't find, however, are the iconic treasures that once glittered inside its display cases.

The gallery reopened in July 2026, nine months after thieves made off with France's crown jewels in one of the most audacious museum robberies in recent memory. The surviving gemstones have since been moved elsewhere while the Louvre determines how to display them more securely.

The Louvre heist is just one example of how a recent string of museum thefts across Europe is changing what travellers can actually see in these beloved institutions.

On 27 August, thieves broke into the Museum of Villena in south-eastern Spain. In just four minutes, they made off with an extraordinary collection of Bronze Age bowls, bottles, bracelets and other objects that included nearly 10kg (22lb) of gold. Less than two weeks later, burglars entered the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera and took four paintings – two were abandoned in nearby gardens as the thieves fled, while two others remain missing. In July, thieves posing as ordinary visitors stole the 2,500-year-old gold torque of Vix from a museum in Burgundy.

According to Europol, such incidents have risen sharply and are becoming increasingly brazen. As one museum security expert in Belgium told the BBC: "Every museum in the world is stressing right now."

Jean-Yves Goriou, head of the EU Organised Crime Unit at Europol, says information shared by member states shows "a clear and steep increase in the number of museum robbery cases since around 2022/2023".

Some have also become more forceful: thieves have used sledgehammers and axes to smash display cases, explosives to blow through museum entrances and firearms to intimidate staff and visitors; in other cases, museum employees have been assaulted or restrained.

Experts say the fact that many museums are publicly accessible makes them increasingly vulnerable to theft. "Museums are most likely doing what they can, given budget constraints and the fact that they are – by design – open to the public," Goriou says.

For generations, that openness has allowed almost anyone to stand within a few feet of an Egyptian sarcophagus or a Renaissance painting. But as museums seek to better protect their most prized pieces, it's changing the visitor experience.

Nothing like the real thing

Travellers to the Louvre who find the Galerie d'Apollon without its jewels still have tens of thousands of other objects to see. But for a smaller museum, losing one object can make a dramatic difference for would-be visitors.

The so-called "Treasure of Villena" that was stolen in August wasn't simply one collection among many in the city's museum. It was inextricably linked with Villena itself: dozens of pieces of Bronze Age gold, silver, amber and iron hidden inside a vessel for roughly three millennia before an archaeologist brought them back into the light in 1963.

Likewise, the Vix torque was the defining object of the Musée du Pays Châtillonnais in Burgundy. The 480g (1lb) gold necklace was discovered in the burial chamber of a Celtic woman who died around 500BC, a rare physical connection to the craftspeople of Iron Age Europe.

Two faithful gold reproductions of the torque already existed when thieves stole the original from its display case. One copy had even travelled to an exhibition elsewhere in France because the museum would not loan the real necklace. Replicas have long been used by museums when originals are too fragile, valuable or difficult to travel, and the recent spate of thefts has encouraged some to consider this practice more widely.

This summer, Dominique Garcia, president of France's National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research, suggested this approach when she issued a national security plan. Yet, France's new 33-point museum-security plan instead calls for particularly vulnerable originals to be temporarily taken off view until they can be displayed more safely.

Some museums are already making that choice. After a 2024 armed robbery at the Musée du Hiéron in Burgundy, director Maud Siron stopped displaying the museum's most valuable works rather than risk losing them altogether. Paris' Musée Cognacq-Jay subsequently dropped a valuable pair of earrings from a planned exhibition, while the nearby Musée Carnavalet substituted a drawing and rhinestone brooch for a high-value jewel in a 2026 show.

While museums all aren't automatically filling all their cases with copies overnight, visitors are finding more stand-ins and, in some cases, an empty space where a treasure used to be.

According to Guy Turton, director of global audience strategy agency MHM, which works with galleries around the world, authenticity remains a powerful pull for museums. As he said, seeing the original piece can create "the feeling that another human made, used or encountered the same object, sometimes centuries ago" – a connection he says can influence the number of people willing to visit and pay an entrance fee.

The Bayeux Tapestry is an especially timely example. With its permanent home in France undergoing renovation, its rare loan to the British Museum has drawn huge demand: the first batch of tickets sold out within a day, and visitors have queued down Great Russell Street to see the nearly 1,000-year-old embroidery in person.

For visitors, that debate matters because seeing a copy is not necessarily the same experience as seeing the object itself.

"If visitors expect an original and discover a replica without explanation, it can feel like a reduction in value," Turton says. "If the museum is transparent about why a replica is being used and what it enables them to experience, it can add value."

Ellie King, director of museum consultancy Crown Cultures and a researcher of visitor experience, suspects many people would accept a museum displaying a replica if they understood that the original object was being safeguarded to protect it from theft.

"For visitors, it may be the story that an object presents which is more important – especially if that story feels highly relevant and connected to the visitor," she says.

How visiting museums may change

For marquee museum treasures that remain on display, the most immediate change in light of the recent string of thefts may be physical: more distance between the visitor and the object.

Turton says that distance can matter almost as much as whether it is original. "In observational research, we consistently see that visitors engage more deeply when they can approach an object, examine its detail and see it from different angles," he says. "Greater distance and more prominent barriers can weaken that connection, particularly if they make the experience feel remote or institutional."

Some of those protections are already standard practice. Under the UK's Government Indemnity Scheme, portable valuables such as gold, silver and jewellery should be kept in locked, alarmed cases, while certain objects must be separated from visitors by at least one metre. If a museum cannot provide enough staff to properly supervise a gallery containing indemnified works, the guidelines allow for that space to be closed.

Recent thefts are also bringing greater scrutiny to objects on loan to other museums. James Ferrer, a fine art and museums expert at global insurance broker Lockton, says insurers and cultural bodies are paying particularly close attention to security around high-profile loans, although he stresses that the goal is still to help museums meet those requirements rather than prevent objects from travelling.

"We are there to help facilitate loans, not to present a barrier to stop loans from taking place," he says.

Visitors may also find thicker glass or more staff in a room. None automatically makes the experience worse.

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Turton points to the Rijksmuseum's live restoration of Rembrandt's The Night Watch. The painting sits behind glass, but visitors can watch artisanal work that would normally happen out of sight, turning the barrier itself into part of the experience.

"If security creates greater physical distance, museums need to work harder through interpretation, transparency and experience design to preserve the sense of connection," Turton says.

As the uptick in museum thefts continues, visitors are likely to encounter different responses in different places. So long as the reasons for the viewing restrictions are clearly explained, Turton says audiences tend to understand the need to balance access, conservation and security.

The challenge for museums is preserving both sides of that bargain: protecting objects that may have survived for centuries while keeping them accessible enough that people still want to travel to stand in front of them.

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Eight ingenious homes for wildlife around the world

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260918-eight-ingenious-homes-for-wildlife-around-the-world, 13 days ago

Animal-friendly designers are creating bespoke structures for specific creatures. From a bat home in the UK countryside to a multi-species refuge in the Catskills, here are eight cleverly designed wildlife havens.

Wildlife has long made its home in our buildings around the world, whether that's swallows fashioning their nests in the eaves, or geckos getting comfortable in the cracks of an exterior wall. Now animal-friendly designers are creating bespoke architecture for specific creatures. These designers are treating wildlife as their clients, catering for their specific nesting, mating, roosting, hibernating and sheltering needs.

"It's about making sure that, as humans alter and reuse landscapes, we deliberately provide long-term infrastructure for the other species that occupy it as well," says architect Owen Pearce. So rather than designing a building and then retrofitting wildlife accommodation, the requirements of the wildlife help determine the form, height, orientation, openings and construction of the architecture.

But these clients can be unpredictable. "We're creating opportunities for wildlife rather than trying to prescribe exactly how nature should behave," Pearce says of the wildlife tower his firm recently designed. "We've done our best to provide the conditions we think different species need and want, but now we have to observe the tower over time and see what actually happens."

Here are eight structures built specifically for wildlife, with many of them aimed at encouraging multiple species to cohabit.

1. Tower for bats, barn owls, little owls, kestrels, invertebrates and wetland species, Somerset, UK

This multi-species tower is at Honeygar, a former dairy farm on the Somerset Levels, which Somerset Wildlife Trust is gradually rewilding and rewetting. It's designed and built by architecture firm Pearce+ and is almost entirely made from locally-sourced, reclaimed materials.

"We deliberately thought about the different species as the clients of the building," says Pearce. "Each has very different requirements, so the architecture changes as you move from the wet ground at the bottom of the tower to the nesting and roosting spaces at the top."

The tower's lower level is intended to appeal to slow worms, newts and other small wildlife. It sits within a seasonally wet landscape, and is full of gaps and crevices for them. Higher up, pieces of larch timber have been stacked, again with openings, recesses and perches for insects and small birds. Inside, there are individually designed nesting and roosting spaces for barn owls, kestrels and little owls. Each is catered for with different entrance sizes, ledges, internal box dimensions and positions.

2. Piaule Multispecies Habitats, Catskill, NY, US

These sculptural structures by Joyce Hwang are a bit like tall clothes racks, each standing on a slatted base. But instead of clothes, the wooden frames support a variety of bird nesting boxes, bat houses, and insect habitat boxes, at different heights and of different styles and sizes. Designed as simple A frames, each armature has a "bent" leg, as if it's about to be on the move. Hwang partnered with students from Pratt Institute's Architecture School on this project, and a series of the habitats stands alongside a walking trail in Catskill, at the foot of the Catskill Mountains.

3. Bat Bridge, the Netherlands

The Vlotwatering, a small canal in the Westland, in the south-west region of The Netherlands, is part of a newly created green recreational route. The canal is also an important flight corridor for several bat species, and NEXT Architects' new 25m (82ft)-long bridge for pedestrians and cyclists was seen as a good opportunity to introduce roosting habitats for them.

The bridge is constructed of concrete, with its ability to absorb and release heat providing a stable and comfortable microclimate for a variety of bat roosts. Then three specific bridge sections contain habitats for bats in different seasons. The northern bridgehead acts as a winter shelter, where the temperature is low and stable. There are summer residences on the underside of the bridge deck and the masonry balustrade, which double as maternity and mating quarters. Meanwhile the bats' main entrance is on the waterside, signposted for them by a concrete ledge. The hope is that a large colony will grow around the bridge.

4. Please Stand By, France

The decline in insect numbers over recent decades has spurred designer Marlène Huissoud's creation: Please Stand By. She was driven by the desire to give something back to bugs, particularly those who are city dwellers such as ants and centipedes. In Please Stand By, they can take refuge, nest and hibernate. With the help of Robert Francis and Mak Brandon from King's College London, the studio picked insects' preferred materials, and the colours that they are attracted to in the natural world, such as white, grey and dark tones.

Huissoud used natural clay (not fired to keep it as primitive as possible) to create a series of bulbous, organic forms, and then coated them in a natural binder to protect them from the weather.

5. Wildlife Tower for the Barn Owl Trust, UK

When a traditional barn owl site, such as an old building or hollow tree, disappears, the Barn Owl Trust has a solution: a small structure – just 2 sq m (6.6 sq ft), and 4.5m (15ft) tall – with three of its walls offering different opportunities. The east-facing wall has an entrance hole 3.5m (11ft) above ground level that leads into a generous, deep nestbox.

To maximise chances of occupation, the hole overlooks open ground, so that a passing owl might spot it. On the west-facing wall, there's a shallow, open-fronted nest cavity to appeal to kestrels. Below that is a small hole leading to a deep nestbox for little owls. The perches just below each owl hole, and the big roof overhead mean it's safer for vulnerable fledglings when they emerge. The warmer south-facing wall has lots of smaller holes in the mortar for spiders, wasps and other bugs.

6. Mumbles Seahives, Swansea Bay, Wales

The village of Mumbles on Swansea Bay is protected from flooding by a 1.2km (0.7 mile) seawall, which is also as a home for marine species such as seaweed, limpets and barnacles. This is because sections of the wall, designed with experts at Swansea University, include hexagonal concrete panels. Each panel has deep ridges and patterns that mimic the rough contours of a rocky coast, and the sea creatures have taken up residence in these gaps and crevices.

7. Barn Elms Ecological Kiosk, London, UK

This is a piece of key infrastructure masquerading as a home for solitary bees, invertebrates, spiders, beetles and birds. Inside, mechanical and electrical systems prevent sewage pollution from flowing into the River Thames. But outside, the wall acts as a vertical habitat. Part of the 100-sq-m (328-sq-ft) facade comprises a gabion wall – wire mesh cages stuffed with natural and waste materials. Unlike traditional green walls, this type of wall doesn't need any irrigation, has superior fire performance, and could host wildlife for between 50 and 120 years. What's more, the brown roof acts as an ecological corridor for creatures travelling to and from nearby green spaces such as the London Wetland Centre in south-west London.

8. Auckland Castle Deer House, Durham, UK

While infrastructure for wildlife aims to promote their good health, not every example has been built with their longevity in mind. This 18th-Century deer house is in the former deer park of Auckland Castle, a residence of the Bishops of Durham since the Norman period. For centuries, deer were hunted here by the aristocracy and nobility.

Deer were fed in the courtyard and sheltered in the arcade, which had a roof of slate tiles at the time. It doubled as a rest stop for the bishop's hunting guests, who could picnic and take in the views from its human-friendly rooms. It's a rare example of 18th-Century Gothic Revival architecture, a fanciful interpretation of medieval buildings, hence its mock-castle aesthetic, complete with battlements, arrow loops, pinnacles and pointed arches.

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The American coast that refused to let African culture die

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20261001-the-american-coast-that-refused-to-let-african-culture-die, 3 days ago

Along the US's South-eastern coast, Gullah Geechee communities preserve a distinct culture and language rooted in West Africa that is spoken nowhere else on Earth.

It's low tide at Fish Haul Beach, a marshy stretch on Hilton Head Island's northern fringe. Fish Haul was the first beach I ever visited as a child, and now I have brought my 18-month-old son. My wife and I watch him stumble and slosh through the shallow water of South Carolina's Port Royal Sound.

Just as I didn't realise it on my own first visit, my son has no idea that the sand and salt marshes under his feet are where the first self-governed town of free Black people in the United States was built. Known as Mitchelville, it was created by formerly enslaved people of West and Central African heritage who spoke a language found nowhere else in the world: Gullah.

These people, who came to be known as the Gullah Geechee, eventually established a series of free settlements and communities on the isolated sea and barrier islands across the south-eastern US, developing their own distinct culture while preserving many of their indigenous African traditions.

On 12 October 2026, this roughly 500-mile (804km) strip known as the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor will celebrate the 20th anniversary of when the United States Congress designated it a National Heritage Area. Along this scenic coastal stretch, spanning from North Carolina to southern Florida, Gullah Geechee culture lives on through its unique language, musical traditions and beliefs, offering travellers a window into the many ways African culture directly shaped the US.

A world all their own

Gullah Geechee culture has its roots in the late 17th and 18th Century, when African peoples were increasingly brought to English colonies in what is now the United States and enslaved on plantations. Planters in the Carolina Lowcountry along the Eastern seaboard sought out people from Central African countries and West Africa's Rice Coast, exploiting their agricultural knowledge to cultivate rice, indigo and Sea Island cotton in the coastal wetlands and islands. The working conditions were brutal, but that same geographical isolation helped the enslaved and their descendants retain – and adapt – African cultural practices.

Traditional West and Central African one-pot cooking techniques combined with local seafood, vegetables, grains and meats gave rise to Gullah Geechee cuisine. Lowcountry red rice, which combines rice, tomatoes, spices, smoked pork and sausage, is often compared to jollof rice, a one-pot rice stew cooked with tomatoes, spices and meat strongly associated with the Senegambia region of West Africa. West African coiled basketry traditions were likewise adapted to the Lowcountry, using readily available sweetgrass, bulrush, palmetto and pine. The "ring shout" – a Gullah Geechee ritual where participants form a circle, then move counterclockwise in a rhythmic pattern while stomping their feet, clapping their hands and singing in "call and response" – recalled West African musical and spiritual practices.

A need to communicate with slave owners and Africans who spoke other languages led to the development of Gullah. Colonial English is Gullah's main lexical source but African-derived words, like oona (you all) and nyam (eat) survive in Gullah speech: cooter (turtle) is believed to be related to the Bambara and Malinke kuta, while goober (peanut) is generally traced to nguba in Kimbundu and Kikongo.

The origin of the name Gullah Geechee itself is hazy. "Gullah may derive from Angola or from the Gola people of West Africa. Geechee may come from the Kissi people or Geechee from Georgia's Ogeechee River," said Luana Graves Sellars, cultural preservationist and founder of heritage organisation Lowcountry Gullah.

During the Civil War, many formerly enslaved people from the Sea Islands aided Union troops as scouts, labourers and soldiers. After Union forces captured Port Royal Sound and Hilton Head Island in 1861, hundreds of freedom seekers sought refuge behind Union lines. In 1862, General Ormsby Mitchel initiated the construction of a freedman's town on the north-eastern part of the island, on the former Fish Haul Plantation. Named in his honour, it developed into a self-governed town. After the Civil War, the withdrawal of Union forces and the loss of wartime employment contributed to the town's decline. By the early 1880s Mitchelville had largely been abandoned, and the Great Sea Island Hurricane of 1893 devastated what remained. Meanwhile, Gullah Geechee people across the Sea Islands built free lives.

Today, about one million people in the US claim Gullah Geechee heritage, including singer Darius Rucker and former First Lady Michelle Obama. I am not one of them – I am a Black father raising a Black son in the American South. My parents brought me to Fish Haul because they wanted me to see a place where African culture survived both the Middle Passage and the passage of time; where Black life preserves a more visible continuity with Africa than the one I inherited in Alabama. And now, on our three-day visit to the Gullah Geechee Corridor, that understanding would pass through from me to my son.

A living legacy

We timed our visit to Hilton Head for Juneteenth, when the island comes alive with days of celebrations. The day after visiting Fish Haul Beach, we headed to Bluffton – a historic river town dating to 1825. Leaving Hilton Head's luxury resort and golf club traffic for the Lowcountry mainland, we were unconsciously retracing the steps of Gullah Geechee families when they settled in this area after Mitchelville was abandoned.

As we drove through Old Town Bluffton, we saw moss-draped oaks, clapboard cottages and broad porches raised on brick piers above the May River. My wife, who often wraps her hair in scarves printed with traditional West African patterns, was pleased to see that we were surrounded by Black women wearing those same textiles. As we approached Martin Family Park, rhythmic beats halted us in our tracks. My son pointed towards the sound.

There was a small group gathered around five or six people who were clapping and stomping to a rhythm. One voice called. The others answered. A ring shout.

An unfamiliar melody in a familiar cadence struck something deep in me. Their songs sounded like an old Black hymn, like those I grew up hearing in church in Alabama. Now they felt like echoes across an ocean and time. First, my son stomped, clapped and mimicked the sounds. I'm typically reserved, but soon my wife and I were swaying, too.

"[A ring shout] has that effect," Sellars later told me. "There are celebratory ring shouts. Religious ring shouts – ring shouts only for grown folks. But they all capture your attention and almost beg you to participate."

Open invitations to participate are just one of the ways visitors can experience Gullah Geechee culture in Bluffton. I saw locals hauling sweetgrass baskets on their shoulders, and caught Gullah words passing between neighbours – brief snatches of oona and gwine (going to). For Sellars, language is only one form of expression. "Understanding the Gullah Geechee language is about understanding that everything we do speaks," she said.

Even the food – today, it remains a comfort that spans generations. Dishes like shrimp and grits, purloo (one-pot rice and seafood stew) and gumbo (thick stew with okra, shrimp and sausage) are ever-present at Gullah Geechee homes, and Gullah Geechee restaurants dot the cities of the Corridor.

Back, in Hilton Head, I ventured to Ruby Lee's, a cosy spot with exposed-brick walls lined with Gullah Geechee art, and ordered Hoppin' John: a dish made of rice and black-eyed peas. The first taste reminded me of the jollof I'd tried at a Nigerian friend’s house. Hoppin' John was less spicy, but smoky and well-seasoned, like the rice and peas my mother makes. The distance between Africa and home closed in a bite.

"For us, food represents a way of living," said Alex Brown, a fifth-generation Gullah resident and Hilton Head councilman. "Our historic culture of bartering is what produces these dishes. [Someone] may have some okra. Someone, rice. Someone else, shrimp. But together, suddenly we have okra gumbo."

Stories worth telling

Later that day, we drove to Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park. Herons flew above a weathered praise-house replica, while we passed ghostly abandoned homes before paying respects at placards honouring Harriet Tubman's role in emancipating more than 700 Gullah Geechee slaves.

For Brown, Gullah Geechee culture is essential to America's founding. "Our people are an important part of America's story," he said. "The story of American democracy cannot be told in full without mentioning Gullah sites like Mitchelville. Folks know Williamsburg. Folks know Jamestown. They have got to get to know Mitchelville."

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Though the Corridor designation has helped preserve and connect Gullah Geechee sites, displacement, ancestral land loss and climate change continue to shadow Gullah Geechee communities today. "Cemeteries where our founders rest are being disturbed, land straits once connecting islands are impassable," Sellars said. The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission warns that heirs' property owners also face pressure from developers.

"Our ancestors here not only founded a freetown but built a fort, Fort Howell, to defend that freedom," Brown said. "Black soldiers helped construct it in 1864. It was built with our hands and stationed by our bodies. This land is important to us."

While the Corridor's land may be under threat, its percussive, enlivening language still moves up and down the coast, connecting Black people to African diasporic traditions and American democracy. My son will not remember standing at Fish Haul Beach. But one day, I hope he understands why I brought him.

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'The PR guys hated the name': The 1,000-year-old story behind Bluetooth

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260924-the-1000-year-old-story-behind-bluetooth, 7 days ago

A pair of ancient runestones in Jelling tell the story of the Viking king who shaped Denmark – and inspired the name Bluetooth.

If you've ever wirelessly connected your phone to your headphones or laptop, you're probably already familiar with the name Bluetooth. But while the technology is modern, the story behind the name stretches back more than 1,000 years to a Viking king whose legacy can still be seen in Jelling, a small Danish town about 250km (155 miles) west of Copenhagen.

Here, two ancient runestones tell the story of his reign – and offer the first clue to how his unusual nickname became attached to one of the world's most widely used technologies.

The Viking king called Bluetooth

The king was Harald Gormsson, who ruled Denmark in the 10th Century. His nickname was Bluetooth – Blátǫnn in Old Norse – first documented 150 years after his death and believed to be a nod to a "blue" or rotted tooth.

One of Harald's most consequential achievements was Denmark's conversion to Christianity, thought to have taken place around 965. The larger of Jelling's two runestones, commissioned by Harald, declares that he "won himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian" and bears one of the earliest depictions of Christ in Scandinavia.

Until then, much of northern Europe was divided into smaller territories ruled by chieftains. Christianity gave Harald a way to consolidate power, strengthen Denmark's ties with Christian Europe and help unify the emerging state.

"It is the nation building of Denmark after 200 years of the Viking age, where the Northerners had a pretty steep learning curve," said Adam Bak, curator at the Kongernes Jelling Experience Center and Museum. "They get well-versed in different forms of politics in Europe, of what Christianity can do for them, and the centralisation of power in a state."

Why Jelling matters

Harald's story is written into the landscape at Jelling. His father, Gorm, commissioned the smaller and older of the town's two runestones in memory of his wife, Thyra. It is believed to contain the first written use of the name "Denmark" within the country.

"We call it Denmark's birth certificate," said Anne Havgaard Mikkelsen, a resident of nearby Vejle. Jelling, then, is its birthplace.

Though it has only 4,000 residents today, it was the seat of power in Harald Bluetooth's time. Originally a pagan burial site, Jelling became a place where pagan and Christian traditions overlapped during Harald's reign.

Today, white posts mark the palisade that once enclosed the Jelling monuments, while hundreds of markers trace the outline of a vast ship-shaped layout, possibly dedicated to Thyra. Two burial mounds and a Christian church complete a landscape that Bak says is less about "bold Viking warriors and Thor and Odin" than about "politics and transition, the change from something older to something new".

In 1994, the Jelling mounds, runic stones and church became Denmark's first Unesco World Heritage site. At nearby Kongernes Jelling visitor centre, interactive exhibits trace the transition between Viking beliefs and Christianity, while the two runestones – Denmark's baptismal stone and birth certificate – stand protected behind glass.

From Viking king to Bluetooth

More than 1,000 years later, Harald's reputation as a unifier would give his name an unexpected second life.

In the late 1990s, engineers from companies including Toshiba, IBM, Nokia, Intel, and Ericsson were developing a new technology that could connect devices across different brands. They needed a codename.

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Jim Kardach, an American Intel engineer, was collaborating with Swedish engineers when the conversation turned to Vikings. Intrigued, he immersed himself in a book about the history (which is on display at Kongernes Jelling) and became fascinated with the king who united Denmark and Norway, just like this new technology might unite different devices.

The code name leaked before the official press release was written, and the rest is tech history.

"The PR guys hated the name because they associated 'Bluetooth' with bad tooth hygiene," said Bak. "They were very concerned about it and had all kinds of different names that were better at explaining what the product was, but were way more boring. Bluetooth blew up because it was so distinct a name."

Its rune-inspired logo also helped its staying power. The ubiquitous symbol combines the Norse rune for "H" and "B" in honour of Harald Bluetooth.

On the 25th anniversary of the technology in 2023, Kardach and other founders travelled to Kongernes Jelling to lightheartedly "apologise" for using Harald's name without permission. The museum in turn accepted the apology and gave them permission keep using it for the next 1,000 years.

"Harald loved showing off," said Bak. "I think he would be very happy to know that billions of people say his name on a daily basis today."

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The world's five best economy airlines for 2026 - and what makes them so much better

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260924-the-worlds-five-best-economy-airlines-for-2026-and-what-makes-them-so-much-better, 9 days ago

From wider seats and extra legroom to better food and service, these are the perks that set Skytrax's top five economy airlines apart.

An extra inch of seat width, a little more space between rows, a better-shaped headrest or even somewhere separate to put your drink can make a surprising difference eight hours into an economy flight.

And when flying in the back of the plane can mean cramped seats, mediocre food and hours spent trying to get comfortable, the airlines that get the basics right can feel dramatically different.

In the 2026 Skytrax World Airline Awards, Singapore Airlines has been named the world's best economy-class airline, followed by Cathay Pacific, Qatar Airways, EVA Air and ANA All Nippon Airways. The awards are based on Skytrax's annual passenger satisfaction survey, which asks passengers to rate airlines across the airport and onboard experience.

"In economy, inches and small touches matter," says Gary Leff, founder of frequent-travel website View from the Wing. Space is the most expensive thing on an aircraft, he explains, but some airlines devote more of it – and more attention – to economy-class passengers.

We looked at how Skytrax's five best economy-class airlines perform on seats, food, entertainment, Wi-Fi and service – and unpacked the design and hospitality choices that can make a flight feel noticeably better at the back of the plane.

1. Singapore Airlines

One of Singapore Airlines' most noticeable economy-class advantages is also one of the simplest: a wider seat. On its Boeing 777-300ERs, economy is arranged nine seats across, in a 3-3-3 layout; many airlines operating the same aircraft fit 10 seats across instead.

"That's extra width for each passenger," says Leff, adding that the difference is particularly noticeable at the shoulders and hips on long flights, when passengers are sharing armrest space for many hours.

But Singapore's first-place finish isn't just about the seat. The airline also ranked first for economy catering, while Lachlan Hyde, a pilot, aviation industry commentator and president of the Royal Federation of Aero Clubs of Australia, notes its adjustable head support, KrisWorld entertainment system and consistently polished service as part of what he calls the "complete package".

Smaller design details matter too. Leff points to features including a foot bar and dedicated cup holder, which frees up tray-table space during meals or when passengers are using a laptop or phone.

2. Cathay Pacific

Cathay Pacific's second-place finish reflects its strength across several parts of the economy experience. It ranked fourth for economy seats, third for economy catering and third for inflight entertainment, while Skytrax also named it the world's best airline for cabin crew in 2026.

Good cabin service is harder to quantify than seat width or screen size, but can be increasingly noticeable over the course of a long-haul flight. "Simply being treated as a person and a customer rather than self-loading cargo can distinguish economy travel," says Leff.

He points to something as mundane as lavatory upkeep. On carriers with attentive crews, he says, passengers are more likely to find the facilities kept usable throughout a long journey – a small detail that becomes more noticeable as the hours pass.

For Hyde, one of Cathay's more noticeable differences is its investment in the technology passengers use at their seats. "On newer/refitted aircraft, economy includes features such as 4K screens, Bluetooth audio and improved storage, alongside a particularly strong entertainment offering," he says.

3. Qatar Airways

Qatar Airways ranked third overall but sixth for Skytrax's separate ranking for best economy-class seats, evidence that a better economy flight isn't necessarily about having more space. For Qatar, the advantage is less about space and more about what passengers can do with their time onboard.

One example is connectivity. The airline has been rolling out Starlink across its widebody fleet, including Boeing 777s, Airbus A350s and Boeing 787s. On equipped aircraft, the system supports faster browsing, streaming and video calls than older generations of inflight Wi-Fi.

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"Investments that matter throughout the cabin take on additional significance in coach," says Leff. "Many airlines are adopting low-Earth-orbit satellite Wi-Fi, and it makes a big difference staying engaged, especially in economy."

For passengers, that changes how a long flight feels. Instead of relying entirely on downloaded content or the seatback entertainment system, travellers can stay connected to messaging, work or streaming services when Starlink is available.

4. EVA Air

Placing fourth overall, Hyde singles out the seats themselves as one of the airline's strengths.

"EVA Air is less about one headline feature and more about thoughtful comfort," he says. The Taiwanese carrier uses adjustable headrests and ergonomic seat designs intended to provide more support over longer journeys. On some aircraft, the seat base shifts slightly as the back reclines, while cushioning and headrest design are intended to reduce pressure during extended periods of sitting.

EVA's food is another distinguishing feature. Its economy menus regularly include Taiwanese and other Asian dishes, and the airline placed second only to Singapore in Skytrax's economy-catering ranking.

5. ANA All Nippon Airways

ANA's clearest economy advantage on certain aircraft is legroom. Several of the airline's Boeing 787-9 configurations offer up to 34 inches of seat pitch, compared with the 31 to 32 inches common on many long-haul economy cabins.

For passengers, that can mean more clearance around the knees and more room to move when the seat in front is reclined. Some ANA 787-9s also include footrests, adjustable headrests, larger entertainment screens, USB-C charging and Bluetooth audio.

There is an important caveat: ANA's economy product varies by aircraft. Some Boeing 787-8 configurations offer less pitch, so travellers particularly concerned about legroom should check the aircraft and seat map before booking.

ANA also ranked fifth for economy seats and seventh for catering, reinforcing the broader pattern among the airlines at the top of Skytrax's economy-class ranking: strong performance across several parts of the experience rather than a single standout feature.

As Hyde puts it, "Economy is won through consistency. The seat has to be comfortable, the service attentive, the food worthwhile and the entertainment good enough that passengers don't spend 10 hours thinking about the fact they're sitting in economy."

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The tiny Arctic island where travellers have found refuge since 1897

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260917-the-tiny-arctic-island-where-travellers-have-found-refuge-since-1897, 12 days ago

For centuries, this tiny Norwegian island sheltered fishermen from violent seas. Now one woman is using tourism to revive it – and offer travellers refuge from modern life.

The day before I travel to Støtt, a tiny Norwegian archipelago just north of the Arctic Circle, an artist tells me a local legend about fishermen caught in the grip of vicious winter storms. "Sometimes, everyone drowned," he says. "But sometimes, an island rose out of the mist, like magic, to save you."

For generations, Støtt was a refuge. Fishing boats blown off course in the Norwegian Sea could shelter here, while a trading post on Innerstøtt, the largest of Støtt's three inhabited islands, supplied fishermen heading north to the rich Arctic cod grounds of Lofoten.

Today, that trading post is home to Støtt Brygge, a hotel run by Eva Ann Andersen, whose family has owned it since 1897. Andersen believes the island can offer a different kind of refuge now: not from violent seas, but from stress, overwork and modern urban life.

She knows something about that herself. Andersen grew up on Støtt before moving to Oslo in her twenties and building an international corporate career. In 2011, exhausted, she returned to the island to recover – and saw new potential in the place she'd left behind.

The story of islands rising out of the sea occupies my mind as I take the coastal ferry to Støtt, watching the island gradually appear from the rainclouds. To get here, I'd flown into Bodø, where a lone conveyor belt serves the airport and the ferry terminal sports posters asking passengers to report whale sightings. As the city disappears behind me, grey sea and low cloud heavy with drizzle takes over. Every so often, craggy rocks loom out of the mist.

After an hour, Støtt finally appears: low-lying granite, red cabins and tall cod-drying racks rising out of the spray. To the west, there's nothing between here and Greenland but open ocean.

It's hard to imagine now, but Støtt was once one of the busiest stopping points on Norway's northern fishing route. Today just a handful of people live here year-round.

After meeting me at the ferry, Andersen and I walk to the hotel, where passing fishermen and sailors once stopped to resupply. The hotel also encompasses a pair of classic red fishermen's cabins, a restored storehouse and a pale-yellow bakery building. We head upstairs to its small fishing museum, whose black-and-white photographs and weathered nets tell the story of the island's heyday, when fishermen would shelter here from storms, restock their boats and wait for calmer seas.

"Fishermen used to come up to fish for Arctic cod in Lofoten in winter," Andersen said, referencing the string of islands that lie like dark cut-outs on the horizon to the north. "The shop was an important place back then. Fishermen came here to buy fishing equipment, bread, sugar and flour – and to have a drink – before continuing their journeys north."

She points out a black-and-white photo of her grandfather standing in a wooden boat, ankle-deep in large silver fish; elsewhere an old film shows men in small wooden boats hauling in huge catches of herring. Downstairs in the restaurant, historical posters and ledgers line the walls while the old shop counter serves as the bar.

Later, in my room in the island's saffron-coloured former bakery, I'm charmed by the lace curtains and framed newspaper cuttings showing men mending nets on the floor of an old fishing hut, hand-rolled cigarettes squashed in the corner of their mouths. But the museum feel is mixed with more modern comforts: Lofoten Seaweed products in the bathroom and snow-white sheepskins scattered across the dove-grey bedroom floor.

Andersen has witnessed much of Støtt's decline. From the 1980s, innovation in the fishing industry brought larger, safer boats and trawlers, meaning fishermen no longer needed to stop at trading posts like Støtt en route. The small-scale fishing industry collapsed, and the island's population fell from around 120 people to just 25 permanent residents today.

"Nobody believed I would stay," she says of her decision to return in 2011. "But I carried hope when I came back."

In the afternoon, Andersen takes me on a bike tour around Støtt, cycling along quiet roads beside pretty holiday cottages and homes. There's only one shop, which sells the bare basics for holidaymakers to stock their cabins. To the north, the mountainous islands rise above the churning navy-blue sea.

We continue to a former German coastal fort, one of Støtt's most striking historical features. Once home to around 200 soldiers, the complex includes concrete bunkers and tunnels built into the hillside after the island was occupied in 1941, along with an underground hospital, ammunition stores and gun emplacements.

Andersen, however, is focused firmly on the future. As we ride, she tells me she hopes Støtt can once again become a refuge – this time for travellers looking to escape the pace of modern life. "A lot of people want this off-the-beaten-track feeling," she says. "It's about connection to land and meeting local people."

To appeal to those travellers, Andersen has expanded the hotel's activities to include kayaking trips, Arctic sauna sessions, RIB boat excursions to Svartisen glacier and dinner in one of the World War Two tunnels. She is also converting the island's old fish factory into luxury suites, hoping to attract more international visitors while creating year-round work for locals.

We stop at the top of the bunker complex to take in the view, and as if on cue, a white-tailed sea eagle soars into view, then wheels back down into the valley where it emerged. I'm still awestruck as we head back to the hotel for lunch, where Andersen's daughter Benedicte joins us. Back from Oslo, where she's studying for the summer, she's in no doubt about why people love visiting Støtt.

"You can't beat the nature here. Oslo has so much stress, but here there is a Zen mode. You don't think about going to the gym, just going outside and seeing the mountains is enough," she says.

I later watch her leading a kayaking group through the turquoise water, past pale sandy beaches around the skerries close to shore. I walk along a quiet beach looking at shells and white coral in the sand. Mountains stand out like inkblots in the far distance, and the only noise beyond the splash of kayak paddles is the sound of birds on the wind.

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Bird watching is another big draw, particularly in spring when migratory birds arrive on the island. In winter, visitors come for the Northern Lights and stargazing. I'm here during the summer's midnight-Sun period when the Sun doesn't set. Late at night, I lie in my room late watching geese outside on the lawn and peaceful passing clouds.

The calm continues into the following morning. Over a classic Norwegian breakfast of marinated, pickled and paprika-sprinkled herring, Andersen tells me about her ambitions for Støtt.

"The greatest aim for me is to rebuild this island's society," she says. By creating more jobs and drawing visitors, Andersen hopes Støtt can give people a reason to stay – and perhaps encourage others to return. In an echo of the ever-popular Lofoten Islands to the north, she wants tourism to breathe new life into the archipelago, drawing artists and writers and stimulating a region that has been forgotten for too long.

For now, though, Støtt remains what it has always been: a place of refuge from the storms beyond its shores.

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New security lanes to speed up airport checks

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr74p85g24ypo, today

New technology means passengers using Leeds Bradford Airport (LBA) will have shorter waits for security checks, airport bosses have said.

A new Central Search Zone is opening, with extra-long security lanes allowing almost double the number of people to be screened per hour.

Passengers are also now able to leave electronics and liquids under 100ml in their bags, rather than having to take them out to be scanned separately.

The airport's management says it forms part of their long-term vision to modernise its infrastructure, improve operational efficiency and deliver an airport experience that meets the expectations of a growing region.

The new facility features dynamic virtual queue management, which means that LBA's team can actively manage passenger flow and reduce waiting times during busy periods.

The area also includes six eGates for boarding card scanning, helping passengers move efficiently into the security search area.

Individual lanes will be capable of processing up to 600 passengers per hour, compared with approximately 350 previously.

By the end of the year, a further two lanes will come into operation, doubling the airport's current security screening capacity.

Dedicated routes have been introduced for passengers needing special assistance, and Fast Track customers.

Vincent Hodder, CEO at LBA, described it as a "landmark moment".

"This is a truly transformational investment that will significantly enhance the passenger experience," he said.

"Not only are we increasing capacity, but we're introducing some of the most advanced security processing technology available at any UK regional airport.

"By doubling our current security capacity, we're creating a more efficient, more comfortable journey for our customers.

"Passengers will spend less time queuing and more time enjoying our terminal facilities before departure."

Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.

National Trust encourages Ironbridge collaboration

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm98z4dznx9no, today

Tourism businesses in Shropshire have been invited to learn more about the National Trust's plans for the Ironbridge Gorge museums, and to how they can benefit.

The National Trust took over ownership of the sites in March and the attractions reopened under their new management in May.

The Telford and Shropshire Local Visitor Economy Partnership has arranged a one-day conference in Coalbrookdale on Monday to discuss collaboration opportunities.

It said the museums, which tell the story of the birth of the industrial revolution in the gorge, were one of the county's "most important visitor attractions".

The attractions had previously been managed by The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust since 1967.

It ran 10 museums, 35 listed buildings and scheduled monuments, including Blists Hill Victorian Town, the Coalbrookdale Museum of Iron and the Old Furnace.

It does not include the world's first large Iron Bridge, a Grade I listed structure spanning the River Severn and giving the area its name, which is owned by Telford and Wrekin Council and cared for by English Heritage.

When the National Trust took over, with the help of a £9m government grant, the National Trust said it aimed to increase annual visitor numbers from 330,000 to 600,000 in the long term.

That will partly be achieved by giving paid National Trust members access to the site, but it said it also wanted to "strengthen relationships" with the tourism industry in the area.

The Local Visitor Economy Partnership is made up of Telford and Wrekin Council, Shropshire Council, Visit Telford and Visit Shropshire.

It said the conference on Monday would allow businesses to "learn more about the evolving visitor offer at Ironbridge Gorge, gain insight into future opportunities, and explore how businesses can work alongside one of the destination's strongest visitor assets".

The Ironbridge Gorge area was named a Unesco World heritage site in 1986.

It played a key role in the Industrial Revolution, owing much to Abraham Darby I's transformation of iron production, as well as the "iron masters" who followed him, with some likening the area to the silicon valley of its day.

The innovations which were started there are widely recognised as being the catalyst for the building of the bridges, railways and machinery of the modern world.

The £9m government grant, announced last October, was given to enable the National Trust to fund the upkeep of the properties, as part of the government's Plan for Change, to help boost the local economy.

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Debris found from plane that went missing off US coast

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cme3x85013llo, yesterday

US authorities have found debris from a medical transport aircraft that went missing with six people on board.

The Federal Aviation Administration told the BBC it had lost contact with the Gulfstream G-100 plane just after 01:00 local time (05:00 GMT) on Saturday, while it was travelling from Bermuda to Boston, Massachusetts.

The search for survivors continues off the coast of Nantucket, a Massachusetts island, the US Coast Guard said.

Authorities have notified the next of kin of those on the flight, four Canadian nationals and two Bermudian nationals.

"Search crews located a debris field confirmed to be from the aircraft off the coast of Nantucket," the US Coast Guard said in an update on Saturday night. It added that ships, helicopters and planes were involved in searches that would through continue the night.

The plane departed from Bermuda's L.F. Wade International Airport at 23:40 local time, according to flight data from FlightAware, and was due to land at Boston's Logan International at 01:30 EDT (05:30 GMT).

According to the tail number released by the Coast Guard, the plane belonged to Latitude Air Ambulances, a company that provides international medical flights for patients returning home.

Among those on board were two pilots and two medical staff, both Canadian, Clarence Togeretz, director of flight operations at Latitude, told CBC News.

The crew flew to Bermuda to collect a patient and their relative, who are not Canadian, Togeretz said.

FlightAware's tracker shows the aircraft significantly dropped in altitude before its communications went dark, plummeting from around 7,300m (24,000ft) to 3,300m (11,000ft).

Radio transmissions shows trouble with communications between the air traffic controller and the pilot, the Boston Globe reported based on transmissions provided by LiveATC.net.

"You're coming in blind? Is that what you said?," the air traffic controller asked. "Are you declaring an emergency, or no?"

The pilot's response was inaudible.

"You're coming in a little weak so I didn't hear what your response was, if you were declaring an emergency or not," the air traffic controller said, according to the Globe.

The air traffic controller later confirmed the pilot had declared an emergency.

An area fire dispatcher asked emergency crews just after 01:00 EDT to prepare to meet a plane with an "electrical issue".

The dispatcher later said "the aircraft has lost radio and radar".

The Coast Guard said it would provide an update on Sunday morning local time.

Can big events change how a city is seen?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5vgyj1vpgmro, 2 days ago

Thousands of people have descended on Southampton for concerts, festivals and major events this summer, but can they change the way the city is seen?

From major artists performing in Guildhall Square to hundreds of musicians taking over venues across Southampton, the city has had a packed events calendar.

It comes four years after Southampton reached the final four in the race to become UK City of Culture, with council leaders subsequently pledging to build on the momentum of the bid.

So is Southampton becoming better known as a cultural destination or does it still have some way to go?

Known as the "Gateway to the World", Southampton has a longstanding connection with the maritime industry.

The Mayflower sailed from the city in 1620 before eventually crossing the Atlantic, while the Titanic departed Southampton on its ill-fated maiden voyage in 1912.

More recently, the city has become synonymous with the cruise industry, with millions of passengers passing through its port.

Those comings and goings can leave Southampton feeling like a "transient city", according to Julianne Watling-McCarthy, co-founder of Southampton Pride Trust.

The city's Pride event is free to attend and Watling-McCarthy said more than 20,000 people visited over the weekend this summer.

"Southampton isn't very good at shouting about the stuff that's great here," she said.

She added there was now "a joined-up way of working amongst cultural organisations in the city", which was largely inspired by its unsuccessful City of Culture bid.

Southampton made the shortlist in 2022 to be named UK City of Culture for 2025.

It ultimately lost out to Bradford, but Sarah Bogle, leader of Southampton City Council and lead on growth, prosperity and culture, said the bid "provided a platform" and made the council think about "the art of the possible".

"The overall goal is to become more of a destination city and provide more experiences for people but also to help residents enjoy our city as well," she said.

Bogle said the packed summer of events was part of a conscious effort to promote Southampton.

She said analysis following Southampton Summer Sessions in June found more than 50% of visitors travelled from outside the SO postcode area.

"It's about building a brand about Southampton as a place to visit, Southampton as a place to spend time in, it's not just a place to pass through," she said.

The Southampton International Boat Show, now in its 57th year, attracted more than 91,000 visitors this year, with events director Jasmine Hill saying 70% came from outside the city.

Hill said the show reinforced Southampton as the "maritime place to go", while its work with local schools and universities aimed to "encourage the younger generation" into the industry.

But Chris Orr, event lead for Music in the City, wants people to recognise Southampton for more than its maritime heritage.

The free grassroots music event is in its 18th year and featured more than 1,800 musicians across 59 venues, with 425 live performances in a single day.

Orr said bands performing at the event had subsequently been rebooked by venues throughout the year, helping it support local talent beyond the weekend itself.

"By its nature Southampton is very spread out, there's lots of different communities and Music in the City brings them all together," he said.

As a local resident, Orr said he did not think Southampton received the recognition it deserved for its culture.

"For things like music and the arts, I don't know how recognised we are," he said.

"You often hear people quote Bristol and Brighton as music cities but I think Southampton very much is one and I think there's work to be done to get that message out there."

'Trial and error'

David McGregor, cabinet member for economy, culture, heritage and tourism at Brighton and Hove City Council, said his council treated culture like a "heritage asset" for the city.

He said economic impact studies were used to measure what events brought back to Brighton, while the council also responded to feedback and had changed or removed events when they did not feel right for the city.

McGregor acknowledged that, at a time when councils were under financial pressure, "culture and events seems like the easiest thing to cut", but said the investment was "invaluable".

He said "having an understanding of what you want to be known for" was crucial to developing a city's cultural identity.

"We have a clear understanding of the things that work and the things that don't," he said.

"Maybe that's a bit of trial and error over the years as well."

How much should you actually tip on a 'free' walking tour?

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260924-how-much-should-you-actually-pay-on-a-free-walking-tour, 8 days ago

They're advertised as free – but guides often pay a fee for every guest. Here's what travellers should know before joining one.

It's a wet December day in Rome, and my friend Daphne* has been waiting near Piazza Barberini for half an hour. Five people booked her free walking tour. None have appeared.

It's the third time in a row that no-one has shown up.

For the travellers, there's no financial penalty. However, for Daphne, there can be. She's given up paid work for the day to be here, so her no-show guests have cost her time and income.

But if Daphne was running a free walking tour, why should she expect money at all?

Let me explain.

How a free walking tour works

On a free walking tour, guests book without paying upfront and are encouraged to tip at the end. Since the model emerged in Europe in the early 2000s, it has exploded in popularity, with companies like Sandemans Tours, Guruwalk, Walkative and Free Tour now offering online platforms for freelance guides to advertise.

But to use some of these platforms, free walking tour guides like Daphne pay a booking or finder's fee for each guest who turns up. Daphne says she paid €3 per person through one company, meaning a low tip could leave her earning very little – or even losing money on a guest.

For travellers, though, the ease of booking and low financial commitment is part of the appeal. Kash Bhattacharya, who runs the BudgetTraveller blog, says free tours helped him explore cities when he was travelling on a student budget. "You would pay them what you felt was within your means and [how] much you enjoyed the tour."

So why do some guides offer tours without charging upfront? For some, while there are certain risks attached – and, in some countries, licensing requirements to navigate – free tours can be an accessible way to start guiding and earn money showing people around a destination they love.

"I'm a theatre kid. I love history," Daphne says. "[And] what an amazing job to be able to show people around the Eternal City."

Why the tip matters more than you think

"Come on, man!" the guide screams at the person next to me. "I paid €3.50 for you!"

It's the height of summer in Istanbul, and our tour group is standing in the midday sun between Hagia Sophia and Topkapi Palace. Our guide has just received a tip he considers too small. As he has been easy-going till this point, his reaction shocks me. But it brings home the reality: the tour may be advertised as free, but if guests don't tip enough, a guide can actually lose money.

That tension is built into the model. Some travellers understandably feel the tip is optional, while platforms suggest paying "a fair amount" – but also say guides should "never pressure you to tip".

Heather Mae Ellis, president of the Berlin Guides Association, says the risk to the guide is that a tour participant is going to take the term "free" at face value. "I'd like to think anyone travelling through Europe can afford to pay a few euros for a tour," she says "[But] you have to accept that someone really might take you at your word."

Daphne agrees it's a risk, but that her philosophy is some tourists pay more, others less, and that everything comes out in the wash.

So, how much should I tip?

There's no "one size fits all" answer. Some platforms recommend tipping freelance guides anywhere between €15 to €50 per participant, while guides themselves say the right amount depends on the destination, the quality of the tour and what you can afford.

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What is the local cost of living (food, drink and rent)? In Vienna at New Year's, my guide suggested at least €20, and plenty of participants opted for €25. In Istanbul, a traditionally cheap destination but where costs have risen sharply, I paid €15-20 where I once might have given €5-10.

Daphne, living in Rome, says that she "would hope at least like €15 per person".

There is still room for "pay what you can", however. Daphne says that if she were guiding two students and they gave her €20 between them, she wouldn't "be too upset". Personally, I tend to tip €15-25 for a good tour.

Bhattacharya also suggests factoring in the guide's expertise and how much value they added. "If you genuinely enjoyed it and the guide really put their heart and soul into it, you should pay extra," he says.

And if you genuinely don't like the tour? You can simply walk away.

* Name has been changed for privacy.

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The world's top cities for 2026 - and why they stand out

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20260923-the-worlds-top-cities-for-2026-and-why-they-stand-out, 11 days ago

From cultural investment to cutting-edge technology, the 2026 Global Cities Index reveals what makes the world's leading cities such compelling places to live and visit.

What makes a city stand out on the world stage – and what makes it a great place to visit? According to Oxford Economics' 2026 Global Cities Index, the answer goes far beyond economic clout or beautiful architecture.

The index ranks 1,000 cities across five measures: governance, economics, human capital, environment and quality of life. New York, London and Paris top this year's list, while cities including Seattle and Dublin rank highly.

Looking across the leaders and standout performers, four qualities stand out – and they help explain why some cities remain so compelling to live and visit.

1. They attract people from everywhere

The world's highest-ranked cities tend to score strongly in human capital, a measure that captures the skills, education and diversity of their populations. That influx of talent and ideas can reshape neighborhoods, food and culture in ways that benefit both locals and travellers.

Boston, ranked seventh in the index, scored particularly highly in human capital, helped by its extraordinary concentration of leading universities and colleges. With its high "knowledge economy", the city earns some of the highest incomes in the world. Some of that wealth goes back into public spaces, including the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a former elevated highway now lined with gardens, fountains and public art, while institutions such as the Harvard Art Museums are open to the public.

Dublin, ranked sixth, benefits from a highly skilled workforce supported by institutions like Trinity College Dublin, attracting major international companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Accenture and contributing to the regeneration of former docklands and public spaces around the River Liffey.

And London goes even further: it ranks first in the index for human capital, drawing workers from around the world, with foreign-born residents making up nearly 40% of its population. Its diversity has helped transform the city's once-maligned food scene, which travellers can sample everywhere from Brick Lane to Borough Market.

2. They invest in culture

Economic power alone doesn't make a city compelling, however. Paris, ranked third overall, scores especially strongly for quality of life, helped by long life expectancy and exceptional access to culture. The city has around 130 museums, with 11 municipal museums offering free entry to their permanent collections since 2001, regardless of nationality of country of residence. Many others also have free admission at least once a month.

Seattle, ranked fourth overall, also benefits from a strong quality-of-life score, with the report pointing to the city’s rich art offerings such as the Seattle Art Museum and its grunge music history, spawning rock bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The city recently completed its 20-acre Waterfront Park, replacing a demolished motorway with a walkway that includes new community piers and bike lanes alongside Puget Sound views.

3. They make urban life cleaner and easier

A city can be exciting and culturally rich, but poor air quality or difficult transport can quickly sour the visitor experience.

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Despite its massive size, London performs unusually well on environment measures for a city of its scale. Oxford Economics points to policies such as the congestion charge and the Ultra-Low Emission Zone as factors helping to reduce traffic and pollution, changes travellers can feel in less car-dominated central streets.

San Francisco also scores strongly in the environment category. The index cites its transport network as one reason residents and visitors are less reliant on cars, which keeps emissions low and air quality high. Dublin performs strongly too, thanks to its comparatively low pollution levels and ambitious climate initiatives, which include reaching climate neutrality by 2030.

4. They stay ahead of change

Some of the fastest-rising cities in the index are being propelled by technology. San Jose, ranked eighth overall, had the highest GDP per person in the index, thanks to corporations like Alphabet (Google), Apple and Nvidia calling Silicon Valley home. In nearby San Francisco, home to Meta, Uber and Salesforce, driverless cars are now part of everyday transport, offering travellers a glimpse of what urban mobility might look like elsewhere in the future.

Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, also made the index's Cities to Watch list, due to its momentum in the tech industry and its high rate of AI adoption compared to other European capitals. High-tech projects like Rail Baltica, set to connect rail travel through the Baltics by 2030, is being built entirely as a "digital native" railway, allowing it to be 100% powered by renewable energy and 5G communication systems instead of physical signal lights.

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Yoga bears to resting owl face: 10 of the funniest animal photos of 2026

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261002-10-of-the-funniest-animal-photos-of-2026, yesterday

From a fitness-obsessed bear to a rather rude orangutan, here are 10 of the most amusing photos of the animal kingdom this year.

A scowling owl, bears sharing a laugh and a leisurely praying mantis are among the finalists of the 2026 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards.

In the photo above, a female brown bear was captured appearing to do her morning exercises around Lake Clark in Alaska, US. Her workout routine included some bicycle kicks as she appeared to get herself ready for the summer season.

Scroll down to see nine more entertaining photos of nature's top comedians.

Caught red-handed

This red squirrel was caught red-handed in Germany while biting off more than it could chew. The squirrel managed to chomp through the huge mouthful, while striking a dramatic pose.

Elegant landing

Photographer Tapani Linnanmäki caught this white-tailed eagle touching down on watery sea ice on Finland's western coast. After photographing these birds at this location for years, Linnanmäki suspects, but can't be sure, that it's the same eye-catching individual that won the 2024 competition's people's choice award.

Leisurely mantis

Sunbathing or posing? In reality, a visual trick is at play in this photo: the praying mantis' hind legs are hidden behind the leaf. The image was captured in the proposed Bosques del Araza Regional Conservation Area in Cusco, Peru, which aims to safeguard the headwaters of several important rivers in an area increasingly threatened by illegal gold mining.

Resting owl face

This mountain scops owl touched down for a moment in front of a group of birders in Nanling National Forest Park in China. In the flurry of pictures the birders took, the owl appeared deeply unimpressed.

It's behind you!

Photographer Kyo Chen was watching a group of spadefish in the waters of Dumaguete in the Philippines when the huge silhouette of a whale shark appeared. Instinctively pressing the shutter, he captured the spadefish's apparent look of terror.

This feels wrong

When Kevin Lohman raised his camera to take a picture of this young great horned owl in Natural Bridges State Beach, California, he found himself snapping a squirrel in mid-flight, launching itself towards the owlet. Both animals were knocked to the grass below. The squirrel then repeated the stunt – twice more. Owl and squirrel both appeared unharmed, Lohman says.

Family photo session

Whether or not these three meerkats in Namibia were actually lining up for a family portrait, the smallest seems accustomed to submitting to grooming inspections.

Salty orangutan

This wild orangutan in Borneo was just finishing a meal when it was caught in the act of raising its middle finger. A critically endangered species, the orangutan's forest home is rapidly being destroyed.

Bear banter

Charles Janson took this photo of two teenage brown bears playfully sparring in Chinitna Bay, Alaska, a behaviour that prepares them for real fights as adult males. "There is debate about whether the facial expressions of these bears are at all equivalent to human smiles – but I like to think that they are," says Janson.

You can see more finalists from the competition here.

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Canada's Atlantic waters are attracting more great white sharks

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261002-canadas-atlantic-waters-are-attracting-more-great-white-sharks, 2 days ago

In the past decade, many more great white sharks are being seen in Canada's Atlantic waters. What's drawing them so far north?

This summer, a seasonal visitor decided the waters off the Canada's prvince of Nova Scotia were very much to his liking.

Just a few months earlier, this tourist had been enjoying Florida. As spring turned into summer, he headed north.

His decision to favour the chilly waters off Nova Scotia over the Sunshine State became noteworthy news; he was no guide-book-toting day tripper, but a nearly 14ft-long (4.2m) great white shark nicknamed "Contender" by researchers.

Contender wasn't alone. Other members of the Atlantic's great white shark population have been patrolling further north and joining him off the coasts of Canada's eastern provinces. US Atlantic states have seen a rebounding shark population due to the recovery of seal populations, and now cold, deep waters further north have become a new great white shark hotspot.

With the growing population, however, there is a greater chance of unwelcome interactions with the people they share the waters with. In September, a diver was attacked by a great white off Quebec's Gaspé Coast. The diver was one of three diving in murky water at the time. His injuries were not life-threatening, but the incident caused alarm amongst diving and water sports businesses, and many operators cancelled dives.

So why are the white sharks ranging further north?

The great white shark, it turns out, is no stranger to Canada's eastern seaboard. As a species, they tend to prefer cooler water, up to a point. They are one of only a few shark species whose body temperature is noticeably warmer than the surrounding water, a feature which gives them added power when hunting. Warm muscles activate quicker in the cold water, meaning faster reactions, but they also require more energy.

Seals are a favourite prey – and seal numbers have been climbing along the US and Canadian coasts in recent decades, possibly because climate-change-induced warming seas are tempting more fish species further north. The surface waters off Nova Scotia are believed to have warmed by about 1.5C (2.7F) in the last 30 years, with the seafloor temperatures warming by about 3C (5.4F) over the same period.

More fish means more seals, and that means more great whites.

A dramatic increase

Alanna Canaran, a dive instructor and ocean science educator based in Novia Scotia's capital, Halifax, first moved to the province from Toronto in 2010. "In that time in Nova Scotia, it was pretty unheard of to see a white shark," she says. After working elsewhere during the 2010s, she moved back to Nova Scotia in 2020. In little more than a decade, the situation had changed dramatically.

"There have been a few days where you're in the water and it feels very sharky. You can feel that energy. Often in the summertime, when the water warms up, the water visibility decreases, so it becomes a little bit green or a little bit hazy – I'm sure they've been around."

Some of her friends have had far closer encounters. One of Canaran's dive partners was recently at a popular spot called Birchie Head, near St Margaret's Bay. "She was looking down at the rocks and looking at lobsters and things, and all of a sudden she looks up and she sees the belly of a great white shark just swim above her."

Canaran's friend warned her dive partner, who eventually looked up and saw the shark above them. "They ended up just staying really close to the bottom and making their way to the shore, and getting out of the water on basically a side of a cliff because they were obviously spooked."

The great whites are not actively seeking humans as prey, but are sometimes drawn to investigate our underwater activities, often characterised by splashing and noise. Robust research has proved that the sharks could confuse a wetsuited diver or a silhouetted surfboard with a seal. Occasionally, their predatory instinct kicks in. More often than not, the sharks cruise at a distance, merely observing.

In another incident this summer, noted on the Canadian Shark Attack Registry, a diver's fins were "bumped" by a great white that had come in for a closer look. Scuba divers, breathing streams of loud bubbles, look less like a seal than a snorkeller in a wet suit, but sharks are known for their curiosity.

"I include a briefing about sharks for my courses and for my guided dives that I take out," adds Canaran. "I also preface it by saying [the risk of a shark attack is] very, very, very unlikely, but it's increasing."

One reason for the increase in sightings, says Canaran, is that there are more people using the water the sharks are frequenting. The population of Nova Scotia has just passed one million, with its main city Halifax now home to 400,000 people – and that's a lot more people using the waters visited by the sharks.

"Even in 2020, when I moved back, there was only a couple dozen scuba divers that were going out on the regular," she says. "Now there's definitely like a couple of hundred, and there's more people on boats. More eyes on the water, of course, will mean more sightings."

Shark scientist and marine biologist Neil Hammerschlag, who counts the different sharks he sees running a cage-diving operations, has also seen an increased number of great white sightings.

"I can definitely say last year was the most sharks we saw, and this year already we seem to be seeing the sharks even earlier than last year," he tells the BBC. "I don't think the population is bigger. I think we're just seeing individuals visiting Atlantic Canada more than they used to."

Hammerschlag says the waters around Nova Scotia are still cold, but very much within the range the species is comfortable with. The extra food is an added bonus. "Nova Scotia has a lot of food options for them. It's a pretty healthy marine ecosystem with lots of big things that they can eat, seals and tunas," he says.

"The individuals learn, they have memories, they have mental maps. They come here and explore and see the opportunity… they remember that and come back."

Hammerschlag's operation has been trying to gauge the size of the area's resident population, which sharks are returning from year to year, how many are male and female, and the size range. "Last year we identified 120 different great whites in 55 days," he says.

These sightings varied wildly between different individuals, he says. A small number of sharks would be seen four or five times; two individuals were seen on about 30% of their expeditions. But the vast majority were encountered only once.

"Probably 80% of them we only saw once and never again. That indicates to us that they're moving through."

There have been attempts to soothe Canadians amongst the increased sightings and interactions, reassuring them that this is not unexpected.

Improving food stocks will likely lead to an increased shark population, though the sharks' numbers increase a lot more slowly than the seals. "If there are a lot of sharks, say around Cape Cod or New York, and they're just too populous, they're going to start moving into their northern and southern ranges," she says.

Speaking before the incident off the Quebec coast, Hammerschlag said he thought more Canadians were "pretty excited" about the possibilities of seeing a great white shark close to home. But they are also perhaps more cautious about the amount of time they are spending in the sea. "You know, I think they're a little more thoughtful when they enter the water."

Nova Scotia's relatively chilly water temperatures could also be a factor. "Most people are not spending a long time in it, and certainly not going very deep… a great white can't get into water that's two feet deep, right?"

That caution could turn out to be of benefit, Hammerschlag says. "I think that's a that's exactly what's necessary – not to be fearful, but to be mindful… it has a lot of benefits, not only for human safety, but for just the understanding and conservation of sharks."

Increasing interactions

Both Canaran and Hammerschlag don't think people should be scared to enter the water because of the recent attack – but they should be more mindful that they are sharing the waters with sharks. And Canaran adds that for Nova Scotia's indigenous people, like the Mi'kmaq, sharing the water with great whites was a fact of life.

"Indigenous people were out on canoes and they were harpooning seals, and so it's pretty amazing… a great white shark could be in the water as well," she says. Indigenous fishing communities, she says, had their own techniques for keeping the sharks at a safe distance.

"They would tie spruce roots and sea grass to the bottom of the boat, and that would confuse the sharks," she says. "It would trick them into thinking they were in slightly shallower water, and so they would leave these boats alone."

Speaking by email after the September attack, Canaran says: "I was teaching an open water [diving] course in the ocean last week and I actually woke up to a bunch of messages about the interaction in Quebec. Did it stop me from diving? No. Did it make me extra cautious that day? Yes. I had sharks on the mind and so I decided to teach my course at a very protected little cove with lots of eelgrass."

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The "sharkiest" season is ending; fewer sharks are expected to be seen in the chillier waters between October and March. Both Canaran and Hammerschlag (who has written a blog on the subject) share similar advice about how to lessen the risk of shark attacks.

"Avoid areas that have preferred prey of sharks (such as seals), especially in areas with poor water visibility which could make it harder for a shark to distinguish between their natural prey and a human," he says.

Canaran says she's more cautious, but she's not letting it stop her dive. "If I only dove when the water was clear, I'd only have about five dives a year. I'm going to keep diving."

The question now is, will the sharks return in similar numbers next year? And will Canadians learn to live with their new reality, lurking in the depths close to shore? "It's about relearning how to live with them. We've done it before, and so I'm confident that we can do it again."

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Hawaii's iconic 550-year-old Hōlei Sea Arch collapses

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crd6dy4xepgyo, 3 days ago

Hawaii's famous Hōlei Sea Arch, a 90-foot-tall (27.4m) lava rock structure that formed about 550 years ago, has collapsed into the Pacific Ocean.

The collapse's exact time is not known. The arch was still projecting into the water from the coast of Volcanoes National Park on 23 September, but was gone by 27 September, the National Park Service (NPS) said.

"The coastline flanking the sea arch has shown signs of instability for years," NPS, which warned in 2021 that the arch would eventually crumble, said in a statement.

Located at the end of Chain of Craters Road on the island of Hawaii, also called "the big island", the formation was a popular - and heavily photographed - tourist destination.

The arch is believed to have fallen when the park was temporarily closed during Tropical Storm Nolo last weekend.

The park service said earthquakes during the 2018 Kīlauea volcano eruption and summit collapse had damaged the cliffs near the arch.

Its ultimate collapse marks "the latest transformation of the park's remote and rugged coastline".

In January 2020, new cracks and instability in the cliffs led the park to close the original arch viewing area, and a few months later, a new viewing area opened at a safer distance, NPS said.

Waves from a tropical storm later that year broke off a chunk of rock from the bottom of the arch.

"This formation is beautiful, but temporary, and has a limited life span," the park service said in 2021. "The sea arch will eventually crumble into the sea. However, others will replace it as the cliff slowly migrates inland."

Thousands of people have liked and commented on the NPS social media post about the arch's collapse, including sharing their memories of visiting the arch and posting photos of it.

"Nothing and no one is here forever," one Facebook user commented. "Millions of years from now the sun will die. Appreciate the good, the beauty, now."

Swiss glaciers suffer 'disastrous' year of ice loss, threatening water supplies

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6n9w0ypjwl9o, 5 days ago

Swiss glaciers have suffered a near-record loss of ice in 2026, new data shows, as intense summer heatwaves take their toll on Alpine peaks.

More than 5% of the country's remaining glacier ice has disappeared in the last 12 months, which scientists say is "extraordinary".

They warn that such rapid melting is no longer a surprise given the pace of climate change, but it could threaten water supplies for farming, hydropower and transport in the decades ahead.

The loss of glacier ice can also destabilise mountain slopes and increase the risk of landslides in some places - which can lead to flash flooding in extreme cases, as seen in Nepal in August.

There were multiple factors involved in that event, which was triggered when a large area of bedrock and glacier ice collapsed.

But scientists say long-term glacier thinning and the thawing of frozen ground likely raised the risks.

The notable finding from this latest report is not so much that Swiss glaciers are shrinking - which is to be expected in our warming climate, driven primarily by fossil fuel emissions - but the sheer pace of melting.

Until recently, glaciologists in the Alps considered 2% of ice lost in a single year to be "extreme". This year has seen an estimated 5.5% disappear.

"It's really just disastrous," said Dr Matthias Huss, director of Glacier Monitoring Switzerland, which produced the report.

Swiss glaciers started the summer in an already difficult place, covered by less snow than usual after a mild winter.

And much of that snow disappeared quickly in the early and intense heatwaves of May and June, exposing the glacier ice below.

Bare ice is darker and less reflective than fresh snow, so absorbs more of the Sun's energy.

That left glaciers vulnerable to melting even faster in subsequent heatwaves.

"Ten years ago, I wouldn't have thought that it's possible to lose glaciers so quickly," said Dr Fabien Maussion, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol, who was not involved in the Swiss report.

"What's happened over the summer now is extremely distressing… but at the same time it was to be expected from a climate scientist's perspective," he added.

Meltwater from glaciers can be an important source of water for irrigation, hydropower and even shipping traffic during hot, dry conditions.

Scientists estimate that Swiss glaciers released 2.2 trillion litres of meltwater between July and September.

Although that helped to ease water shortages this summer, it has rapidly diminished the frozen supply.

The loss of ice could pose long-term challenges, Huss warned, with smaller glaciers unable to top up water levels to the same extent.

"Every drop of water that runs off during these heatwaves is kind of old water that's been stocked in the glacier ice centuries or decades ago," said Huss.

"It's helping us [now] but it's unsustainable, so we won't have it at [our] disposal in the next heatwave."

The River Rhine reached record lows in places this summer, affecting shipping navigation routes and increasing transport costs.

One of the most ominous findings is what researchers observed at measurement sites at the highest elevations, where temperatures are lowest and glaciers are typically snow-covered.

Even as high as 3,500 metres above sea level, scientists found no snow remaining at the end of summer.

"At some glaciers we've seen four metres of ice loss at the highest point, where they should be covered by several metres of winter snow at this time of the year," said Huss, from Glacier Monitoring Switzerland.

Snow is like glacier food - and under stable conditions some of it would eventually compact into ice.

But if no snow survives the summer, it cannot replace the ice lost to melting at lower, warmer elevations. The glacier will starve, shrink and eventually disappear.

"Glaciers are complex because they gain mass at the top and they flow downstream, so there is a lot of physics," explained Maussion.

"But in its simplest form, what we see right now is that we took an ice cube out of the fridge and it's just melting in front of our eyes."

Scientists say the climate is now too warm for many Alpine glaciers to survive.

Some, like Plattalva in eastern Switzerland, have already disappeared.

But researchers stress that sharp cuts to carbon emissions can still save much of the world's glacier ice.

This is particularly the case for the Himalayas and the polar regions, where most of the planet's ice resides.

"There we still can make a big difference with protecting the climate," said Huss.

"If these ice masses can be saved or stabilised, we can limit the rise of global sea levels… which could affect billions of people living along the coast."

Additional reporting by Dominic Bailey

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Environmental groups critical of housing levy idea

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwm2q2e145p4o, today

Environmental groups have criticised a pilot scheme that aims to make housing developers pay a new nature levy.

The government wants parts of Norfolk to be the first areas subject to its Environmental Delivery Plan (EDP).

In order to unlock space for thousands of homes, developers would pay money that could create new wetlands, fund deer culls and restore rivers.

But ecology experts fear that it would fail to tackle the sources of pollution, leaving vulnerable chalk streams still at risk.

Sally Haines, chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, said: "While [actions outlined in the plan] would improve ecological habitats in the area, they won't necessarily address the pollution that will be going into the water.

"Unless you do that, you are not going to get good nature recovery."

The EDP, which would apply to much of central Norfolk and parts of The Broads, would pool cash from housebuilders.

It would be spent on measures to help offset pollution from new homes.

Norfolk's rare chalk streams, often described as England's rainforests, are particularly vulnerable.

Environment Secretary Angela Eagle calls it a "win-win" for development and nature, claiming it would unlock space for 15,780 homes that are currently stalled because of rules protecting rivers.

With developers paying £2,675 per house, it is hoped the levy will raise about £42m.

The scheme is designed to replace the more complicated nutrient neutrality rules that are in place, which were blamed for blocking the regeneration plan for the former Colman's Mustard Factory at Carrow Works in Norwich.

A government spokesperson said the introduction of a single levy would make life easier for developers.

Natural England is leading on the project and chief executive Marian Spain said: "Instead of tackling pollution piecemeal, site by site, we can now deliver conservation measures that make a real difference for rivers, wetlands and wildlife across Norfolk."

However, Haines said it was a "fallacy" to blame environmental concerns as the main stumbling block when building houses - pointing instead to a myriad of issues such as the availability of materials and labour, and land prices.

Under the proposals, restoration projects would be put together for the River Wensum, the Bure broads and marshes, and the River Yare catchment area.

One eye-catching policy is to put some of the cash towards deer management, including targeted culling.

Booming deer populations in The Broads are becoming a growing issue as the animals can cause damage to the environment through grazing.

People can submit their views as part of a consultation - which opened on 17 September and runs until 27 October - before Natural England submits its final plans to Eagle and her department.

Natural England hopes to roll out EDPs in other parts of England in the future.

The chief executive of Norfolk Wildlife Trust, Eliot Lyne, said his organisation needed more time to review the proposals.

But he said it was worried about wider changes to planning rules and how they affected natural habitats.

"We are concerned that it weakens existing protections for Norfolk's nationally and globally important wildlife sites such as chalk streams, wetlands and valley fens," he added.

Mark Dye, a chalk stream campaigner for the Gaywood River Revival group in west Norfolk, said: "Fundamentally, if you are polluting a chalk stream or a river and you're putting more and more pollution into that river, and not seeking to address the underlying causes of that, then it's only going to get worse."

Steve Turner, executive director of the Home Builders Federation, claimed pollution from farmers was a bigger issue than new homes and he criticised water companies for not investing in infrastructure to stop sewage entering rivers.

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Council challenges solar farm approval

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c59vzpn79e3lo, today

A Reform UK government would try to prevent solar farms from connecting to the national grid, the party's deputy leader said.

Richard Tice, MP for Boston and Skegness, spoke as Lincolnshire County Council said it had launched a judicial review of a decision to approve a solar farm in the county.

The authority said the impact of the Beacon Fen Energy Park near Sleaford, which was approved by the government in August, may not have been fully considered.

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said the climate crisis was the biggest threat to agriculture and nature, and solar was among the cheapest and quickest forms of energy to build.

The Beacon Fen solar farm will be capable of powering up to 130,000 homes.

In August, the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero said there was an "urgent need" for the proposed development.

At a press conference on Friday, Tice said: "I'm announcing that a Reform government, very quickly after an election, will do all we possibly can legislatively to stop the national grid from connecting up these solar farms.

"So, my message to these overseas investors, caveat emptor [buyer beware]: you might lose all your dough, think very seriously about this."

'Crazy solar farms'

County council leader Sean Matthews said the judicial review could cost up to £300,000, but he thought the authority had a good chance of winning.

The council said it had raised concerns throughout the planning process that insufficient weight may have been given to the impact of the development on communities, farmland and the cumulative effects of several other major solar developments in Lincolnshire.

"I will do what I can to stop these crazy solar farms, and I will do everything that I can to achieve that," Matthews said.

"And yes, if that means opposing all of these and putting judicial review against all of the solar farms that we've been told we're getting, then I will do that," he said.

In May, Lincolnshire County Council and North Kesteven District Council launched a claim for a judicial review to the High Court over the government's decision to approve plans for Springwell Solar Farm, between Lincoln and Sleaford.

Judicial reviews are court proceedings which look into the lawfulness of a decision or action made by a public body, the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary says.

A government spokesperson said it would not comment on individual projects, but all solar farms were subject to a rigorous planning process in which the views and interests of local communities were considered. This included any impact on biodiversity, visual amenity, or the natural environment.

"We continue to work with NESO [National Energy System Operator] on delivering the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan (SSEP) which will set out a strategy for how new infrastructure should be spread across the country," the spokesperson said.

The BBC has contacted Beacon Fen Energy Park for comment.

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Purchase of field aims to expand 'green lung'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv0lr3584ej9o, yesterday

Conservationists have said they are planning to buy a field to extend a "green lung" in one of Jersey's most built-up parishes.

The National Trust for Jersey said it had secured the rights to acquire the land near Maupertuis Farm in St Clement and hoped to complete the purchase shortly.

A green lung is an area of fields, parkland or vegetation within an otherwise urban area, providing space for wildlife and helping to reduce pollution.

The trust previously raised £50,000 in 37 days to buy a nearby field on Samares Lane in 2021.

The trust said the latest acquisition would help preserve the agricultural heritage of Maupertuis Farm and the surrounding area.

Chief executive Alan Le Maistre said green spaces were becoming "ever more precious" and protecting them was particularly important in densely developed parts of the island.

"It is a privilege to have the opportunity to extend this green lung for both the wildlife and people of the area," he said.

The National Trust for Jersey, which celebrated its 90th anniversary in August, manages about 1,800 vergées of land across the island.

It invited people who want to support the latest acquisition to contact the charity directly.

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Rainbow sea slug find a reminder of climate change

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq4g5ng8l31ro, yesterday

The discovery of a rainbow sea slug at a beach in Cornwall is an "important reminder" of climate change's impact, conservationists have said.

The Rock Pool Project, a community marine conservation organisation, said the slug, also known as babakina anadoni, was found during an event it held at Porthpean Beach in August.

It said it was the first time a rainbow sea slug, which have previously been found in other parts of Cornwall and the South West, had been spotted at Porthpean.

Dr Ben Holt, chief executive officer at The Rock Pool Project, said while the discovery was exciting, it also showed how much the UK's shores were changing as climate change warms waters.

The Rock Pool Project said rainbow sea slugs were usually found in warm Atlantic waters off the coast of Spain, Portugal and France, but they have been appearing on UK shores in increasing numbers in recent years.

"Whilst this is an exciting find, it's also an important reminder of how much our shores are changing," said Holt.

"We must continue to track these changes to understand the effects of climate change on UK marine life."

Luke Galpin, who found the rainbow sea slug during the Rock Pool Project event, said it was a surprise to uncover it.

"I hadn't seen many sea slugs at all over the summer, so I wasn't expecting to find one," he said.

"But its unmistakable colour popped out at me the moment I flipped the rock over.

"It was tiny, about the size of my thumbnail, and in my excitement, I shouted for everyone else to come and have a look."

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Young minds develop ideas to tackle climate change

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv62kpj70585o, 5 days ago

A group of young people have developed ideas to tackle the effects of climate change as part of a free touring exhibition.

On Tuesday 16 young people took part in a hackathon - a timed event where people work together to build creative solutions to problems - where they devised posters with ways to combat light pollution, wild fires, damage to oceans and poor water quality.

The event was hosted by Seeds of Hope and Change, an organisation run by the Soka Gakkai International and the UN Earth Charter, at the Jerwood Dancehouse in Ipswich.

Maryanne, 16, took part in the project and said: "We just want people to be aware of what's going on, especially with major issues such as ocean pollution."

Climate change is the long-term shift in the Earth's average temperatures and weather conditions.

This year's summer was the UK's hottest on record, according to provisional data from the Met Office.

The Met Office said the heat experienced this summer was made about 130 times more likely by human-induced climate change.

Baveen, 17, said "We wanted to talk about the cities and the sky and how it affects people and also wildlife."

The poster her group produced included ideas for using low-intensity bulbs and motion sensors in street lights so that they were not continuously left on.

The exhibition, which is free and runs until 4 October, includes 24 pop-up panels that share information and environmental case studies from around the world on the impact of climate change.

The hackathon for young people was run by ambassadors from the youth-led campaigning organisation #iWill.

Alex Harrison, one of the #iWill ambassadors, said: "The main purpose is reminding young people that in the face of something really scary like climate change, there's a lot that you can do personally to make a real change."

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Dead animals found in canal where children row

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq783py14ry3o, 5 days ago

Residents in Brentford have raised concerns about sewage flowing into the local canal network, with dead animals washing up over the summer.

Paul Keane, general manager of watersports charity Brentford Community Boathouse, told the Brentford and Syon Area Forum that the problem had been worsened by the "epidemic of heat" this summer.

The animals were mostly found in the Brentford Lock basin, where the Grand Union Canal meets the River Thames.

"We saw dead foxes, dead ducks and there was a dead cat," Keane told BBC London.

"Because of the stagnant water and the fact that the water wasn't travelling anywhere, we were going past them every day in exactly the same spot," he said.

Brentford Community Boathouse events officer Kelly Everden, who volunteered on a clean-up operation organised by Keane, said the children who used the canal were worst affected.

"It's really upsetting on behalf of the children, because that's not anything that they should ever be faced with, especially with a pet cat," she said.

Water quality can also be impacted by misconnections when household sewage ends up in waterways. Ben Morris, founder of Clean up the River Brent, has been working to stop misconnections.

He said: "We need to see much, much better inspections and regulation of plumbing and drainage on our properties throughout the capital.

"Until we've got that done, we are still going to have these sewage pollutions going into our rivers."

He added: "The water has to be hygienic, and there are times when it simply isn't. It's a very difficult issue, but it needs an overall strategy."

Keane said the animals were predominantly found with E. coli and botulism, and that the most stagnant stretch was within the locks around Boston Manor Park.

Warm, still water holds less oxygen, creating the conditions in which botulism thrives and speeding up the growth of E. coli.

Hounslow councillor Katherine Dunne said officers in Ealing and Brent were examining misconnections through a River Brent catchment group, and committee chair councillor Dan Bowring urged residents to contact their ward councillors.

"All councillors in Brentford will be concerned about this," he said.

The Canal and River Trust said it aimed to remove any dead animal as quickly as possible. Aquatic weed has been a particular problem at Brentford, it said, because both of its west London weed clearance boats were out of action at the same time.

Thames Water said the area was known to have issues with misconnections and that, while it was not responsible for third-party drainage, it was working with property owners and councils.

The Environment Agency said the area remained in drought, which can affect river health, and that it would continue investigating reports of pollution.

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Is the South ready for a future of wildfires?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmly4d55p91vo, 6 days ago

Wildfires will increasingly become the norm in the South with the risk likely to double within the next 50 years, according to an expert.

Dr Mark Hardiman, an expert in wildfires from the University of Portsmouth, said fires across the region were larger, burned for longer, and came closer to people's homes and roads.

It comes after a record 1,350 wildfires across England and Wales this year, as the Fire Brigades Union warns crews are overstretched and lack the right equipment to meet the challenge.

Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service said it had significant capability to tackle wildfires, while the government said it was investing nearly £100m to improve national resilience.

What happened this summer?

Fires broke out right across the region during this summer's heatwaves.

The largest of the blazes came in August, when a van fire on the A31 spread to heathland in the New Forest, affecting more than 100 hectares, an area equivalent to about 140 football pitches.

Firefighters were at the scene for two weeks, while the road was closed for nearly a fortnight as National Highways replaced damaged safety barriers and fencing.

A blaze at Headon Warren, near the Needles, burned for five days and needed 80 firefighters at its peak. Fire engines were ferried across the Solent and a helicopter dropped water on areas crews were unable to reach.

In the New Forest, more than 60 firefighters were called to a fire near Ashurst in July, where discarded disposable barbecues were found.

In Dorset, part of the Rustic Stomp music festival site near Wareham was destroyed after a camping stove set a tent alight, while crews believed a fire at Bourne Valley Nature Reserve in Poole was started deliberately.

Nationally, figures from the National Fire Chiefs Council show there were 1,350 wildfires in England and Wales in 2026, the highest number on record and more than 1,000 more than in 2024.

Why is the risk growing?

Hardiman said wildfires would "increasingly be the norm".

"Over the next 40-50 years, the risk - particularly in places like the South, the Isle of Wight - is probably going to double," he said.

The UK's Climate Change Committee has also warned that the risk could double across much of the UK by 2050.

Antony Bholah, area manager at Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service, said the conditions that allowed fires to start and spread quickly were becoming more frequent.

"We need to recognise that the risk is changing. We need to be more prepared for it," he said.

While hot, dry weather creates the conditions for wildfires, fire services say many still start because of human activity, including barbecues, campfires, discarded cigarettes, farm machinery and deliberate fire-setting.

Are there enough firefighters?

James Leslie, South West regional secretary of the FBU, said crews had done "remarkably well" but had worked long hours "under really arduous conditions".

He said crews were "more often riding a fire engine with four instead of the safe system of five".

"You're waiting longer for the second fire engine to come, and all that time the fires are getting bigger," he added.

The FBU says one in five firefighter posts across the UK have been cut since 2010.

It says Hampshire and Isle of Wight Fire and Rescue Service has lost one in four of its firefighters over that time, while Dorset and Wiltshire's firefighter numbers have fallen from 1,297 to 981.

Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service said firefighter numbers had fallen as funding failed to keep pace with rising costs, but it remained able to respond to large or simultaneous wildfires.

Hampshire and Isle of Wight Fire and Rescue Service has been approached for comment.

Hardiman said more resources were needed to cope with several large fires at once.

"If you don't have the resources, you have to start picking and choosing which ones you fight," he said.

Bholah admitted it was "challenging", but said the service planned for it.

He said Dorset's firefighters had worked with neighbouring services to provide help across borders, and could call on national resilience arrangements.

Do crews have the right equipment?

Leslie said most firefighters in the South West, including those in Dorset and Wiltshire, were still using kit designed for structural fires in buildings rather than lightweight equipment made for fighting fires in the open.

Bholah said the service was "quite fortunate" to have four-by-four fire engines and specialist vehicles designed for rough terrain, and was continually reviewing whether it had enough.

Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service has a £500,000 off-road Unimog based at Wareham to reach fires in remote rural locations, while the Hampshire service has a new specialist off-road fire engine based at Rushmoor.

Hardiman said fighting wildfires required different equipment from house fires, because crews had to travel long distances and spend long periods on foot.

He said fire services across the South had been learning from crews in Portugal and Spain about how to tackle larger, more aggressive wildfires.

What more needs to be done?

Hardiman said the solutions for fighting wildfires were already known and tackling the problem came down to a "political choice".

He argued for investment in people as well as equipment, so that "when we do have another year or even a worse year over the next few decades, we are able to fight it and hopefully defend homes".

Leslie called for a national approach, including a consistent definition of what counts as a wildfire, national aerial firefighting capability and nationally recognised training.

Bholah said: "I don't think it's always a case of just throwing money at a problem. I think we need to be really sure about where that money needs to be spent."

The government temporarily banned the sale of disposable barbecues in August, saying they had caused a number of serious wildfires over the summer.

Bholah said the service had been campaigning for the ban and was "really pleased" when it came in, but said more needed to be done to educate the public.

The government said its £97m would fund six specialist firefighting teams to work across the UK, as well as equipment such as off-road vehicles.

The prime minister has also said the government will hold a summit with fire and rescue services to make sure they have the right equipment and resources.

Lives 'will be lost' unless UK does more to combat wildfires, committee chairwoman says

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6r7dyx2x7pdo, 6 days ago

Lives "will be lost" unless more is done to combat the increasing risk of wildfires, the chairwoman of the UK's Climate Change Committee (CCC) has said after a record number of blazes this summer.

Baroness Brown told BBC File on 4 Investigates "not enough action" had been taken in light of predictions the UK is facing longer, drier summers because of global warming.

Earlier this year, one man died in a wildfire in Gloucestershire, while 19 homes were destroyed in Stourbridge, near Birmingham, and villagers were evacuated in the Cairngorms.

The government said it was investing nearly £100m to improve national resilience capabilities, which includes piloting specially trained firefighting teams.

UK 'not prepared for the changing climate'

As far back as 2012, the independent CCC warned of "more frequent wildfires due to warmer and drier conditions".

File on 4 Investigates has seen figures from the National Fire Chiefs Council showing that 2026 set a new all-time high, with 1,350 wildfires in England and Wales, up by more than 300 on last year and more than 1,000 on 2024.

Records for the number of reported wildfires were also broken in 2022 and 2025.

Baroness Brown said the CCC, formed in 2008, has been telling the government for years that the UK is "not prepared for the changing climate". She continued: "The warnings have been there and not enough action has been taken.

"I fear that lives will be lost. We need to be doing much more education and preparation."

She said that included investing in specialist teams and equipment, but also "planning our woodlands, thinking about fire breaks" and early warning systems.

By 2050, she said the risk of wildfires could be doubled across much of the UK.

'No-one should have this experience'

Uttam and Sandy Shiralkar are still coming to terms with the loss of their family home in Stourbridge after it was engulfed by a wildfire in August.

Sandy, a surgeon, said: "We saw the complete destruction of the house. There was no roof, no floorboards. Nothing. No-one should have this experience."

The fires started accidentally in fields in Stourbridge, where farming machinery was in use on the hottest day of the year.

The couple are now living in temporary accommodation. Uttam said: "Every loss is painful, but losing a house has got a different dimension. Coming back to normality is going to take a long time."

Fire crews dangerously overstretched

While the risk of wildfires is on the rise, the number of firefighters has been in decline.

Steve Wright, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, which represents firefighters, said more than a fifth of firefighter and control room posts across the UK – some 12,000 jobs - had been cut since 2010, which left crews dangerously overstretched over the summer.

"We had firefighters from London being mobilised to Yorkshire, firefighters from Merseyside being mobilised to Dorset," he said. "The effect, when you have wildfires happening at the same time across the UK, is there's just not enough firefighters on the ground to be able to deal with them."

Phil Garrigan, chairman of the National Fire Chiefs Council, which represents senior managers of the UK's fire and rescue services, said he welcomed the £97m investment to provide six specialist firefighting teams to work across the UK.

But he insisted more money was needed to boost aerial firefighting capability and improve specialist equipment for firefighters. He said: "The money has to be there, otherwise we'll be going into 2027 and 2028 with a likely occurrence that we'll see what we've seen in 2026, which is 50 plus homes lost and families devastated by the impacts of wildfire. We've got to get ahead of that."

State-of-the-art equipment such as dedicated off-road vehicles will be bought as part of the £97m investment, which the government said was funding the biggest upgrade to national resilience for 20 years.

The prime minister has said the government will hold a summit with fire and rescue services and other organisations to make sure they have the right equipment and resources.

The US state replacing power plants with home batteries

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260928-a-virtual-power-plant-hidden-in-vermont-homes-is-keeping-the-lights-on-during-storms, 6 days ago

Spread across thousands of ordinary homes, this "power plant" has become Vermont's largest power source. It's protecting owners from outages and providing cheaper, cleaner energy.

Vermont has faced an increase in extreme weather events in recent decades, including some of its worst storms in recorded history. For Pollyanna Bladyka, such events used to mean losing power a dozen times every year, often for multiple hours.

"I just want my coffee in the morning and I want to be able to watch my news," says Bladyka, who lives in the rural town of Springfield in eastern Vermont with her husband Andy and her dog.

Bladyka became so fed up with the frequent power outages that in 2024 she was on the verge of buying a gas generator, as many of her neighbours had already done. But the electrician she hired to install it told her about a programme providing a compelling alternative.

Run by Vermont's largest utility, Green Mountain Power (GMP), the scheme installs two batteries in participants' home for $55 (£41) a month over a 10-year lease agreement. After doing some research, Bladyka and her husband decided it was a better option than the $12,000 (£9,000) cost of the generator they had planned to buy. They have not lost power a single time since the system was installed in 2024.

More than 5,500 people in Vermont have similar home battery systems. As well as providing individual homes energy security during power outages, these batteries form the backbone of a new kind of system known as a virtual power plant that mimics the resources of a traditional power plant.

The US now has over 40GW of virtual power plant capacity, according to internal analysis by Wood Mackenzie. It's still relatively small compared to the roughly 600GW of natural gas and 200GW of coal, but a total of 160GW of capacity could be unlocked by 2030, according to a 2025 US Department of Energy report – equal to some 20% of the country's expected peak energy demand.

Through GMP's programme, its virtual power plant has quietly become Vermont's biggest source of power. Now, the state is testing how far this "hidden" form of power can go.

A power cut safeguard

For Bladyka, avoiding outages was the main reason she got the battery. "I'd like to say I did it for the environment, but I did it for myself," she tells me on a visit to her home in May 2026. "But I don't mind helping."

She describes previously waking up without power multiple times per year and not being able to go about her morning routine, with storms the most frequent cause, she says.

Virtual power plants can give a huge advantage over traditional systems when it comes to resilience against power outages.

Climate change is driving an increase in extreme weather globally and Vermont has seen that trend firsthand, from flooding to snowstorms. It may not come as a surprise then that the state has experienced an increase in outages in recent decades (as has the US as a whole), according to a 2022 Associated Press analysis of government data.

In fact, seven of the 10 most damaging storms in GMP's history have happened in the last decade, the company tells the BBC, causing more than $225m (£168m) in damages.

Given the state's rural nature and extreme cold in the winter, any kind of prolonged outage can be a matter of life-and-death if a customer does not have backup power – as it was during Texas' grid failure in 2021.

Now, though, power cuts are not a worry, says Bladyka – her battery should be able to power her house for two days, so long as electricity usage on things like dishwashing and laundry is kept to a minimum.

Megan Browning, who lives in northern Vermont with her family, has had two home batteries through the GMP programme as well as rooftop solar for around a year and has not lost power since. When a recent severe windstorm knocked down a power line near her home, she says, many houses in her neighbourhood lost power, but she "didn't even notice a flicker".

Others in Vermont have likewise decided that enough is enough when it comes to outages. GMP saw a surge of enrolments in the battery lease programme in 2023, when state regulators lifted a cap on it. Enrolment has continued to grow steadily ever since, it adds, with over 2,500 people enrolled since 2023.

GMP, which serves over 75% of Vermont, has a goal of eliminating all power outages by 2030. The battery programme plays a strong role in its plan, alongside other measures like undergrounding power lines.

In fact, in some rural and more outage-prone areas, GMP sees home energy storage as so important to its goal of preventing outages that it has proposed giving thousands of customers batteries at no cost. It has already done so on a small scale through multiple pilot projects.

Power plant of the future

Several virtual power plants have emerged in the US in recent years as people catch on to their promise, says Kate Peters, a virtual power plant expert at Boston-based consultancy The Brattle Group.

But GMP's programme, which began as a pilot in 2017, may be one of the largest battery programmes in the US, says Peters.

The company can tap into Bladyka's batteries (and everyone else in the programme's) whenever needed, though the customer always retains some reserve power for themselves, especially during outages. It links these batteries in with an array of other resources including EV batteries, commercial demand response and a handful of utility-scale batteries.

The programme now provides some 110MW of power – about the same as a small-to-average-sized natural gas plant – and is the largest power source in the state.

Virtual power plants themselves don't actually produce power, though the solar panels tapped into it do (around 50% of the houses in its programme with home batteries also have solar panels, GMP says). Instead, they use software to manage and conserve energy in more intelligent ways, making what we have already go further – especially at the times the grid needs it the most.

Many experts now view such systems as a power plant – and by extension electric grid – of the future. They are innovative, resilient and more efficient than the traditional way utilities have supplied power, says Mari McClure, the chief executive of GMP.

"We believe in a two-way grid," she told me on a visit to the company's headquarters in May 2026. "With technology nowadays, we can create a distributed, decentralised model that's much more affordable and much safer. Customers really become consumers and producers."

Peak alternative

The grid in Vermont, as well as most places in the US, was built to meet peak demand – the time when electricity use is at its highest. In many places, however, that peak is often only seen on a handful of days per year.

Utilities conventionally build entire power plants, known as "peaker plants", just to serve this purpose. Run on fossil fuels, they are often both expensive and highly polluting.

GMP similarly used to rely on oil, diesel and natural gas peaker plants to meet peak demand. Now the company's virtual power plant has effectively replaced them, says McClure. "We've been slowly able to decommission those as they've become end-of-life," she says. (Four peaking plants still run very occasionally if the regional New England grid operator calls on them, GMP says, though it hopes to close them all soon.)

Rocky Mountain Power in Utah is another utility that has effectively replaced peaker plants with home batteries, albeit on a smaller scale. In fact, research has found that virtual power plants could fill the role that peaker plants have played across the US – and often at a much lower cost, which would likely lower customers' bills.

"A virtual power plant is a way for a utility to pay people to provide some of the services that [they] usually pay big companies to provide for the grid," says Ben Hertz-Shargel, president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities and an expert on distributed energy sources.

Besides outage prevention, this lower cost is arguably the biggest benefit to customers. GMP's virtual power plant saved customers $11m (£8m) last year, the company told the BBC. The US Department of Energy found these plants could save the US over $10bn (£7.4bn) annually by 2030.

"When we look at what's the most impactful thing we can do to really maximise the grid and take it to the next level, the answer [always] comes back to virtual power plants," says McClure.

People's energy

Virtual power plants still face barriers in the US. The most significant is a "backwards financial incentive structure" that dissuades utilities from using them, says Jen Downing, a former US Department of Energy official and lead author of its 2023 virtual power plant report.

"Utilities don't have much incentive to harness demand flexibility because they make more money if they just build stuff," she says. "That's probably the number one issue nationally," she adds, though noting it's not the case for every utility.

Other hindrances can include the cost of enrolling customers into programmes in the first place and difficulties integrating virtual power plants into wholesale electricity markets.

The tide may finally be turning in the US, however, according to Downing, with states like Massachusetts, Illinois and New Jersey pushing utilities to procure capacity from virtual power plants in an effort to bring down energy costs. States and tech companies are now also looking to them as a way to make room on the grid for data centres.

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In the coming years, GMP aims to offer all its almost 300,000 customers energy storage if they want it, says McClure, with ambitions to more than double the size of its virtual power plant by 2034.

It also hopes to expand its resource base, plugging in the thousands of EV batteries in Vermont, for example, to provide a significant distributed resource – a concept known as "vehicle-to-grid".

Since the storage capacity of EV batteries is so large, this could be a potential gamechanger for virtual power plants everywhere. It remains to be seen whether that will happen, though, says Downing.

"If you look at the total storage capacity of EV batteries, it's enormous, but I don't think it's really cost-effective today for most consumer EVs," she says.

McClure has experienced its potential first hand: during one outage, she powered her rural home for five days with the battery from her electric Ford F-150 Lightning truck, she says.

Whichever technologies end up powering virtual power plants, they're likely to involve local communities more than traditional energy systems have, says Hertz-Shargel. People working in large groups, he says, can be "as big as a power plant".

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Warning more homes will be uninsurable due to flood risk

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c60qxk288e57o, 6 days ago

Homes are being built today that could become uninsurable in the future due to the risk of flooding, the boss of insurance giant Aviva has said.

Amanda Blanc said the risk of flooding is "absolutely increasing", but based on current building patterns 115,000 new homes will be built in flood zones in the next decade.

"That doesn't seem to me to make sense. We need to think about where those homes are being built," she told the BBC.

About 6.3 million homes and businesses in England are at risk of flooding, according to the Environment Agency, and Aviva research found one in nine homes built between 2022 and 2024 are at medium to high risk of flooding.

Blanc told the BBC's Big Boss Interview podcast that England was "for sure" building homes that might be uninsurable at some point in the future.

"It's very well known where these flooding areas are. Let's think very carefully about homes that are being built."

Blanc said construction that borders those flood zones also needs a different approach.

"You can do all sorts of different things to your property to make it more or less vulnerable to flood," she said.

According to Aviva's research, nearly a third of new homes built in 2024 will be at risk of some flooding by 2050, and one in seven would be at medium to high risk of flooding as extreme weather becomes more acute.

Earlier this year the Met Office estimated that with current levels of global warming, record-breaking wet winters like the one experienced in the UK in 2023-24 have gone from once in 80-year events to once in 20-year events.

A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: "We've put a record amount of investment into protecting nearly 900,000 properties against billions of pounds of flooding damage.

"Meanwhile our planning proposals will help ensure that housebuilding will not go ahead in areas that are at risk of flooding, helping us to build 1.5 million homes without compromising on safety."

In a wide-ranging interview, Blanc urged the government to avoid policy "kite flying" ahead of Chancellor John Healey's first Budget on 28 October.

Aviva is a major UK private pension provider, and Blanc said speculation over the last couple of Budgets about changes to pensions led to a significant increase in withdrawals.

"Effectively we saw in the last year 30 times the normal withdrawal from pensions that we would normally see, which is clearly something which customers may regret afterwards because once you take your tax-free lump sum out, you can't put it back in," she said.

"So we would say be very, very thoughtful about the things that you are testing, thinking about."

The few policy announcements ahead of the Budget so far have included a scheme to help first-time buyers get on to the property ladder, and a commitment from Healey to deliver a "new age of industrialisation" for the UK.

Healey has said previously that Budget speculation is unhelpful as it has a "direct impact on the decisions that investors hold back from, or may make".

A Treasury spokesperson said: "The chancellor makes tax policy decisions at fiscal events. Speculation can be harmful which is why we do not comment on future changes to tax policy."

Blanc said Aviva was "ready with capital" to invest in infrastructure, pointing out that the company already invests more than £100bn in the UK, £35bn of which goes into infrastructure, from hospitals to schools to windfarms.

"We've got that capital. We want to invest, we're a big UK employer. We want to invest in UK infrastructure. It provides good returns for our pension holders and for the members of those pension schemes," she said, but added detail was needed to turn it into reality.

Asked about the current debate about the pension triple lock, which means the state pension rises by the highest of either average wage increases, inflation or 2.5%, and whether the government is looking to change that, Blanc said it was not for her to say what should happen.

But potential lower annual increases to pensions if the triple lock is changed would have knock-on effects, she added.

"If you've got a lower state pension then you need a higher private pension, don't you? So you need to think about that balance," Blanc said.

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Reports of melted roads rise by 67% in three years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2z0pp7r8wo, 7 days ago

The number of cases of roads melting in the East of England has risen by 67% in the past three years, data obtained by the BBC shows.

The region's highways authorities reported more than 200 cases of melting roads in the past four years, following the BBC's request for information.

Experts said that part of the problem was caused by most UK roads being designed for cooler weather rather than prolonged periods of "extreme heat".

The Department for Transport (DfT) said it was supporting local highway authorities to improve the resilience of road networks through guidance, tools and resources.

Earlier this year the A143 at Stanton, near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, was shut as an emergency measure amid reports patches of asphalt were being lifted up by cars using the road.

It was the second time this year the road surface was reported to have melted as a result of high temperatures.

But the BBC, which asked all highways authorities in the East of England how many instances of roads melted by hot weather they had dealt with in each financial year since 2023, has now established the Stanton incident was merely one of dozens across the region.

According to comparable figures from eight authorities, the number of melted road cases rose from 33 in 2023-24 to 55 in 2025-26.

In Suffolk instances of melting roads rose from three cases to eight and in Norfolk the number of "dustings" - when gritting lorries spread light dustings of sand or stone to prevent road tarmac from melting - rose from 29 to 46.

Buckinghamshire Council did not provide data for the 2023-24 to 2025-26 but said it had received 59 cases since April this year.

Essex had one incident in both 2024-25 and 2025-26 and a further six cases since April this year.

West Northamptonshire Council said it had two incidents in the past three years while North Northamptonshire Council said it did not hold data about melted roads.

Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Thurrock councils said they had not experienced any incidents with melting roads in the past three years.

As well as the Stanton cases, Suffolk County Council said it had a further eight incidents this summer.

A spokesman for the authority said: "While incidents of roads being affected by hot weather remain relatively uncommon, Suffolk Highways has experienced a small number of cases following periods of exceptionally high and prolonged temperatures."

The council said it used granite dust during periods of "extreme heat" and said it "continues to work with other local highway authorities, industry partners and suppliers to explore innovative maintenance techniques and materials that improve network resilience".

This work includes looking at new road treatments that can withstand a wider range of temperatures.

"Through ongoing research, trials and sector-led collaboration, the highways industry is continuing to develop and identify best practice solutions that will help ensure the long-term resilience and performance of highway assets," the spokesman said.

Dr Mashael Kamran is a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Cambridge whose work looks at the future building and maintenance of the country's transport infrastructure.

"Many of our roads were built for the cooler winter weather rather than the warmer weather we are seeing," she said. "When air temperatures reach 30C (86F), the roads below can go up to 50C (122F). On top of that, when you've got heavy duty traffic as well, that can cause rutting of the roads."

She said tight council budgets meant many authorities were increasingly surface dressing or patch repairing roads rather than relaying them, which meant they remained susceptible to melting in hot weather.

"That doesn't really help in a heatwave situation," she said.

She said part of her work involves exploring various road materials that perform at a wider range of temperatures and how to prioritise where limited budgets are spent first.

The Chartered Institute for Highways and Transportation (CIHT) said high temperatures were having a "significant impact" on roads.

It said when air temperatures are 30C the road surface can reach between 40C and 50C adding that some roads start to soften above 50C.

Sue Percy, the chief executive of CIHT, said: "Climate disruption is no longer a future challenge.

"Highway authorities and transport operators are already seeing the effects of higher temperatures and more extreme weather on the transport network.

"When transport networks are disrupted by extreme heat, the consequences go beyond damaged infrastructure. Communities can lose access to jobs and essential services, businesses face delays and disruption, and the wider economy suffers."

A spokesperson for the DfT said: "We recognise the impact of extreme heat on our road network, which is why we are investing a record £7.3bn in local highway maintenance, and working closely with local authorities to help manage the impacts of hot weather on roads."

Butterfly populations 'could crash' due to weather

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw8d322y7y15o, 9 days ago

Butterfly and day-flying moth numbers recorded across Devon and Cornwall this summer have been "very good" - but experts fear prolonged hot and dry weather could lead to a decline.

Nearly 5,000 people took part in the Butterfly Conservation's 2026 big butterfly count in Devon, recording 77,151 insects during the three-week count. It said nearly 3,000 people took part in Cornwall, spotting 47,712.

Professor Richard Fox, head of science at the conservation, said adult butterflies loved hot weather, but warned they could be on course "for a population crash".

"The extreme droughts in 1976 and 1995 had severe impacts on butterfly populations, with some species never fully recovering," he said.

The charity said strong butterfly numbers were "likely" down to favourable conditions for caterpillars in spring, followed by the hot, sunny weather enjoyed by adult butterflies during the summer months.

However, it said previous drought conditions across much of the UK may have caused food plants used by caterpillars to wither before they had finished feeding. The charity said it feared the full impact may not become clear until next year.

Fox said many species were already under pressure, with 80% of the UK's butterfly populations having declined since the 1970s.

"So many are already struggling for survival without these extreme weather pressures," Fox said.

'Pushed towards extinction'

He added: "With increasingly hot, dry summers and droughts predicted to become more and more frequent due to climate breakdown, degraded habitats and already depleted butterfly populations, some species may be pushed further and faster towards extinction, which is a very sombre thought.

"They are, quite simply, less resilient to these events, which means we could be looking at very difficult years ahead."

The charity has urged people to help wildlife recover by planting more trees and shrubs, installing water butts to store rainwater and leaving areas of grass uncut.

Most spotted species

The gatekeeper was the most commonly spotted butterfly in Devon and Cornwall.

The meadow brown took the second spot in Devon, followed by the red admiral. In Cornwall, the red admiral took second spot, followed by the painted lady.

Butterfly Conservation said the painted lady was one of the standout species with 6,955 recorded in Devon and 6,033 in Cornwall. The migratory butterfly enjoyed a strong year nationally.

Painted ladies undertake one of the world's most remarkable insect migrations, travelling from Africa to the UK over several generations, crossing the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea.

Follow BBC Devon on X, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to spotlight@bbc.co.uk.

A mysterious organ in the sperm whale's head gives it the power to sink ships

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260923-the-science-behind-moby-dick-the-prized-head-of-the-sperm-whale-is-its-greatest-weapon, 9 days ago

A survivor of the shipwreck that inspired the novel Moby Dick had a theory about how a sperm whale could destroy a vessel many times its size – 200 years later, he's been proved right.

On the morning of 20 November 1820, 15-year-old Thomas Nickerson had just escaped from one whale punching a hole in the side of his boat. Rowing quickly back to the main whaling ship as the boat took on water, Nickerson and his companions thought they were safe.

But, taking the helm of the whaleship Essex, Nickerson saw another, much larger whale speeding straight towards them. Alerting Owen Chase, the ship's first mate, there was shouting and alarm among the crew followed by "a tremendous crash", Nickerson wrote 50 years later.

The whale struck the Essex with such force that all the men were knocked off their feet. The whale swam 900ft (270m) away from the boat, turned around sharply and came back at its utmost speed. With that second collision, it stove in the entire bow. The whaleship Essex was sunk.

If it sounds like a novel, it's because the shipwreck of the Essex inspired Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Today, 175 years after publication of the book, research has revealed how a sperm whale can take down a ship several times its size. As it turns out, the answer was correctly predicted more than 200 years ago by none other than Chase, the first mate of the Essex.

Ironically, the whales' superpower seems to reside in the same place as the precious oil chased by the whalers: inside its head.

A mysterious cranial organ

Sperm whales have a huge head. In fact, their heads make up around a third of their overall body length. Weighing up to 9kg (20lbs), their brains are the largest of any animal on Earth.

Within the forehead is a large fatty, squishy organ called the spermaceti – unique to their species. This organ is filled with an oily substance also called spermaceti, which gained its name because whalers thought it was semen.

The spermaceti was highly sought after by whalers as the oil provided a high-quality fuel, and could be congealed into products like soaps and candles. During the 18th and 19th Centuries, around 300,000 sperm whales were killed worldwide.

Despite this extensive harvesting of the sperm whales' spermaceti, we are still uncovering its function. One theory sees the spermaceti as a combat tool.

"This wasn't originally our hypothesis, it was Owen Chase's," says retired evolutionary biologist Dave Carrier. "An 18th-Century whaler argued that the forehead was a weapon, and we set out to test that."

For the past two centuries, biologists had largely ignored Chase's ideas, but from Carrier's perspective, "the whaler's intuition and experience were probably correct".

In a 2002 study, Carrier suggested that the sperm whale's greatly enlarged melon – a fatty organ located in the forehead of all toothed whales – evolved as a battering ram, able to deliver a fatal blow on a rival, just like a hippo. "Whales are mammals, closely related to animals like deer and rams, where males compete by ramming – so this behaviour may be inherited from their ancestors."

Recently, Alec Burslem, an ecophysiologist at the University of Hawaii, caught sperm whales on camera while they were head-butting not a whaling ship, but each other. It was "a lucky coincidence" he captured the behaviour, he says, which took place around the Balearic Islands and the Azores.

It might seem strange that whales would use their head to fight – why would anyone endanger a vital body part to hit an adversary? But a 2015 study says that the organ has enough buffering that whales could use their head as a ram without risking damage.

Brute force

Burslem observed this behaviour multiple times, by a number of young sperm whales. The biggest impact he recorded was made by a juvenile male who sped towards another whale at 15ft per second (4.5m per second) and hit its companion with a force of about 460kN. Burslem estimates a large fully grown sperm whale closing in at the same speed would hit with a force of approximately 1,200kN – that would feel like being hit by a bus travelling at 40mph (65km/h).

Turned on a ship, this is a considerable force.

"In history, only three whaling ships were attacked by whales," says Michael Harrison, chief curator at the Historical Society in Nantucket, which hosts an impressive collection of original logbooks and artefacts. But whales would routinely attack the smaller, open boats that were lowered overboard from the main ship when a whale was spotted.

"The logbooks don't often do justice to the drama of this," says Harrison.

In all three cases when a whale attacked the mother ship, the attacker was a sperm whale. In 1851, in the South Pacific, a sperm whale charged the Ann Alexander and completely wrecked it. In 1902, too, a sperm whale wrecked the Kathleen, which was sailing off the Galapagos Islands.

But it was the fate of the Essex that became perhaps the most infamous survival ordeal in maritime history.

More like this:

• Novel Moby Dick challenged our fear of the whale

• The human-like 'alphabet' of whales

• The whale graveyards that transform the deep sea

That day, 20 men abandoned the sinking mother ship and clambered onto three whaleboats. They were 1,300 miles from land and what followed became one of the most gruesome stories in maritime history, and inspiration for Melville's Moby-Dick.

Love and war

Of course, we don't know how often sperm whales use their heads as battering rams in nature, when no drone is watching, says Burslem. Neither do we fully understand the purpose of their uniquely enormous melon.

There are other theories on the role of spermaceti, and it may have more than one use. Whales produce sound with "monkey lips", a pair of phonic lips located at the front end of the nose. The sound travels both forwards into the water and backwards, to the end wall of their spermaceti at the back of their head.

When a female hears the combination of these two sounds, she can judge how big the spermaceti of the male is, and whether it is a large specimen she'd like to mate with, says Burlsem.

"We have a huge amount still to learn about these animals. We need to prioritise keeping them around, " says Burslem. "We're really only just starting to understand."

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The treasured 'eternal snow' on this tropical island is about to disappear forever

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm5ydvww0erdo, 10 days ago

The mountains of Papua are not far from the equator, but they've been topped with "eternal snow" for centuries.

The peaks in this Indonesian region on the world's second-largest island, just north of Australia, have offered scientists countless insights into the Earth's climate history.

They're also the epicentre of the spiritual universe for many Papuans - a Mecca or a Vatican, as one activist puts it.

But now, nearly all the snow is gone.

A century ago, the 300km (190-mile) stretch of the Sudirman Range had snow and permanent ice on all four of its major peaks.

But now there are only small areas around Puncak Jaya, also known as Carstensz Pyramid, with any snow at all. These are expected to entirely disappear in a year or two.

Glacier cover around the peak has shrunk from nearly 1,900 hectares (4,700 acres) in the 19th Century to about 16 hectares (40 acres) today. Almost entire glaciers have vanished within a human lifetime.

"There is a profound unfairness in this," says Marie Šabacká, a Czech glacier ecologist who travelled to Puncak Jaya last March in a bid to be among the last scientists to study Papua's "eternal snow".

She says the tropical glaciers in Papua are unique because they are separated from other glacier systems by thousands of kilometres. Papua is home to the "last remaining tropical ice" between the Andes and Himalayas.

Ice cores taken from the slopes of Puncak Jaya preserve a record of climate history.

Scientists can use them to obtain information about atmospheric conditions in the region and understand changes in the planet's warmest ocean waters that surround the island - the tropical Pacific and Western Pacific Warm pool.

But this archive is disappearing before scientists have had time to fully study it.

Proof of a warming planet

The retreat of Papua's glaciers is driven by the same forces affecting ice around the world, Šabacká notes, a warming atmosphere caused by human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

As temperatures rise, the freezing point moves higher up mountains, so more precipitation falls as rain instead of snow, even in places that once saw regular snowfall.

El Niño events can accelerate this process, while local factors such as cloud cover, snowfall and mountain topography influence its pace.

The mountains in Papua are just 450km (280 miles) south of the equator, where "permanent ice can survive only at very high altitudes and within a narrow range of climatic conditions", Šabacká says.

A small increase in temperature, a higher freezing point or shift from snowfall to rainfall can determine whether a glacier survives at all, she adds.

The glaciers' retreat is evidence the Earth has been warming over a long period - and their disappearance "removes both a biological habitat and part of a culturally significant landscape".

A spiritual anchor

At least five groups of Indigenous people have had strong spiritual ties to Puncak Jaya for generations.

The Moni people refer to it as Mbainggela, and believe their ancestors watch over the mountain. To the Amungme people, the range is known as Nemangkawi, or the "White Arrow".

"Parents and grandparents prayed their children would have hearts like the White Arrow, never straying from the proper path," says Elfrida Natkime, a young Amungme woman. "It symbolises honesty, purity and moral integrity."

According to traditional Amungme beliefs, Nemangkawi symbolises how people should live.

Amungme environmental activist Adolfina Kum stresses how important the peak is to her people - and how traditions and cultural foundations risk being shattered as the ice melts.

"How would Muslims feel if Mecca were destroyed? How would Catholics feel if Rome or the Vatican were destroyed?" she asks. "For the Amungme people, that is what it feels like when Nemangkawi is destroyed."

For many Indigenous Papuans, the disappearance of the glacier is not an isolated event.

The discovery of vast copper and gold deposits transformed the region during the 20th Century, and the development of extractive industrial projects have reshaped parts of the landscape.

Entire mountain faces have been excavated and roads, industrial infrastructure and settlements have transformed surrounding valleys.

Papuans say the development has brought jobs, roads, education and economic opportunities, but also environmental degradation and decades of social conflict. Some have lost access to their ancestral lands as mining expanded.

The BBC has approached Freeport, which operates Papua's Grasberg mine, one of the world's largest gold and copper operations, for comment.

"Every time I see the mountains, I feel amazed, but I also feel sadness," says Elfrida Natkime. "Since the company came, I have seen the exploitation. But the development has also provided a livelihood for many people."

As local communities watch their sacred landscapes change, scientists and explorers are racing to document what is left.

Using drones and three-dimensional mapping techniques, Danish researcher Klaus Thymann and his team have created a detailed model of what remains.

From the early 2000s to 2025, the glaciated area has receded by 95%, he says. "There's almost no ice left. Those are the facts."

Thymann says glaciers are "incredibly powerful" as indicators of climate change.

"When people hear that something described as 'eternal' is disappearing, it triggers a reaction," he explains.

Adolfina Kum believes communities "lose an important source of strength" when sacred mountains, forests or ancestral places are disturbed.

"I often describe it as pulling out the roots of a tree. Once the roots are removed, the tree loses its foundation."

Just how hot and dry was your summer? Use our postcode lookup to find out

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy9zvw47v90o, 11 days ago

The UK faced its hottest summer on record this year, with much of the country experiencing drought and repeated heatwaves.

But temperatures and rainfall were not the same everywhere. Type in your postcode to see what summer 2026 was like in your area.

High-pressure weather systems sat over the UK for much of the summer, bringing clear, sunny skies for many parts of the country and creating warm, dry conditions.

But global warming - mainly the result of the burning of fossil fuels - is raising average temperatures in the UK.

This means that any warm spells can reach higher temperatures than the same weather systems of the past.

The Met Office estimates that this summer's average temperature was made about 130 times more likely by human-caused climate change.

Rising temperatures also mean that our vegetation and soils dry out more quickly - which can worsen the effects of low rainfall.

UK summers are expected to become drier on average due to climate change - although when there is heavy rain it could fall in more intense bursts.

Not every summer will be as hot or dry as this one, as weather patterns vary from year to year.

But scientists warn that average temperatures will keep increasing while countries keep adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Development and testing by Ryan Smith, Stephen Connor and Adam Allen. Data support by Libby Rogers and Christine Jeavans.

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Apple Day called off after poor harvest

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxddvjzy4yd9o, 11 days ago

Tatton Park's annual Apple Day has been cancelled for the first time in 24 years after extreme weather and increased pest activity left organisers short of fruit to share with visitors.

The event in Cheshire will not take place this October following a significantly reduced harvest from the estate's collection of about 300 apple and pear trees.

Head gardener Simon Tetlow said prolonged summer drought had created one of the most challenging growing seasons the team had experienced.

He said the cancellation highlighted the challenges climate change posed for sustainable fruit growing.

Head gardener Simon Tetlow said: "For 24 years, our orchards have provided the centrepiece for a fantastic tasting day to celebrate the start of autumn, but this year a combination of prolonged drought and unprecedented pest pressures [from the Apple Capsid bug] has left us without enough fruit to share with visitors."

He said the gardening team was already adapting what crops were grown, where they were planted and cultivation methods to improve resilience in future seasons.

Organisers said they hoped Apple Day would return in 2027.

Read more stories from Cheshire on the BBC, watch BBC North West Tonight on BBC iPlayer and follow BBC North West on X. You can also send story ideas via Whatsapp to 0808 100 2230.

Climate emergency declaration scrapped by council

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckge4wn195nwo, 11 days ago

Calderdale Council has voted to scrap its climate emergency declaration several years after it was introduced.

The decision was made by the Reform UK-led administration, despite its leader Dan Sutherland having proposed the original declaration when he was a Labour councillor in 2019, saying immediate action was needed.

Protesters gathered outside Halifax Town Hall before Wednesday's meeting, with two members of the public removed from the gallery during the debate.

Reform councillor Connor Dent told the meeting scrapping the declaration was not because "we should care less about our environment", but questioned whether it gave "the best possible outcomes" for residents and the environment.

During the meeting, a 90-year-old protester was among those escorted out by security staff after shouting that scientists had said there was a climate emergency and it should not be ignored.

After another two interruptions, the public gallery was ordered to be cleared, but eventually remaining members of the public were allowed to stay on the basis that they would not further interrupt the debate.

The decision in Calderdale follows similar moves by other Reform-led councils, including Wakefield, which recently voted to "undeclare" the climate emergency the authority had unanimously backed in 2019.

Outlining Calderdale's proposals, Dent said every pound spent by the council must be justified, and environmental policy must deliver real benefits and not just look good on paper.

He said changes shaped by the policy, including building cycle lanes, had caused congestion and a loss of parking spaces which residents had questioned.

He added that the expected increases in the level of cycling had not materialised.

Dent also said the policy had "disconnected" from local worries, citing a battery energy storage plant being given planning permission at Holmfield in Halifax.

Supporting him, Reform councillor Mike Payne said practical, proportionate, safe environmental measures that benefited residents would be supported, but not "virtue signalling".

Opposing the motion, Labour councillor Scott Patient said Reform-led councils were following the party line.

He said the declaration had helped secure £150m for projects, including home insulation, flood resilience and public buildings, and argued that any savings from scrapping it would be minimal.

Supporting him, Councillor Martin Hey, leader of the Green Party group, said that climate initiatives had helped create a green economy worth millions of pounds, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

Before the meeting, councillors were lobbied by residents and groups, including Green New Deal and Extinction Rebellion, who voiced concerns about the council's withdrawal from the commitment.

One campaigner, Ali Bath, from Extinction Rebellion, said the previous administration had tried to tackle the issue, but that was now under threat.

She added: "There are huge impacts on our everyday lives and I don't know how communities are going to cope. I don't think people are prepared."

Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.

Christa Pike's prognosis still unclear after failed execution, lawyer says

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgelynyg7d3o, today

US murderer Christa Pike remains critically ill in hospital and her prognosis is still unclear following her failed execution, her lawyer has said on Sunday.

Speaking to CNN on Sunday morning, Pike's lawyer Stephen Ferrell said doctors were still trying to clear two doses of pentobarbital from her body.

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death following her conviction for murdering Colleen Slemmer in 1995.

She survived two execution attempts on Wednesday, and was transferred to a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee.

Ferrell said: "She's still in the hospital, on a ventilator, critically ill, we really don't know the prognosis yet, and may not know for several days."

He didn't believe she had regained consciousness at any point, adding that he has been receiving updates through her medical power of attorney rather than consulting directly with doctors.

He has not been in to see her. "She is guarded. I'm not sure who may have seen her," he said.

Authorities have not yet said whether they will try again to execute Pike. They have also not offered an explanation for what went wrong. But Tennessee Governor Bill Lee suspended all executions for the rest of the year - and the head of prisons in the state said he would resign on Saturday.

"If she recovers - she may not fully recover - and there may be issues about her competence. I mean, we just don't know any of this," Ferrell said. "We have had no discussions about this. The Tennessee attorney general's office so far has not given us any indications of what their intentions will be."

He called on the governor to commute her death sentence to a life sentence "at the very least". "She has endured a torturous attempt at executing her," he said. "She's spent over 30 years in prison, most of that in solitary confinement."

"We don't know right now - and we may never know - what sort of torture she endured during [her failed execution]."

Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed 19-year-old Slemmer in 1995.

She was sentenced to death the following year after a media frenzy around the killing in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Slemmer's mother May Martinez travelled to Nashville for the execution, which moved ahead despite last-minute legal challenges.

Martinez, who supported Pike's death sentence, told local news outlet WJXX that she "broke down in tears" after finding out it was not successful.

"I think that the state owes me a big apology," she said.

The state's Department of Correction has defended the use of lethal injections, saying "the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out".

Pike's lawyers previously warned that her medical history and anatomy - including thrombocytosis (a blood-clotting condition) and small veins - meant there was a risk she would experience "unnecessary" pain and suffering during a lethal injection.

Cornell frat house rape accuser 'under siege' online, says lawyer

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6ly0ljypzrdo, 2 days ago

The lawyer for the woman who alleges she was raped at a Cornell University fraternity house says she is "not doing well" as she finds herself "under siege" from online sleuths seeking to identity her.

Thomas Giuffra said the woman known in legal documents as Jane Doe was "incapable of consent" because she was "completely, grossly intoxicated" when she turned up at the home where she says the assault took place.

The woman alleges she was assaulted by seven men at the campus in Ithaca, New York, in 2024.

No charges were initially filed in the case. It has reopened since she filed a civil lawsuit that thrust the claims into the national spotlight, reigniting the possibility of criminal charges.

In an interview on Friday with CNN, Giuffra said: "She's under siege on social media where people are trying to identify her."

He said that postings have "incorrectly" identified other women as Doe.

In an interview with CBS, the BBC's US partner, Giuffra argued that his client, aged 20 at the time, was unable to provide consent because she was intoxicated when she arrived at the fraternity house.

Giuffra said she had been pressured into taking the drug ketamine before she was allegedly raped.

His comments came as New York Governor Kathy Hochul appointed the state's top prosecutor, Attorney General Letitia James, to take over the investigation.

At a news conference on Friday, Hochul said she had "lost faith" in the county prosecutor's ability to oversee the case.

"This young woman had already endured something that is utterly unspeakable, and then at every turn she was failed by people and institutions with an obligation to protect her," Hochul said.

She also vowed to close a "loophole" of state law that makes it difficult to press rape charges if an alleged victim voluntarily consumes alcohol or drugs.

During an interview with investigators, Doe told campus police investigators: "I was a sex doll for all intents and purposes."

She also said that she "felt like bait" as the attackers were "like lions around me", according to records from the school's disciplinary investigation, obtained by US media.

Social media feeds are filled with women trying to shield the Cornell accuser's identity by posting videos of themselves under the title "I am Jane Doe".

As well as seeking to complicate internet searches for her name, the messages of solidarity included clips of women detailing their own experiences of sexual assault.

Efforts to rally round Jane Doe gathered pace after a political commentator vowed to unmask her, arguing it was unfair for her to remain anonymous while the men are publicly named despite not being charged with a crime.

Online sleuths have also tried to locate the addresses of the so-called Cornell Seven, leading to at least one case of mistaken identity.

An active-duty US Marine Corps sergeant who had the same name as one of the men was incorrectly served the woman's lawsuit, leading to a torrent of abuse and threats, according to the Free Press.

Ex-US congressman sentenced to 10 years in prison for $50m lobbying scheme

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crz98wnx4n1wo, 3 days ago

A former US congressman has been sentenced to 10 years in a federal prison for money laundering and working as an undeclared foreign agent.

David Rivera, 61, who was elected as a Florida Republican, was found guilty in May after a seven-week trial heard Venezuela's state-run oil company hired his consulting firm to lobby members of Congress to help improve US relations with Venezuela.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a former housemate of Rivera, and Texas congressman Pete Sessions both testified to the court that they had no idea about his activities.

Defence lawyers had said the lobbying was for a US subsidiary of the oil company, not the Venezuelan government.

Rivera's associate, political consultant Esther Nuhfer, who was tried alongside him, was also found guilty in the case.

As a part of his sentence, Rivera, who served in Congress from 2011-13, must also forfeit his Florida properties.

Federal prosecutors in Florida said Rivera and Nuhfer engaged in a "secret political influence campaign", receiving a $50m (£37m) contract for three months of work on behalf of a US-based subsidiary of Venezuelan state oil firm PDVSA, which is also known as Citgo.

Prosecutors alleged that, in 2017 and 2018, at the behest of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's government, Rivera and Nuhfer attempted to lobby Rubio - then still a senator and former housemate of Rivera - as well as Kellyanne Conway, a former senior White House adviser.

The lobbying came during a moment of tense relations between the US and Venezuela, during President Donald Trump's first term in the White House when his administration imposed sanctions on the South American country.

Defence lawyers for Rivera and Nuhfer argued that the pair did not need to register as foreign agents because their contract was with a US-based subsidiary of a Venezuelan state company.

But Judge Melissa Damian said during Friday's sentencing: "There's no dispute this money came from the Maduro regime."

Rubio, who was not implicated in the wrongdoing, testified during the trial that he was close friends with Rivera but was unaware he was working as a lobbyist.

Woman at centre of Cornell rape inquiry was 'failed' by officials, says New York governor

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqvg04718lr9o, 3 days ago

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has said the woman at the centre of the Cornell University rape case was "failed" at "every turn".

The woman, known as Jane Doe in legal documents, alleges she was drugged and raped by several men at a fraternity house in 2024.

The case was investigated at the time but no charges were laid. It recently reopened after the woman filed a civil lawsuit last month that thrust the allegations into the national spotlight.

At a news conference on Friday, Hochul said she was "deeply disturbed" by how the investigation was handled. She has now appointed New York Attorney General Letitia James to lead the case.

This appointment was made after Hochul said she "lost faith" in the local prosecutor's ability to oversee the investigation.

Expressing outrage that local prosecutors did not interview the accuser themselves, Hochul on Friday said: "This young woman had already endured something that is utterly unspeakable, and then at every turn she was failed by people and institutions with an obligation to protect her."

She has also vowed to close a "loophole" that prevents prosecutors from pursuing rape charges in cases when the victim has voluntarily consumed drugs or alcohol. Jane Doe is believed to have voluntarily taken drugs and alcohol on the night of the alleged gang rape.

"If someone is too intoxicated to consent it should not matter if they chose to use drugs or alcohol," said Hochul, adding: "Voluntary intoxication is not a licence for gang rape."

James, who is the state's chief legal officer, appeared alongside Hochul at Friday's news conference, pledging to "lead a process guided by the facts and the law".

She said her office would interview witnesses and pursue prosecutions if warranted.

District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, who previously led the investigation, has defended his office's previous decision not to file charges in the case, arguing they were not given enough evidence to meet the legal threshold.

Van Houten said much of the information released in recent weeks about the case was not passed to his office.

In a statement on Friday, he said he supported James' investigation, adding: "It has become clear that we were not provided the full picture by the university."

Cornell has said it provided evidence to the district attorney's office from its own investigation, including a Snapchat group chat in which fraternity members discussed a "free" sexual encounter with Doe on the night of the alleged assault.

Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit against the Ivy League university in September.

Speaking to CNN on Friday, her lawyer Thomas Giuffra said she is "not doing well".

"She's under siege on social media, where people are trying to identify her; some false court postings, attempting to identify her," he said.

Survivor and victim advocates say current state law on sexual assault makes it difficult for charges to be brought against perpetrators if the victim voluntarily took drugs or drank alcohol before the alleged assault took place.

A bill to address what Hochul described as a legal loophole was already before the state legislature prior to this week's public outcry over how police and investigators handled the Cornell rape allegations.

People who have voluntarily become intoxicated to the point that they are unable to give consent are currently not protected by New York's rape laws, says state assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, who first sponsored legislation to close the loophole in 2019.

"The real bottom line is that right now if you are voluntarily intoxicated, you will not get justice," he tells BBC News.

"Being voluntarily intoxicated, basically, is almost like giving somebody a get out of jail free card."

Dinowitz says that around half of US states have already changed their laws to say it makes no difference whether intoxication is voluntarily or involuntarily in rape cases.

Hochul said she will support the existing bill and that it could move forward as early as the next legislative session which reconvenes in January. As governor, she could also call lawmakers back for a special session before then.

I've seen nearly 500 executions - but never one like Christa Pike's

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6d949gq47x9o, 3 days ago

Reporter Michael Graczyk has covered nearly 500 executions carried out in Texas, continuing even after his 2018 retirement from The Associated Press.

He remembers two instances where needles popped out before reinsertion for successful execution - but never one in which an inmate survived.

That's what happened this week in Tennessee, when 50-year-old inmate Christa Pike remained breathing and audibly snoring after two separate doses of pentobarbital, the barbiturate used in the state's lethal injection protocol.

Graczyk, 76, says he wasn't entirely surprised to hear of the anomaly - and had actually thought about the possibility during his decades-long career as a Texas journalist.

"It seems to me it was just a matter of time," he told BBC News.

Tennessee's execution protocol calls for a secondary set of pentobarbital-filled syringes in case the person being put to death does not die after the first set, according to AP, but does not spell out what happens if the subject is alive after the second set.

Governor Bill Lee halted executions in the state after Wednesday night's failure, ordering an independent review into procedures. Botched executions have come under scrutiny over the past decade, since a shortage of the drugs used led some states to change the formula, or procure drugs from more questionable sources. Some states even brought back death by firing squad as an alternative.

Pike is now in hospital where she is receiving "life-saving care", according to her lawyer.

It's not uncommon for lethal injections - the most frequently used form of capital punishment in the 27 US states where the penalty is legal - to be "botched". The Death Penalty Information Center, a think-tank that does not take a stance on the death penalty, describes a botched execution as one with "unanticipated problems or delays that caused, at least arguably, unnecessary agony for the prisoner or that reflect gross incompetence of the executioner". The organisation has compiled a list of 64 botched executions since 1982, 51 of them lethal injections. In at least seven of those cases, the executions were halted because the IV line could not be set.

But Graczyk has never seen an execution fail after the injection was delivered.

"That has never happened here," Graczyk said of the Lone Star State.

Graczyk, who covered a wide range of topics for the AP during his 46 years with the news service, considers his prolific attendance at executions to be an important part of the job.

"There is no [greater] authority, power, or whatever you want to call it, that state or federal government has over us than the power to take our life," he said.

There have been 1,683 executions in the US since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre, which is when the US Supreme Court re-instated the death penalty. Texas has carried out by far the most of any state, with 602 executions. In 1982, it became the first state to use lethal injections to execute people.

"I always thought it was important for someone who has no stake in the outcome of a case to be there and to see the law being carried out and to make certain that it is done properly," Graczyk said.

"That someone is there to see it and tell others: Here's what I saw. Here's what happened."

Although he is technically retired, he still works freelance for AP covering executions in his home state.

He feels a particular responsibility to remember victims in his coverage and it's especially disheartening when he writes a story about an execution that doesn't make big news.

"I feel bad for the victims in the case," he said. "They are the forgotten folks. They always have been."

"Today, all the emphasis is on the inmate in Tennessee," he said. "No tears are being shed, other than the victim's immediate family, for the victim … and I understand that's the business we're in, but it doesn't mean it's right."

Pike's victim was Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old originally from Florida who loved to roller skate, smile and help others, according to descriptions given by her friends and family. Slemmer was tortured and killed by Pike, then 18, and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, after they met her at a job training camp.

Slemmer's mother, May Martinez, was present in Tennessee on Wednesday for the execution attempt, telling NBC News afterwards that it "was a mess".

Texas, where Graczyk lives and works, does not allow observers in the execution chamber when the IV is being inserted, he said.

"So when we get into the chamber, the inmate's already hooked up."

In a lethal injection execution, the IV would typically be inserted in the crook of the person's arm, Graczyk said. But if that didn't work, sometimes it would go into the top of their hand, their leg, neck or other sites.

During successful executions, Graczyk said inmates become "visibly unconscious after just a few seconds". They are usually pronounced dead 20 to 40 minutes after the fatal dose is given, he said.

He still remembers the death of Jonathan Nobles, who was executed by lethal injection in Texas in 1998. He'd been handed the sentence after his conviction for the brutal 1986 stabbing murders of two Austin women, Kelley Fraquhar and Mitzi Johnson-Nalley.

Nobles sang "Silent Night" as his last words.

"He gets to 'Round yon virgin' and he stops talking," Graczyk told BBC News. "That's how long it took for the drug to kick in so he wasn't conscious anymore."

That scene has stuck with Graczyk for nearly 30 years.

"To this day, when I'm in church on Christmas, and the choir is singing Silent Night, and all the congregation is joining in Silent Night and they're all, you know, in the spirit of the season and the joy of the season, and I'm thinking of this execution, I'm sure I'm the only one in that congregation that is having that kind of recollection."

When people hear about his career covering executions, he said, they are usually curious.

"Most people don't get to watch someone die," he said.

But when people ask him about what he has witnessed, he tells them "it's not the only thing I did or do or have done".

What happened in the failed execution of Christa Pike - and what next?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckge4eql4q7eo, yesterday

Warning: This article contains details that readers may find distressing

US convicted murderer Christa Pike is in a critical condition in hospital after Tennessee authorities failed to execute her by lethal injection, her lawyer says.

The case of Pike, whose attempted execution on Wednesday had already been the subject of a high-profile legal battle, raised a number of questions, including what went wrong? And what happens next?

A third-party review has been ordered by state Governor Bill Lee, who has halted executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year. The head of prisons in the state is also resigning after the failed execution.

How did it go wrong?

Pike was scheduled to be put to death in Tennessee on Wednesday evening local time. The injections were allowed by the Supreme Court at the 11th hour.

She was given two injections of the drug pentobarbital, but her legal team said these failed to stop her heartbeat. As of Thursday night, she was unconscious, intubated and on a ventilator.

Pike's lawyers filed an emergency motion on Friday to preserve "any and all evidence" related to her botched execution.

During the execution attempt, prison officials tried to start intravenous (IV) lines by using at least seven needles on Pike, according to her lawyers.

While receiving the two doses, "she could be heard crying, whimpering, and breathing loudly", her lawyers said.

"At no point did any member of the execution team realise that the IV lines were not correctly placed or that the veins had blown and that the pentobarbital was, in whole or in part, entering Ms Pike's body," her lawyers said in the filing.

Her lawyers had warned something like this might occur.

In January, Pike's legal team filed a lawsuit challenging the state's lethal injection protocol. In it, they said Pike suffered from a blood-clotting condition known as thrombocytosis and said she had "small veins that make insertion of a needle more difficult".

After the botched execution, Pike's attorney Stephen Ferrell said setting an IV line was more difficult than a simple blood draw, adding: "We knew this was coming."

Pike's other attorney, Randy Spivey, said he noticed during the execution that "her right arm was turning purple" and that there was "burning around the sites of the injection" afterwards.

Pike's lawyers also raised the issue of degraded pentobarbital, suggesting that it may have lost its potency.

The Tennessee Department of Correction has defended the method it used, saying "the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out".

The state protocol does not clearly specify what should happen if an inmate remains alive after a second dose, according to the AP news agency.

Authorities are yet to say whether they will try again to execute Pike. They have not explained why the dosage given to Pike proved to be non-fatal.

On Saturday, Tennessee Governor Lee announced the state's Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada was stepping down. Lee said it was "in the best interests" of the state and called the ongoing investigation into the incident "entirely appropriate and necessary".

Opponents of the death penalty said it was difficult to know what went wrong, because part of Pike's execution happened behind a curtain.

Maya Foa, the head of international legal organisation Reprieve, said: "Lethal injection relies on secrecy at every stage, to hide the violence of the state taking a human life."

How did she survive?

Pike survived two doses of the lethal drug pentobarbital. Dr Joel Zivot, an anaesthesiologist advising Pike's defence team, said this was enough that, had it entered her bloodstream in normal circulation, "she would have surely died".

Zivot said the only possible explanation for her survival "is that the pentobarbital blood level was never high enough to cause death" and that blisters on her arm after the botched execution indicated a ruptured vein.

So, instead of entering Pike's bloodstream, he said, the pentobarbital was more likely to have spread across the tissue under her skin.

Pike's medical condition of thrombocytosis may have also played a role, forming blood clots at the injection site that would potentially block pentobarbital from entering her veins.

Regarding the possibility the pentobarbital was degraded, Zivot explained that if this was the case, it could be due to factors including poor manufacturing or improper storage.

What happens next?

The Tennessee correction department said Pike had been taken to an off-site medical facility. Hospital staff were working to save her life and clear the drug used, pentobarbital, from her system, her lawyers said in a court filing on Friday.

Dr Joel Zivot said: "It's very possible that as a consequence of the delay of the beginning of resuscitation she [Pike] will have a brain injury."

Pike's lawyers are now asking for her sentence to be commuted, but it is not clear what might happens next.

Historically, the US Supreme Court has not halted second attempts at executions, said John Mills, a lawyer who works with inmates sentenced to death.

In 2024, it allowed Alabama to proceed with a second execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith, using an experimental oxygen deprivation method, after their attempt to kill him by lethal injection failed two years earlier.

What is pentobarbital?

Pentobarbital is a potent sedative that slows down the body, including the nervous system. Doctors sometimes use it as a treatment for certain conditions, but in high doses it can also be used as a lethal injection to cause death.

Its use in lethal injections came under renewed scrutiny last year after a US federal government review during the Biden administration raised concerns about the drug's potential for "unnecessary pain and suffering".

The Biden government banned its use in federal executions, but that did not bind individual states such as Tennessee, which can choose their own methods.

In recent years, states have found some drugs needed for lethal injections harder to come by, because pharmaceutical companies have opposed the use of their products for such purposes.

The Tennessee correction department has not specifically addressed an allegation from Pike's legal team that the pentobarbital it used was "degraded".

But the department said in a statement the lethal injection chemical had "consistently been effective".

Has this happened before?

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.

Background on the case

Pike, now 50, was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder a year earlier of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, which was perpetrated along with her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.

Pike killed Slemmer at a camp for troubled teens, after accusing Slemmer of insulting her and attempting to steal Shipp from her.

Two other residents at the camp later testified that Pike had bragged about the murder and showed them a piece of Slemmer's skull.

Shipp was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole and he remains in prison. He was spared the death penalty for his part in the attack because he was not yet legally an adult at the time.

Correction 1 October: This article originally referred to the inmate executed by the state of Louisiana in 1947 as Willie Smith. We have amended the article to make clear that his name was Willie Francis.

'Ashamed': Cornell students gather to voice anger over alleged gang rape

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm0e3ed1er1yo, 3 days ago

Students have called for drastic change at Cornell University as a result of an alleged gang rape in 2024, with one using an emotional student assembly on Thursday to say: "We're absolutely ashamed of the events that happened on campus."

Students and faculty members say the investigation into the incident has cast a "dark cloud" over the campus - stirring anger, concern over fraternity culture, and a backlash against the university's handling of the situation.

At Thursday's assembly, some labelled the perceived lack of justice a "disgrace" and criticised the prestigious university, which has defended its handling of the case.

"We deserve to know that our institution values our safety more than its reputation," undergraduate Sophia Riley Sim told those at the gathering.

Sim said she had been too upset by the case to attend classes for the past week.

Under normal circumstances, the Ivy League university is a beautiful place to study at this time of year. Autumn leaves bring pops of colour to its stately buildings, which are set against the backdrop of the rolling hills of upstate New York.

But students and staff who spoke to the BBC - some on condition of anonymity - said the tension on campus had become palpable since the 2024 case resurfaced in recent weeks.

The accuser at the centre of the alleged gang rape, known anonymously as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit against Cornell on 16 September, saying she was drugged and raped at a fraternity house during the incident two years ago.

She claimed that Cornell had failed to protect her or adequately punish the men involved in the incident. The men have been dubbed the Cornell Seven.

Cornell has already agreed to an independent investigation into the rape allegation.

The university has also defended its handling of the issue to date, saying it conducted an "extensive investigation" that lasted several months following the report of the incident, and that it followed applicable federal civil rights law.

Shortly after Thursday's student assembly at Cornell, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced she had appointed the state attorney general, Letitia James, as special prosecutor in the case.

She said she had "lost faith" in the Tompkins County district attorney, who was previously leading the investigation. James therefore takes over the case from Matthew Van Houten.

Van Houten's office initially concluded that the evidence did not meet the legal threshold to bring charges - before reopening a criminal investigation last week in light of the new civil complaint, a move that Cornell supported.

An upcoming "Justice for Survivors" protest, planned at the university for 5 October, is being advertised in flyers all over campus. It calls on Cornell to take action against alleged rape culture.

Student organisers are calling for Cornell to expel and revoke the degrees of the alleged perpetrators of the rape, rewrite policies around sexual assault punishments, initiate an external investigation of the university and mandate prevention training for campus police.

As part of its account of its prior investigation of the case, Cornell says: "At its conclusion, the hearing panel issued a range of sanctions, which included expulsions and suspensions from Cornell."

Cornell says it is legally prevented from publicly disclosing specific disciplinary outcomes about disciplinary students, adding that "we recognise that this legal limitation can be frustrating".

Across campus, the case has stirred anger.

One fourth-year student recalled that it had been hard to live there in 2024, in the aftermath of the incident, as rumours began spreading about Jane Doe.

Now, two years on, she told the BBC how she and her friends felt "overwhelmed" and "disappointed", comparing the atmosphere on campus to a "dark cloud". Cornell, she believes, mishandled things.

She wants the administration to admit what she sees as its mistakes, calling the lack of transparency disheartening.

She also asked why multiple men in a group chat for members of Chi Phi - the fraternity group at the centre of the allegations - did not speak up. A chapter of the fraternity was closed in 2024 and remains barred from campus.

Students and community members also used Thursday's student assembly meeting to vent their frustrations and disappointment.

"I am very disgusted to be here, to be paying this institution to be here," freshman Eliana Dolven-Miller said. "There was a lot of anger in that room, I was very angry."

Eeshaan Chaudhuri, the student assembly chair, opened the meeting by saying that the campus stood "with victims of sexual violence".

"We don't tolerate it here on campus, and I think I can speak for every single one of us, and I can say we're absolutely ashamed of the events that happened on our campus," Chaudhuri said.

The student group has also raised a resolution calling on the university to release a written account of how it handled the alleged sexual assault, including what evidence was gathered and whether and when the university referred the matter to campus police.

A faculty member said the mood on campus was "dismal". Staff were not trained therapists, she said, so it was hard to know how to navigate these discussions with students.

It was an "incredible situation that was so… I just don't understand," she said, adding that she was unsure if the university should have gone further, and adding that this was not the first time a fraternity group had had problems on campus.

Some of the freshmen, or first-year students, who spoke to the BBC had only arrived at Cornell last month.

A young woman said she and her friends had been discussing the allegations again that morning. Her friend said it had been difficult for him to come to an Ivy League university feeling excited about the future, only to see this story dominate the news.

Students were not OK about what happened to Jane Doe, he said.

Cornell alumni have also given their views.

More than 1,300 graduates have signed a letter calling on the university to take "swift and expansive" action after the allegations came back to light.

"Will Cornell take this as an opportunity to ask difficult questions about the proliferation of sexual violence on its own campus?" asks the letter, which was published in the university's student newspaper.

"Or will it shy away from reform to protect its image? This is not an isolated incident."

Cornell case highlights 'draining' maze for victims to report campus sex assaults

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crpd0wdnlgxno, 4 days ago

Warning: This story contains distressing details and discussion of sexual assault.

When Mary was a first-year college student, she woke up after a fraternity party with bruises and bite marks all over her body. She says it took her a few days to piece together that she had been sexually assaulted while "blacked out", and to find the strength - and the right avenue - to report the assault.

The man she accused was eventually expelled, but police declined to bring charges because they said there was a lack of physical evidence.

Mary - whose name has been changed to protect her identity - says the process of finding some measure of justice was oftentimes confusing and disappointing.

"Even though it was a positive outcome, it was still so emotionally exhausting and draining, because I had to do all of this in tandem with getting used to being a college student for the first time," said Mary. "In many ways, I had to be my own advocate, gathering all my evidence."

The experience with local police, she added, "left me with a deep sense of disappointment in the system".

How both universities and the criminal justice system respond to these types of assaults on college campuses is once again under the spotlight, after a former student at Cornell University filed a civil lawsuit alleging she was raped by several members of a fraternity two years ago, with prosecutors declining at the time to pursue a case.

Mary did not attend Cornell, and her case is not connected with the university. But advocates for survivors of sexual assault say her case, and the Cornell allegations, are emblematic of the larger challenges in responding to sexual assault claims on college campuses specifically.

The confusing web of systems and policies - which varies greatly by college - is one of several reasons why the vast majority of sexual assaults on college campuses, research suggests, go unreported.

"These processes are hard to navigate if you aren't in trauma," said Nancy Chi Cantalupo, an associate professor of law at Wayne State University who has represented victims on college campuses. "If you are in trauma, they're virtually impossible to navigate."

Earlier this month, the former Cornell student known only as Jane Doe filed a lawsuit against the Ivy League university, alleging she was drugged and raped by several men at a fraternity house at the university in 2024.

She also alleged that Cornell failed to protect her or adequately punish the men involved. Jane Doe said she had reported the alleged assault to campus police, who interviewed her, and provided information to the district attorney's office. The prosecutor declined to bring charges at the time, but this week, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten re-opened the case.

Both Cornell and Van Houten have defended their handling of the 2024 case. In a statement, the university said it had "conducted an extensive investigation and adjudication over several months and imposed different sanctions based on the findings and circumstances involving each student" in addition to creating a new framework for addressing sexual assault on campus.

Cornell has said it followed the procedures outlined in a federal civil rights law called Title IX. The law mandates that universities follow certain rules about investigating sexual assaults. Cornell said its investigation resulted in the fraternity involved being barred from campus, and that students involved were suspended or expelled.

Two complex reporting systems

Typically, after a student reports an assault on campus, the university's Title IX office determines whether the alleged behaviour could constitute a violation of policy.

Eventually, both parties attend a hearing with a panel of faculty members or other mediators to present evidence and testimony in the case before a decision by the school is reached.

One of the biggest challenges sexual assault survivors face is simultaneously navigating the university and the criminal justice system, which "serve different purposes, operate under different rules and timelines, and lead to different outcomes", said Zoey Scheinblum-Brewer, a policy coordinator at the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, a nonprofit anti-sexual assault organisation.

"Unclear guidance about the options available through these parallel processes can create so much confusion and uncertainty that some students ultimately decide not to report," she said.

Mary said this process at her college was not clear to her when she made the decision to report the assault.

"For me, it would've been nice to know what I was getting into before it all happened. It felt like they were learning the process alongside me," she said of university officials.

While some colleges, like Cornell, have information sharing agreements with local police, Mary was told she had to go to police separately to file a report - a process she found physically exhausting.

Mary's lawyer says there was surveillance footage from the night showing her alleged rapist carrying her "slumped" over, and she had pictures of her bruises and bite marks. But police told Mary they did not have probable cause for an arrest, and that the district attorney wanted to leave it to university administration.

"I was left with this taste that because they knew that the college was 'handling' my investigation, that they could wipe their hands clean of it," she said.

The local police department told the BBC it did not have the details of this particular case. The local district attorney's office did not respond to a request for comment.

Secrecy and protection

University investigations are done behind closed doors, said Helene Weiss, a lawyer who has represented several victims of sexual assault on college campuses. She believes that part of the reason for the secrecy is to protect institutions' reputations.

"The secrecy of the process, it prevents other students from knowing about it. It prevents witnesses from coming forward," she said.

Michael Diamondstein, a Pennsylvania attorney who has represented those accused of sexual misconduct on college campuses, said the secrecy helps protect both the victim and the accused.

"I think when you compare it to what they would face in a courtroom, it's much easier for students and much safer for students. Their name isn't put out there. The news media doesn't get them," he said.

Cornell students have criticised the university's handling of the woman's claims. The Cornell Daily Sun, a student newspaper, published the names of the accused under the headline: "Cornell won't, we will."

In a statement, the college said that federal privacy law "prohibits Cornell from disclosing specific information regarding individual students" so it cannot "make a public statement on any other disciplinary response".

'My only avenue'

Many advocates say there is merit to universities investigating sexual assault complaints separately from the criminal justice system. Prosecuting sexual assault cases is notoriously difficult - a recent systematic review found that less than 10% of sexual assault cases yielded convictions. In a criminal trial, a prosecutor must convince a jury "beyond reasonable doubt" that the accused is guilty. But in a campus tribunal, the burden of proof is lower.

Under Title IX, the university is also required to offer solutions that local law enforcement cannot, like ensuring a student is not in the same class as their alleged abuser while the investigation is ongoing and offering homework extensions, said Scheinblum-Brewer.

This is one of several reasons why victims and advocates for survivors say there are benefits to having two separate avenues, through the university and the criminal justice system.

For Mary, after her case was dropped by the police, pursuing her assault claim through Title IX became the only way for her alleged rapist to face repercussions: an expulsion from college.

"This was my only avenue to achieve any sort of justice," she said.

Cornell president says university 'must do better' after frat house rape allegations

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckly0leelnz4o, yesterday

Cornell University's president says the school "must do better" after a woman alleged she was drugged and raped by a group of men at a fraternity house.

In an eight-minute video statement released on Saturday night, Michael Kotlikoff described the allegations raised by the woman, identified as Jane Doe, as "deeply disturbing".

The alleged incident has raised questions around the culture on campus of drug and alcohol use, and the way investigations were conducted in the case, Kotlikoff said.

Jane Doe was a 20-year-old student at the university when she says seven men from its Chi Phi fraternity assaulted her for hours in an incident involving alcohol and the drug ketamine on 19 October 2024.

She said she had reported the incident two weeks after it happened to Cornell University police, which investigated, but no charges were laid.

Last month, Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit against the Ivy League university, in which she alleged Cornell had failed to protect her or adequately punish the men involved.

Kotlikoff said Cornell was "committed to investigating" the way the case was handled, and said the school administration and community "must do better".

"We must foster a culture in which sexual assault is inexcusable and ensure our community is empowered and understands informed consent," he said.

He added that university leaders need to create an environment where victims of sexual assault "feel safe coming forward and are treated with compassion and dignity".

Kotlikoff said it is a "defining moment" in the university's history.

"We must lead the way, we owe it to Jane Doe and to survivors of assault to get this right. And we must keep each other safe," he said.

On the university's campus this week, the BBC saw growing frustration about the situation.

At a public hearing for students to speak about the alleged gang rape, many told the BBC they were ashamed of what happened and said the university had failed Jane Doe.

"Our administration needs to change and it needs to change drastically and it needs to change fast," one student told the BBC. "Something like this never should have happened, this is a disgrace."

As part of "broader work" that needs to happen, Kotlikoff said in his video statement that there should be a "serious look at the role of fraternities and sororities in campus life".

"Being part of a group can never diminish individual responsibility for our own actions, for how we treat others, or for speaking up when someone may be at risk," he said.

The university president also said that at the "appropriate time", the school would speak about how Cornell will "use this moment, this conversation, this anger, to help lead the broader effort to combat sexual assault not only on our campus, but beyond it".

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has said she was "deeply disturbed" by how the investigation was handled, and has appointed New York Attorney General Letitia James to lead a review of the case.

Kotlikoff said he supported the decision to appoint James to lead a criminal investigation, and welcomed an independent review by a law firm of how Cornell has handled the matter.

Jane Doe said in her lawsuit that she was intoxicated during the alleged incident and could not provide consent.

What is kratom, the 'gas station heroin' alarming officials in the US?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjn5ddzekwnro, yesterday

Jeffrey Deaver, a 58-year-old retired timber cutter in the state of Washington, has taken kratom for four years to help with severe chronic hip and knee pain.

He discovered the herbal product when he couldn't find relief from doctors and while waiting for surgeries. Scared at first, he "started small", but then took more until his pain went away.

"It was like a miracle," Deaver said. "I could sleep. I could function.

"I just don't know what I'd do without it."

Kratom - a herb with opioid-like effects - has grown in popularity in the US over the last decade, and is typically purchased over the counter and consumed in pill or liquid form.

Investigators said they found packaged kratom in the possession of two deceased University of Mississippi students. A father and son who worked at a Mississippi smoke shop were charged in connection with at least one of the student deaths, federal prosecutors said.

Although their deaths were not directly attributed to kratom, officials are now issuing warnings about its consumption.

For years, anti-kratom advocates have pushed for bans, and in some countries, like the UK, it's illegal. But Kratom is not regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration and is legal in some states, including Mississippi.

Here's what we know about it:

What is kratom?

Kratom is a tree that is native to South East Asia in countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

It's been used for centuries for its stimulant properties, ground down and consumed similar to tea.

As its popularity spread around the globe, it entered the US market as a supplement around 2016.

"That's really where the problems began," said Dr Shane Speights, dean of the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State University.

In the US kratom is mostly sold in highly concentrated forms either via pill, powder or liquid, Speights said.

It's also widely available - found everywhere from convenience stores and petrol stations to vape shops.

Also, because of the supplement classification, kratom products are not federally regulated.

"There's no way to know exactly what you're getting," Speight said. "You could go and create something in your basement, market it as a supplement, and nobody's really going to check and see what's in it."

What is kratom used for?

Kratom is often marketed as a safe, natural herbal supplement that helps with pain management, anxiety and depression.

In lower doses, its stimulant properties create a "caffeine-kind of buzz", Speights explained.

Because of its opioid-like effects, it has also been used with the goal of curbing addictions to actual opioids like fentanyl.

Those properties stem from the way the plant's compounds - like 7-Hydroxymitragynine - activate various hormones, including dopamine.

What are the effects and how dangerous is it?

"It's almost like taking a narcotic," Speights said. "At higher doses, it can create more euphoria and give you more of a general high."

Hallucinations are possible, too.

The higher doses also pose greater risk for adverse side effects.

That includes central nervous system (CNS) depression - which is "where the deaths come in," Speights said.

CNS can result in cardiovascular collapse and loss of breathing.

Withdrawal symptoms and addiction are also risks, said Jana Wu, director of clinical integration at the addiction treatment centre Mountainside.

"It affects marriages, relationships," she said. "I've seen people lose jobs, spend thousands of dollars a month on it."

Because it's easy to develop a high tolerance to the herb, users may need to take an increasing amount to achieve the same effect over time.

"I've worked with people that were taking like up to 20 pills a day," Wu said.

Experts told the BBC that the biggest dangers come from the fact that kratom is not federally regulated.

"Is there a safe dose?" Speights said. "My answer is going to be no because - I'm going to go back to this - we don't know what's in it."

Is kratom legal?

Kratom is banned in 11 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont and Wisconsin.

Massachusetts was the last state to make it illegal, issuing a temporary emergency order in August.

Ten years earlier, the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) had moved to classify kratom as a Schedule 1, the most dangerous level for drugs, calling it "an imminent hazard to public safety".

But the effort failed a few months later, after the justice department said it received "numerous comments from members of the public challenging" the attempt.

That leaves states to take action, like Arizona, which recently sued a company selling kratom beverage products.

In Mississippi, where the students Aidan Hamilton and Robert Strang died, kratom is illegal in the city of Oxford, home to the Ole Miss university.

Police made two arrests in the case at the end of September, after executing a search warrant at a convenience shop and finding over "500 units of kratom" and other illegal substances, including THC products.

Yahya Mohamed Mosleh, 51, and Islam Yahya Mosleh, 18, were arrested and charged with possession with the intent to distribute controlled substances in connection with the investigation of the student deaths.

Groups opposed to kratom want states to do more, saying "gas-station drugs are poisoning our communities".

Pro-kratom groups like the American Kratom Association are pushing for bans against synthetics "posing as natural kratom".

Internationally, kratom is banned in the UK. In Europe, the laws vary by country.

In Malaysia, where the kratom tree is native, consumption and sale are banned under the Poisons Act of 1952.

US father and son arrested after suspected kratom drug deaths

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6qjnlk4r2jjo, yesterday

A father and son who worked at a Mississippi smoke shop have been arrested and charged in connection with the death of at least one university student who died from a suspected overdose of kratom, sometimes called "gas station heroin" in the US.

The pair worked at a shop that allegedly sold derivatives of the substance to University of Mississippi students.

US prosecutors charged Yahya Mohamed Mosleh, 51, and Islam Yahya Mosleh, 18, for possession with the intent to distribute controlled substances in connection with the death investigation of two Ole Miss students last month.

Although their deaths have not officially been attributed to kratom, officials afterward issued warnings about consuming kratom.

The criminal complaint alleges that on 21 September, an Ole Miss student was found dead in his dorm room. The apparent cause of death "appeared to be consistent with a drug overdose", the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Mississippi said in a press release.

Law enforcement found packages - with some tablets missing - of suspected kratom derivatives.

About an hour later, a second student was found dead from a suspected overdose in another location, also with packages of suspected kratom derivatives.

Officials connected the packages with the local vape, tobacco and beer store, the US Attorney's statement said.

Law enforcement executed search warrants and seized suspected kratom derivative controlled substances from the store. The Mosleh's, father and son, were later arrested.

The two students' deaths have sparked alarm and warnings from officials about the plant-based drug referred to as "gas station heroin".

Kratom - a herb with opioid-like effects - has grown in popularity in the US over the last decade, and is typically purchased over the counter and consumed in pill or liquid form.

For years, anti-kratom advocates have pushed for bans, and in some countries, like the UK, it is illegal. But Kratom is not regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration and is legal in some states, including Mississippi.

The Mississippi prosecutors said that kratom derivatives, such as MGPI, MGM-15 and MGM-16, are now schedule I controlled substances in the US and can be significantly more potent than natural kratom leaf products and morphine.

Tennessee prison chief to resign after Christa Pike's failed execution

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8zxl62yzxzxo, yesterday

The head of prisons in the US state of Tennessee is resigning after the failed execution of death row inmate Christa Pike on Wednesday.

Governor Bill Lee announced the change on Saturday, sharing the news in a joint statement with Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada.

Strada said that his stepping down is "in the best interests" of the state, and called the ongoing investigation into the incident "entirely appropriate and necessary".

Pike, who was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of Colleen Slemmer, survived two injections and is now in critical condition at a Tennessee hospital as her lawyers seek to commute her sentence.

"Commissioner Strada has served with integrity, and I appreciate his willingness to put the interests of Tennesseans first during this difficult moment," Lee said.

Lee has ordered an independent review into Pike's attempted execution and he halted all executions in the state for the year.

Attorneys for Pike called the resignation "justified" but said "it does nothing to help Christa now".

"What happened to her Wednesday reflects a systemic failure that goes far beyond any one person," Pike's legal team wrote in a statement. "We hope the Governor's call for a full, independent review will expose the profound problems within Tennessee's entire death penalty system."

Pike is being treated at a hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, where doctors are attempting to clear the drugs used during the execution from her body, according to legal filings.

She was injected with two lethal doses of pentobarbital on Wednesday but remained alive. She was then sent to hospital in an ambulance. While receiving the two doses, "she could be heard crying, whimpering, and breathing loudly throughout the procedure", her lawyers said.

As of Thursday night, she was unconscious, intubated and on a ventilator.

The state's Department of Correction has defended the method it used, saying "the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out".

Authorities have not yet said whether they will try again to execute Pike. They have also not offered an explanation for what went wrong. Her lawyers filed an emergency motion on Friday to preserve "any and all evidence" related to her failed execution.

Pike's attorneys previously warned that her medical history and anatomy - including thrombocytosis (a blood-clotting condition) and small veins - meant there was a risk she would experience "unnecessary" pain and suffering during a lethal injection.

The attempted execution went ahead after multiple failed, last-minute legal challenges by Pike's lawyers.

The US Supreme Court rejected two separate efforts to stop the lethal injection.

Tennessee's governor also denied a clemency request from Pike, the only woman on the state's death row.

Pike was 18 when she and her then-boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, beat, tortured and killed 19-year-old Slemmer in 1995.

She was sentenced to death the following year after a media frenzy around the killing in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Why pastors may not be seen - or heard - preaching on Ghana's buses for much longer

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwnvln99v2ygo, yesterday

Before the morning rush begins, the sound of praise and worship fills the Neoplan bus station in Ghana's capital, Accra, as a group of Christians gather to prepare to evangelise on vehicles taking travellers across the country.

Amid drumming and dancing, Boateng Bismark James leads 13 worshippers, nine men and four women, in prayer for drivers and passengers travelling to destinations across Ghana.

Ghana is a predominantly Christian country where preaching on public transport is widespread.

On long-distance buses, pastors can often be seen - and heard - preaching the gospel.

Sometimes they stand in the stairwell next to the driver, at others they walk up and down the aisle reading from the Bible and calling on sinners to repent at the tops of their voices. They do not stop even if the trip lasts for several hours.

The faithful sometimes offer money to the preachers to support their endeavours.

But a new law means this familiar practice could be coming to an end.

Anyone found preaching in public service vehicles faces up to eight months in prison, a fine of up to $52 (£39) or both.

The new regulation, passed by parliament in May, and which has started to be enforced in recent weeks, targets preaching and hawking on vehicles while they are in motion, classifying both as a nuisance and citing the safety and comfort of passengers.

Boateng, a 61-year-old pastor at Gospel Light church, has been preaching on commercial vehicles leaving Neoplan station since 2023.

"I preach on commercial vehicles because not everyone is able to go to church on Sunday. There are a lot of passengers who need our message of salvation to repent from their sins. We even heal the sick on some buses," he told the BBC in Twi, a local language.

Wearing a clerical collared shirt, Boateng moves through rows of buses loading passengers before boarding one bound for Kumasi, Ghana's second-largest city.

We speak to him before the bus departs to avoid breaking the law.

Some travellers listen closely as he delivers his message. Others try to ignore him, browsing their phones, making calls or chatting among themselves.

"Some passengers are very happy with my message. Some even say they have never heard the message in church, but through my preaching they now know it is in the Bible," he says.

The new rules have divided opinion.

Critics say preaching on moving vehicles is a nuisance and a safety risk, as it could distract the driver, while supporters argue that evangelism is a Christian duty and should be protected under the freedom of religious worship.

One woman in her early 30s, who wishes to be identified as Chery Lokko, says she prefers to travel in peace.

''I don't like it because they are a nuisance. Some of them spit saliva on you unconsciously, especially if you are seated not far from them, and they are a nuisance in terms of noise and saliva. I like my peace whenever I'm on public transport.''

In one video widely shared on social media recently, a passenger on a minibus is seen angrily confronting a pastor attempting to board.

"Get down, I say get down," he shouts.

But in this devout country, ranked among the most religious in the world, others say evangelism on public transport is an important way of reaching people who may not attend church.

Bernice Nartey, a passenger travelling to Kumasi, says pastors should be allowed to preach, but only with passengers' consent.

"The preaching sometimes helps people to repent. For instance, if someone is going through a stressful situation, the message of the pastor can give the person renewed hope," she says.

Boateng says he was shaken by the regulation and wants religious preachers to be given an exemption.

"We are very worried, because most pastors here depend on preaching to take care of their families through the monetary gifts offered by passengers," he says.

"The government should allow us to preach on the buses and alight when it is exiting Accra," he adds.

For Boateng, preaching is not only a religious calling but also an important source of income.

"I have been able to take care of my children's education. My last-born just completed university, and half of the financial support came from money I got from preaching."

Ghana's constitution guarantees freedom of religion, although those rights are subject to considerations including public safety.

Preaching on commercial buses was first prohibited in Ghana in 2012, with offenders facing up to 30 days in prison.

But enforcement was weak and so the practice remained common, particularly on buses. The new law beefs up the penalties for those that flout the ban.

Preachers using megaphones can also often be seen and heard at Ghana's lorry parks and markets but they are not affected by the ban.

The Christian Council of Ghana did not respond to the BBC's request for a comment but Rev Enoch Paul Hayes, a senior pastor at one of the biggest churches in Ghana, the International Central Gospel Church, tells the BBC he does not think the new rules infringe on religious freedom.

He urges his fellow pastors not to break the law, saying they should find other ways of spreading their message.

"There is social media as an alternative outlet, where the same message can reach thousands of people," he says.

For Boateng and other bus preachers, the new rules create a difficult choice between adapting their ministry, giving up an important source of income, or risking falling foul of the law.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

Zimbabwe tycoon Wicknell Chivayo and wife killed in helicopter crash

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr4gvg0yenl4o, 4 days ago

Prominent Zimbabwean businessman Wicknell Chivayo and his wife have been killed in a helicopter crash that left six people dead, his family have confirmed.

The helicopter came down in the Marondera rural area, about 70km (43 miles) east of the capital, Harare, on Wednesday evening. Police said all six people on board died.

Family spokesperson Herbert Chivayo confirmed the deaths of the 43-year-old businessman and his wife Lucy Muteke to state broadcaster ZBC, saying the family was devastated by the tragedy.

Chivayo was known for his lavish lifestyle, close ties to some African presidents and lucrative government contracts that had repeatedly attracted scrutiny.

He had denied allegations of wrongdoing linked to his business dealings.

Police spokesperson Commissioner Paul Nyathi said the aircraft crashed at about 17:00 local time (15:00 GMT) and had six occupants, but authorities did not immediately identify all those on board. Two of the six were pilots, according to government officials.

ZBC reported that the group was travelling from Gandami in Chikomba, where Chivayo and his wife were building a rural home, when the helicopter crashed at Kudenga Farm about 40 minutes after take-off.

"We are at a loss for words after the tragic news," the family spokesperson, told the ZBC.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known, and police said investigations were under way. Emergency services were sent to the scene on Wednesday evening.

Earlier, government spokesman Nick Mangwana confirmed the crash, saying the helicopter was carrying "a prominent businessman, three other passengers and two pilots".

"Current information indicates that there were no survivors in this crash," Mangwana posted on X.

On Thursday, aviation officials led by Transport Minister Felix Mhona arrived at the crash site, where investigators recovered the aircraft's intact black box as they began investigating.

"Preliminary findings show that fuel spilled on impact, followed by a fire that burnt the grass at the crash site," said George Mashababe, director general of the Civil Aviation Authority of Zimbabwe.

"The cause of the crash is yet to be ascertained."

Despite serving several years in prison after being convicted of fraud in 2004, Chivayo went on to build a successful business career, mostly through government contracts.

He was the managing director of Intratrek Zimbabwe and had built a high public profile through his philanthropy and displays of wealth on social media.

Among his best-known business ventures was a $172m (£128m) solar power project in Gwanda awarded to Intratrek by the state-owned Zimbabwe Power Company. The project became the subject of years of legal disputes.

He also came under scrutiny over the procurement of materials for Zimbabwe's disputed 2023 elections. Zimbabwe's anti-corruption commission investigated allegations surrounding contracts awarded to South African company Ren-Form but closed the inquiry in 2025, saying it had found no evidence linking Chivayo or the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to wrongdoing.

Widely known as "Sir Wicknell", Chivayo frequently used the title publicly and on social media, although he was never given a British knighthood.

He was also known for giving away luxury cars and large sums of money to musicians, religious leaders and other public figures, often publicising the gifts on social media.

In a statement, President Emmerson Mnangagwa said he had met Chivayo after a cabinet meeting just a day before his death, when the businessman shared some of his plans for Zimbabwe.

"We are all shattered by this unexpected, sudden demise of so young a family," Mnangagwa said, describing Chivayo as "consummately philanthropic", saying his family had "touched so many lives" through their acts of charity and generosity.

Mnangagwa said Chivayo's death had left him "personally numbed" and in "great shock".

His connections extended beyond Zimbabwe.

Kenya's President William Ruto, who had previously appeared in public with Chivayo, paid tribute to him as a "dear friend" and sent condolences to the families of those killed.

"I will remember him for his friendship, his energy and his deep conviction in the possibilities of our continent," Ruto added.

Kenyan opposition figures had questioned Chivayo's repeated access to Ruto and State House.

He frequently publicised his access to African leaders, posting photographs of meetings with presidents including Zambia's Hakainde Hichilema, South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa and Tanzania's Samia Suluhu Hassan, as well as Eswatini's King Mswati III.

More about Zimbabwe from the BBC:

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

Making politics 'fun, trendy, sexy': How Gen Z could shape Kenya's next election

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwly7v7kk17mo, 4 days ago

Ademba Allans is making it "cool" to vote in Kenya.

The student journalist turned civic mobiliser launched a voter registration drive on social media earlier this year, using snappy selfies infused with music and humour to target young people.

The result astonished him and many observers of Kenyan politics – by the time the registration period ended, 2.6 million new voters across the country had signed up. He is aiming to get another 2.3 million on board in the next round.

"It was the Gen Z way of doing politics," he tells me. "Fun, trendy, sexy, fashionable. Because of how we created the hype around it, people had the fear of missing out. Everybody wanted to be involved."

Gen Z, the term used to describe people born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, burst onto the scene two years ago with mass protests that forced the government to retreat on a widely unpopular tax bill. But their victory was followed by a police crackdown that killed and injured dozens of demonstrators.

Now many young Kenyans are planning to move from the street to the ballot box, angry with a political establishment they accuse of corruption and police brutality.

And they have the numbers to make a difference - more than 30% of voting-age Kenyans are younger than 35.

Polls suggest President William Ruto is looking vulnerable.

But can Gen Z convert a decentralized digital-led rebellion into organised political power?

"These youth-led movements are a wild card, in that they are unpredictable," says political analyst Tom Mboya.

"They don't require much in the way of resources and can pop up at any time. The finance bill protests were political in nature, but the movement has not been tested at an overtly political level. So if they decide to support a candidate, then he's likely to do fairly well."

One of the strengths of the digitally savvy Gen Z activists is that they have been able to mobilise outside the party structures and ethnic allegiances that anchor Kenyan politics.

Allans has been careful not to advocate a particular candidate or party – emphasising leadership rather than politicians, marshalling a new force, he says, outside traditional tribal voting blocs.

"There has never been a case where there is a bloc that is not affiliated to any person or any party. They just want to vote in the right leaders, and this is what we created," he says.

"It's more of a swing vote because you cannot tell who we are going to vote for."

Ruto and his United Democratic Alliance (UDA) are facing strong head winds with less than a year to go before the August 2027 vote.

More than three-quarters of respondents to a survey conducted in June felt the country was moving in the wrong direction, with two-thirds saying their personal economic situation had worsened since Ruto was elected in 2022.

But analysts argue that the president does not necessarily have to be popular to win. He is a master political organiser with the resources of the state, they say.

Ruto's political rivals are also fragmented, and it is not yet clear whether they can form a united opposition to take him on.

One man who has captured the attention of many Gen Zs is Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna. He has emerged as the leader of a movement called Linda Mwananchi (Protect the Citizen), which is getting strong support from disaffected young people.

Sifuna first caught their attention when he tried to stop police from shooting at protesters who were storming parliament during the 2024 demonstrations.

Now he is championing a "people-led" movement that promotes the protection of human rights and rule of law as enshrined in the constitution.

He has yet to officially declare a run for the presidency, but is already on the road rallying support. The BBC caught up with him on a recent trip to Meru county in central Kenya, a region that voted strongly for Ruto in the last election.

"Young people want us to create an environment where everybody feels that they can compete fairly," he told me before starting out on his raucous road show.

"We need to absolutely dismantle the system so that everybody has a fair chance at life, a fair chance at education, a fair chance at employment, and the opportunities to grow themselves.

"This election in 2027 is when this theory that the young people are advancing will be put to the test," he said. "Our challenge as a leadership is to ensure you have a compelling message that then encourages people to come out, let them see the vision for the new country."

Ruto also had a compelling vision for the country when he came to power in 2022.

He promised to transform the economy from the bottom up, with a focus on lifting the marginalised. His government has since introduced changes including landmark reforms that widen access to public healthcare, but many young people felt betrayed by his austerity measures and tax hikes.

"I'm here to participate in a revolution change that we want a new Kenyan youth leader who knows the common problems that are facing the young people," 23-year-old Brandon Muremi told the BBC.

I found him in a relatively quiet corner of the final stop in a hectic day of a "rolling rally" – Sifuna's convoy visited four locations, sometimes blocking traffic as he and local politicians climbed on top of their vehicles and delivered rousing speeches at ear-splitting volumes.

"We are looking for a leader who sticks to his plans, not just talking the promises that he makes," agreed Conrad Mutangili, a 19-year-old mechanical engineering student who had come out of curiosity.

"We are looking for somebody who can actually accomplish and actually bring to the people what they are talking about," he said. "Because they promise sweets, but we don't feel any sugar in our mouths."

"We want immediate results," said a 22-year-old computer science student, Yvonne Kileme, acknowledging that the results of government projects may be more long-term. "And one thing that we want as youths is employment, employment, employment, employment."

Ruto argues strongly that his government is delivering jobs, and says the high rate of youth unemployment is a problem that predates his presidency.

He has reached out to Gen Z with various programmes that offer grants and loans to small business and youth-led enterprises, technology hubs and digital work opportunities.

The national youth leader of Ruto's UDA, Kariuki Ngunjiri, told the BBC he was confident of winning the election with an overwhelming majority.

"The president is a listening president and he's been able to now come down to the youth, get what their concerns are, give them jobs, and that has absolutely, even for the party, given us a head start," he said.

"We are not worried about the social media buzz because we are people who actually engage the young people on real, actual, tangible development. What you see mostly on sponsored hashtags and sponsored headlines does not really concern us."

He was speaking as a senior sports official promised to expand the stadium-building programme with another venue, at a packed UDA town hall meeting in Kangema, about 100km (60 miles) north of the capital, Nairobi.

Like so many others, 23-year-old Shintah Mutahi was job hunting.

"I came to listen to what they were saying," she said, "maybe find an opportunity for a job. I think they can give me a chance, they should just be given some time to do that."

John Kiragu, a local UDA youth leader, said he understood the grievances that had driven young people to protest.

"There have been challenges," he said, "but now the government is really trying hard to consolidate the youth. The government is implementing programmes that will really uplift their lives."

Kiragu told me he was involved in a programme to deal with youth alcoholism – a real problem in this region. Many of the young men who attended the morning town hall meeting were already drunk on a cheap local liquor.

The captain of the local football team, Calvin Ware, also turned up to hear the stadium announcement. He said he had heard similar promises many times before, especially before elections, and this one was not going to influence his vote.

"We have already made our mind," he said. "The whole government should go home. We want to build a new Kenya, new youth, new people, fresh people from all over the country, and we are not basing on tribal [allegiances] or anything else. We just want a change, a change, and a change. Nothing else."

As we were speaking, we heard a loud cheer – the event had ended and people were lining up to receive cash handouts – 350 Kenyan shillings, about $3 (£2.20).

It is common practice to pay people to attend political meetings in Kenya, and politicians can use much larger sums to try and influence votes.

"More so than many other parts of the world, money talks in an election here," says political analyst Mboya. "The cost of politics is significantly higher than in other parts of the world."

Less than a year to Kenya's election, it does feel like politics might be changing, that the race could be shaped by youth disillusionment with the political establishment. But while the Gen Z movement has rejected the "old politics" based on ethnic group and money, those have been the building blocks that win elections in Kenya.

Nobody yet knows what the energy of Gen Z voters will mean at the ballot box.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

Journalist crowned king in Uganda after bitter succession dispute

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx7v4glz50elo, 6 days ago

Edward Rukidi Kijanangoma has been crowned king of Uganda's Tooro kingdom.

The new monarch has long been a familiar face in the East African nation, where for many he was known not as the heir to the throne, but as a storyteller: a long-serving anchor and editor at the state broadcaster.

But the 56-year-old - now King Edward Rukidi Kijanangoma Nyabongo I - has become the subject of media attention himself as his rise to the Tooro throne sparked controversy and widespread reactions beyond the country.

Tooro is one of Uganda's four main officially recognised historical kingdoms. For the last 31 years, it had been headed by King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV, who was once known as a "boy king", after ascending to the throne as an infant.

Oyo became king in 1995 at the age of just three, following the death of his father. Then the world's youngest monarch, he ruled until he died last month from cancer, aged just 34.

The coronation is a day for celebration, involving traditional practices that started at midnight.

Kijanangoma has had to perform various ceremonies and walk about 4km (2.5 miles) to the official Karuziika royal palace where he has now been crowned.

The Tooro kingdom's Information Minister Charles Mwanguhya told the BBC Focus on Africa podcast that a mock fight would follow his crowning, to signify that kingship does not come easy.

Kijanangoma would then be blessed by members of the royal Babiito clan, he said.

But his selection was far from straightforward.

According to tradition, a recognised son of the late king should have succeeded him. Close members of the royal family said Oyo had left a young son and a will with instructions that the child should be next on the throne.

But the son has never been revealed to the public and nor was he recognised by the committee of 21 Babiito clan members who choose the king and eventually selected Kijanangoma.

The late King Oyo was never publicly married, and little is known about his wife or their son.

Nonetheless his mother, Queen Best Kemigisa, argued that the late king's will ought to have been respected.

However, the royal succession committee ignored her wishes, insisting their selection process was conducted in accordance with Tooro customs and traditions.

The new king has thus found himself at the centre of a succession dispute, with Kemigisa and her close relatives unhappy with the outcome.

Kemigisa referred to Kijanangoma's selection as the "announcement of a second king" being "made after the will of King Oyo was read to members of the royal family".

"As a mother, that was extraordinarily painful," she said, describing celebrations for the next king taking place "only metres from where my son's body lay".

The queen later said Oyo's son, who was in the US state of Texas, had been due to return home but that could not happen amid a "tense and polarised succession dispute".

"No child should be placed in circumstances where returning to his father's homeland could mean being drawn into hostility and conflict," Kemigisa asserted in a post on X.

But according to the Tooro kingdom's information minister, the son being talked about "hasn't been presented anywhere, which means there is a growing acceptance that sad as it may be, King Oyo didn't leave a son behind".

While King Oyo inherited the crown from his father, Mwanguhya told the BBC "the crown has moved to a different line within the ruling clan".

A king must come from the Babiito clan, specifically the lineage of King George David Matthew Kamurasi Rukidi III, according to royal palace sources.

Kijanangoma and the late King Oyo are cousins. Both are grandsons of Rukidi III, the 11th king, or Omukama, who ruled the Tooro kingdom from 1928 to 1965.

Kijanangoma was among several people who were considered for the role, including Prince George Desmond Kamurasi, who plays football for one of the UK's best-known amateur clubs.

According to the succession committee, the South East Dons captain and goalkeeper declined the offer of the throne, citing other responsibilities.

After he was formally announced, Kijanangoma promised that the palace would be open to the people, while vowing to focus on unity and development.

"I ask you for one thing - they have given me this title as king but I cannot work alone, I have to work with you," he said.

Uganda's traditional kings have no formal political authority, but they retain cultural influence and command significant loyalty in the communities they lead.

The country is home to four main kingdoms, the largest and most prominent being Buganda in the central region, which encompasses the capital Kampala.

The kingdoms were abolished in 1967, but the government under President Yoweri Museveni restored them in the early 1990s.

The government said this was to promote cultural pride and national unity, but the move has also been interpreted as a way of appeasing communities and fostering political loyalty.

Amid the succession dispute, the government backed the Babiito clan's choice of Kijanangoma. Attorney General Sam Mayanja said the Tooro kingdom was cleared to go ahead with the coronation, as there had not been a formal complaint against him.

The date of the coronation was announced by the government with President Museveni attending the ceremony.

The president's son and the head of the military, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has also publicly supported Kijanangoma. "Long may he reign," he posted on X.

Kijanangoma's very name points to his royal heritage.

His father, the first Kijanangoma, was born in the year King Rukidi III became king. The king gave him the name, which means the "one who comes with the royal drum".

The drum of royalty, foretold two generations earlier, is now returning to its bearer.

Kijanangoma was born in 1970 and raised at their family home at Kidukuru village in Fort Portal, about 300km (186 miles) from Kampala.

He left the village to pursue further studies and graduated with a mass communication degree from Uganda's prestigious Makerere University in 1999.

He worked as a broadcaster in a career spanning more than two decades, including in neighbouring Rwanda and at home, with the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC).

The years spent engaging with the public, the interactions with leaders and the exposure to national affairs in his work as a journalist may yet serve him well as he returns to the community he came from, this time as their leader.

After he was named king, Kijanangoma said he would use the connections he had built up over 21 years working as a journalist "to get good things for our people".

His mother, Assimwe Yusta Kijanangoma, is confident that he is well prepared for his new role. She says his upbringing was deeply rooted in tradition.

"I really raised him with the teachings of the old kingdom of a cane and instructions and scolding. I laugh with him, and other times I scold him," she told the BBC.

She added: "Eddy is well-mannered, he does not fight, or shout, even when wronged, he says a few words and does not go so much into it."

She feels good for her son, although she admits to having mixed emotions, especially as her son is taking over after the death of a "great man".

More about Uganda from the BBC:

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Twelve women have been killed in one part of South Africa since July. Here's what we know so far

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6m27dprvzv7o, 7 days ago

Police in South Africa have confirmed the discovery of the bodies of three more women in an area east of Johannesburg, bringing the total number of bodies found there to 12 in just two months.

The latest bodies were found in Ekurhuleni between Saturday and Monday morning, according to local police.

Police have made arrests in three of the cases, which do not appear to be related to the others. Nevertheless, police have said they cannot rule out the possibility of a serial killer.

The discoveries have caused widespread alarm in Ekurhuleni, particularly around Kempton Park, and come against the backdrop of longstanding concerns about high levels of violence against women in South Africa.

Here's what we know.

Busisiwe Mahlangu

Case 1

Busisiwe Mahlangu's body was found in Kempton Park on 15 July 2026, the first of a string of bodies found in Ekurhuleni within a two-month period. The 37-year-old was found naked with her hands bound with cable ties.

Police arrested a suspect, believed to be her partner, two days after her murder. He has been in police custody since then and has not been linked to the other deaths that followed.

Itumeleng Kekana

Case 2

Itumeleng Kekana, 32, was the second woman whose body was found in the same area on 3 August 2026.

The young mother disappeared in July and her body was found badly bruised, partially clothed and dumped on a bridge in Kempton Park.

No arrests have been made so far.

Nomfesane Mjobo

Case 3

Nomfesane Mjobo's body was found on 26 August, also in Kempton Park.

Few details around her death have been released but like most of the victims, she was found partially or fully naked with bruises.

No arrests have been made.

Unknown woman

Case 4

Police confirmed the discovery of an unknown woman, in her 20s, on 7 September. The woman's body was found floating in a river in Olifantsfontain wearing only her underwear.

No further details have been shared about her death and no arrests have been made.

Gracious Nkomo

Case 5

Gracious Nkomo was the fifth woman whose body was discovered, again in the Kempton Park area.

Her partially clothed body was found on 10 September along a road close to South Africa's busiest airport. No arrests have been made in the 28-year-old's death.

Elizabeth "Tsontso" Moselakgomo

Case 6

Elizabeth Moselakgomo was the sixth woman to be found, after a highly publicised nationwide search for her. The 38-year-old went missing while out for a daily run near her home in Kempton Park.

Her body was found badly bruised and partially clothed on 12 September. It was the discovery of her body that really raised the alarm about the spate of killings. No arrests have been made in her case.

Unidentified woman

Case 7

Police confirmed the discovery of another body just two days after Moselakgomo was found. The body was found in Olifantsfontein on 14 September, but police have withheld her name as her family has not yet been informed.

No arrests have been made.

Dineo Motapane

Case 8

The body of Dineo Motapane, 38, was discovered on 15 September just two days after she was last seen alive.

Motapane's battered and partly burned body was found on the side of the road in Springs, another part of Ekurhuleni.

She leaves behind a young child. No arrests have been made in her case.

Jabulile Ntimba

Case 9

The body of Jabulile Ntimba, in her 30s, was discovered half-naked and wrapped in a sheet on the side of a road in Boksburg on 17 September. This was the ninth body found in Ekurhuleni.

According to police, it appears Ntimba was killed because of a possible love triangle. Three people, two women and a man, were initially arrested for her grisly murder but the man was released due to insufficient evidence.

The two women have been charged with premeditated murder and defeating the ends of justice.

Ntombifuthi Nxumalo

Case 10

The body of Ntombifuthi Nxumalo, the 10th body found in Ekurhuleni, was discovered at a cemetery in the Tembisa neighbourhood north-east of central Johannesburg on 26 September. She was found naked with serious head injuries as well as stones near her body.

This has led to police believing she may have been stoned to death.

A 36-year-old man was arrested a day after Nxumalo's death after he had travelled to another province. He faces a murder charge.

Unidentified woman

Case 11

The body of a yet-to-be identified woman was found in Springs on Sunday - the 11th body found in Ekurhuleni.

The grim discovery was made by a security company patrolling the area.

The woman was found in an open field, but no further details have been shared.

No arrests have been made.

Boitumelo Gift Mashita

Case 12

Boitumelo Gift Mashita was shot and killed on Monday in Tembisa Ekurhuleni. The 23-year-old woman was on her way to work when she was gunned down and her belongings were taken.

Police say her estranged husband, who they suspected of being responsible for her murder, was later found dead inside his vehicle in Midrand.

Police have not found any link between this case and the discovery of the other bodies.

While most of the bodies were found in the same area, police confirmed the discovery of another body about 39 miles (63 km) away from Ekurhuleni on 20 September.

The body of a young woman, believed to be in her 20s, was found wrapped in a duvet in a dam in Soweto, south-west of Johannesburg.

It's unclear if her murder is linked to those in Ekurhuleni.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said the killing of these women and others was a "stain on our national conscience".

South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates, with 5,427 people murdered between April and June this year alone.

South African police statistics do not differentiate victims by gender but the South African Human Rights Commission said last week that 569 women were killed between April and June this year. This works out as an average of six women killed each day.

Police have set up a task team to investigate these murders and have offered a reward of 400,000 rand ($24,000; £18,000) for information that could lead to arrests.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

How fresh fighting in Tigray could spark wider conflict in Ethiopia

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6d94wywx0ypo, 3 days ago

Fighting has erupted in Ethiopia's northern region of Tigray between regional forces and the national army.

Tigray residents, who have been trying to recover from a brutal two-year war that ended in 2022, fear a return to full-scale conflict.

There are reports of panic buying - and now internet and call services have been disrupted.

This means people cannot get access to their money via digital apps in what has become a largely cashless society after ATMs stopped working several months ago.

Why has fighting broken out now?

It follows more than six months of worsening relations between the government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the party that runs Tigray.

The African Union (AU) brokered a peace deal, known as the Pretoria Agreement, between the two sides, ending the war nearly four years ago - but several issues have remained unresolved that have inflamed tensions.

This year, both sides have been trading blame while troops have mobilised amid pockets of fighting.

This week, major clashes erupted in Tigray and quickly spread into the neighbouring Afar and Amhara regions. The two sides disagree over who started the latest escalation.

The TPLF says it was responding to a federal offensive, including drone strikes, while the government says Tigrayan forces attacked first after seizing control of airports in Tigray.

Who are the TPLF?

For much of Tigray's modern political history, it has been governed by the TPLF, which first emerged as an armed movement in the 1970s fighting Ethiopia's military government.

It became a major force in the overthrow of the Marxist regime in 1991 and went on to become the most powerful component of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the coalition that governed the ethnically diverse country for nearly three decades.

At times this proved contentious as some felt the TPLF held too much sway as Tigrayans only make up around 6% of Ethiopia's population.

When Abiy Ahmed became prime minister in 2018, he replaced the EPRDF with the Prosperity Party, significantly watering down the TPLF's influence.

Relations between Addis Ababa and the TPLF rapidly deteriorated until war erupted in 2020 in what was one of the most deadly conflicts this century.

The AU mediator estimated some 600,000 people died during the war, which totally cut off Tigray from the outside world and drove the region to the precipice of famine.

An uneasy truce was agreed in November 2022.

Why has the peace deal faltered?

There are four key issues - and two concern the fertile area of western Tigray.

The TPLF lost control of this territory in the early days of the war to Amhara, a region which neighbours Tigray to the west and whose fighters had fought on the side of the Ethiopian army.

Many people in Amhara believe the territory of western Tigray should never have been incorporated into Tigray when regional boundaries were redrawn after the military regime was ousted in 1991.

When its fighters seized control during the recent civil war, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tigrayan people fled and are now living in homeless camps in Tigray and in the capital, Addis Ababa.

The TPLF wants western Tigray back and for those displaced from the territory to return. The government says the future of the territory needs to be decided by a referendum.

For the government, a major matter of contention has been disarmament. It says the TPLF has only handed over old weaponry to the AU and has been hiding its arms.

The two sides have also been at loggerheads over how Tigray should be governed. Under the terms of the deal, an interim administration was appointed by Abiy.

But attempts by the prime minister to influence affairs caused disputes within the TPLF itself and just before the general election in May, which was not held in Tigray because of the security situation, it restored its pre-war administration, disbanding the one set up by Abiy.

This has meant that civil servants are longer being paid and other services have been seizing up, worsening economic conditions.

Who is backing the TPLF?

A major development has seen the TPLF, once politically isolated inside Ethiopia, gain several key allies.

Earlier in September, it joined six other armed movements in forming what is called the Alliance for Survival, which includes those actively fighting the government like Amhara's Fano militia and the Oromo Liberation Army.

Members of the new alliance have different grievances, but they do share one objective: they want to remove Abiy's government from power.

So while the TPLF and Fano forces were on opposite sides during the civil war - and still disagree over the fate of western Tigray - they have temporarily put some of their differences aside.

TPLF officials say they do not want to repeat the situation of 2020, when they felt surrounded and isolated.

Yet analysts caution the alliance may become difficult to maintain because its members ultimately have very different interests.

What is the government's position?

As well as blaming the TPLF for starting the recent fighting, it has criticised the new alliance, portraying it as an attempt to destabilise the country.

It has also accused neighbouring Eritrea of supporting the rebel alliance, something Asmara denies. The row has led the two countries to cut diplomatic ties with each other.

During the recent civil war, Eritrea fought alongside Ethiopian troops but the two neighbours, which have long had a volatile relationship, have again fallen out.

Their disagreement centres on the Red Sea and its ports.

Ethiopia, the world's most populous landlocked nation, lost access to them when Eritrea seceded in 1993. Recently Prime Minister Abiy has been pushing for ownership of Eritrea's southern port of Assab - about 60km (37 miles) from the border - and hinted at taking it by force.

What do we know about the bombing in Tigray?

Reports indicate that federal forces have been using drones and other military operations against Tigrayan forces.

The government's stated justification is that it is responding to attacks and trying to defend federal positions and territory. However, the circumstances surrounding individual strikes are difficult to independently verify.

Residents in one recently targeted town told the BBC the drones had hit two schools, which local officials said had been used by Ethiopian troops as military bases during the war.

This suggests Addis Ababa may believe they are again being used for a military purpose - by Tigrayan forces.

The attacks have come amid reports that the TPLF has been forcibly recruiting young men to join its ranks.

What is being done to stop the fighting?

The main diplomatic effort is being led by the AU, which has called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and a return to direct talks.

It has asked former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, the AU's special Horn of Africa envoy, to engage the parties urgently.

The UN has made a similar appeal, warning against a wider and more devastating conflict.

The regional organisation Igad has also called for fighting to stop and dialogue to resume.

The difficulty is that trust between Addis Ababa and Tigray is extremely low, while the formation of the new armed alliance has made the situation more complicated.

Could the fighting spread?

Yes, there is a significant risk of wider conflict inside Ethiopia.

The fighting has already moved to areas over and along Tigray's borders, while the government is simultaneously dealing with armed conflicts in other regions, particularly Amhara and Oromia.

The new alliance potentially connects several of these conflicts politically and militarily.

There is also a fear that Eritrea could be drawn in again - this time against the government.

The two aggressors in Sudan's civil war are also on opposite sides when it comes to allegiances in Tigray, potentially complicating matters.

The AU has specifically urged all neighbouring countries not to take actions that could further escalate the crisis.

More about Ethiopia and Tigray from the BBC:

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South African white genocide does not exist, new ambassador to US tells BBC

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2l8qv7zppko, 10 days ago

South Africa's new ambassador to Washington has a personal reason to challenge Donald Trump's assertion that there is a genocide against white Afrikaners - he is "a born Afrikaner" himself.

"Is he talking about us?" Roelf Meyer remembers thinking when he first heard the US president say it.

His response to Trump's claim is blunt.

The notion of a mass attack on the white Afrikaner minority in South Africa does not exist, he told the BBC, adding that his identity gave him the legitimacy to say so.

Meyer was one of the chief mediators to end white-minority rule, known as apartheid, in South Africa in the 1990s. He was appointed ambassador to the US in April after diplomatic relations between the US and South Africa soured.

Meyer said in an interview with the BBC that the facts about violence in South Africa had been misrepresented and that he had never received a clear answer about where this "misdirection of information" was coming from.

Last year, Trump accused South Africa of white genocide in a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House and launched a US refugee pathway for Afrikaners.

Since last year, nearly 13,000 refugees have been admitted to the US and all but three were South African.

Among them was Lielie, the name she uses publicly, who moved with her family to Texas from South Africa, where they had lived on her stepfather's farm, growing macadamia nuts and bananas.

Despite walls around the house, an electric fence and eight bull terriers, she said she felt "fear the whole time" and that on three occasions she saw people entering her property.

"Nothing was stolen, we weren't harmed, but there are friends of my husband, people that lived around us - they were brutally attacked," she said.

She said since moving to the US under the Trump administration's refugee pathway her life had changed, she felt safer walking around and "my kids can actually play outside".

The Trump administration is planning to admit up to 17,500 additional white Afrikaners as refugees over the next 12 months, according to a notice sent to Congress on Tuesday.

A White House spokeswoman said in a statement to the BBC: "President Trump has provided a lifeline for Afrikaners, who are being raped, maimed, killed and driven off their property across South Africa.

"While the South African government and many in the media have brushed off the horrific lived experiences of this community, the Trump administration continues to process applications for refugee status because the president has a humanitarian heart."

SJ Du Venage, who lives on South Africa's west coast, has been trying to move to the US under the new scheme.

Du Venage is a council member of the Freedom Front Plus, a right-wing Afrikaner party, and argues that there is a "political drive towards killing white people, and killing the farmers on the farms".

"There's absolutely an agenda to wipe us out here," he said.

An Afrikaner lobby group is holding a vigil on Saturday with thousands of white crosses on Washington's National Mall to commemorate what it says are victims of "farm attacks".

Claims of genocide against white South Africans have been discredited by every political party in the country, including by those representing Afrikaners.

"I'm an Afrikaner from South Africa myself," Meyer said, "and I can say that I've never experienced something of that kind."

Meyer said he would like to have a conversation with Trump about the reality of the situation, saying that as a "born Afrikaner" he had the "legitimacy" to speak about the subject.

The ambassador helped negotiate an end to apartheid on behalf of the National Party, which was responsible for it, with now-President Cyril Ramaphosa also a key negotiator for the African National Congress party.

He said the "trust" between the two men was one reason Ramaphosa appointed him to help mend US-South Africa relations, as well as "the fact he also saw the value of me being an Afrikaner".

"But I'm not here to represent the Afrikaner only," Meyer said.

Last week, the Trump administration announced visa restrictions for those South Africans who it said were responsible for "race-based discrimination" against white people. It also warned of further punitive actions if South African leaders did not address the issue.

Police data shows the majority of victims of crime in South Africa, including on farms, are black. Farm violence, often motivated by robberies, is an issue but represents a smaller number of homicides in the country.

While no politician disputes that crime is a problem in South Africa, many experts say this does not qualify as "persecution".

Larry Bartlett, the former director of the US Refugee Assistance Programme, said it could even be "unlawful" to appropriate a programme defined in law for people who "really have no chance to go home".

He said white people who were unlikely to qualify as refugee in law were taking scarce opportunities meant for those fleeing war or ethnic cleansing.

The programme has its critics among Afrikaners in South Africa too.

"Why single out the white Afrikaner to say this group qualifies to flee to the US? This country suffers gender-based violence. Why not single out women?" Rudi Swanepoel, a pastor from Johannesburg, told the BBC.

Swanepoel thinks it is not persecution but a "loss of privilege" that is causing some Afrikaners to feel aggrieved.

"To use the metaphor of a cake, 30, 40 years ago the white people of South Africa controlled the cake," he says. "Since democracy came, the obvious reality was we had to now start sharing that cake and those privileges."

Alongside "rural safety", the Trump administration has raised other concerns about South Africa, including targets for companies to increase non-white employment and a law allowing the state, in exceptional circumstances, to expropriate land without compensation. These are aimed at redressing historic racial inequality.

Meyer wants Trump's executive order against South Africa, which underpins the refugee pathway, revoked.

He said South Africa had never prevented people from leaving and had addressed all the US concerns, stressing that the land expropriation law was awaiting a court judgment.

"South Africa has challenges with the prevention of crime and with the combatting of crime," he said.

But he added: "It's a problem all around. It's not rural. It's not farm attacks only. If you look at the total picture, the huge levels of crime in the black townships of South Africa are the biggest concern, proportionally, far more than anything else."

He said he would encourage the US to help South Africa with resources on combatting crime, including by providing equipment to speed up reaction times.

Meyer also has a message for Afrikaners protesting against "farm attacks" by laying white crosses in Washington.

"It doesn't help us to raise a voice outside if we are not committed to doing something inside the country," he said.

Ethiopia and Eritrea cut diplomatic ties as northern conflict escalates

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crpd0d0jl0y0o, 3 days ago

Ethiopia and Eritrea have severed diplomatic relations as renewed fighting in northern Ethiopia raises fears of a wider regional conflict.

On Thursday, Ethiopia announced it was closing its embassy in the Eritrean capital, Asmara, and ordered 10 Eritrean diplomats to leave the country within 48 hours, accusing them of activities that threatened national security.

Eritrea responded by cutting diplomatic relations, saying Ethiopia's decision had left it with no choice but to take reciprocal action.

Meanwhile, a pro-government militia says it has seized the town of Milazat, which is just 20km (12 miles) south-east of Mekelle, the capital of Tigray, where the main anti-government group is based.

The BBC has not been able to verify this claim.

The diplomatic confrontation came hours after powerful explosions were heard overnight in Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, including near Ethiopia's military headquarters.

It follows a sharp deterioration in relations between the neighbours, with Ethiopia accusing Eritrea of supporting a new rebel alliance – an allegation Asmara has repeatedly denied.

Eritrea described the decision to expel its ambassador as "astounding".

"Eritrea has no option but to reciprocate in kind and sever all diplomatic ties with Ethiopia," its foreign ministry said, warning of "negative corollaries" from the decision.

The diplomatic fallout comes as Ethiopian federal forces battle fighters from the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and its allies across parts of the northern regions of Tigray, Afar and Amhara.

Ethiopia has also expelled an Egyptian diplomat, giving him 48 hours to leave the country, according to state media. The government has not publicly given a reason for the decision.

Egypt responded by ordering an Ethiopian embassy official to leave within the same period, according to the state-affiliated Al Qahera News.

Relations between Ethiopia and Egypt have been strained for years, largely over Ethiopia's Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a huge hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile.

Egypt, which relies heavily on the Nile for its water supplies, has long expressed concern about the dam's potential impact on its share of the river's water.

The cutting of ties between Ethiopia and Eritrea mark a dramatic reversal from 2018, when Abiy restored relations with Asmara after two decades of hostility, prompting joyous scenes as the border reopened and families separated for years were reunited.

The rapprochement helped earn the Ethiopian prime minister the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.

The latest hostilities are the most serious since a peace agreement ended the devastating Tigray war in 2022. An African Union mediator previously estimated that about 600,000 people had died during that two-year conflict.

Last month, the TPLF joined six other armed movements, including the Fano militia from Amhara, to form an alliance whose stated objective is to remove Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government from power.

A pro-government militia commander fighting in Tigray told the BBC that Eritrean soldiers had been involved on the front lines.

The BBC has not independently verified the allegation.

The BBC is unable to report from Tigray and the internet and phone lines have been cut, making it difficult to get reliable information from the region. It is not clear who was responsible for cutting communications.

In a rare response to the BBC before diplomatic relations were severed, Eritrea's Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel denied that it was involved in the fighting in Tigray, which borders his country.

He told BBC Tigrinya that Ethiopia's governing Prosperity Party was blaming neighbouring countries to divert attention from conflicts and other problems within Ethiopia.

The two countries were allies during the 2020-2022 Tigray war, when Eritrean troops fought alongside Ethiopian federal forces against the TPLF.

But relations have deteriorated significantly since then, particularly over Ethiopia's push for direct access to the Red Sea.

Ethiopia lost its coastline when Eritrea became independent in 1993.

Abiy has repeatedly argued that access to the sea is essential to Ethiopia's long-term economic and security interests, while Eritrea has accused his government of harbouring ambitions over its ports.

Federal forces and their allies appear to have made gains in southern Tigray and are advancing towards Mekelle, the regional capital. In Alamata, a doctor told the BBC earlier this week that at least 52 civilians had been killed during three days of intense fighting.

The TPLF has also been fighting in neighbouring Afar, which lies along Ethiopia's crucial transport corridor to Djibouti and the sea. Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have fled their homes there.

Both the Ethiopian government and the TPLF accuse the other of starting the latest hostilities. Tigrayan authorities say their forces were responding to a federal offensive and drone strikes, while Addis Ababa says Tigrayan fighters launched attacks after taking control of federally administered airports in Tigray.

The African Union has urged Ethiopia, Eritrea and Egypt to exercise restraint and resolve their differences through diplomatic channels, warning against actions that could further destabilise the region.

The UN has also warned that the deteriorating security situation is severely disrupting humanitarian work in northern Ethiopia. UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric said drone activity and air strikes were putting civilians, vital infrastructure and aid operations at risk, while insecurity and road closures were restricting humanitarian movements.

The UN has called on all sides to guarantee safe and unhindered access to people in need.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

Algeria introduces death penalty for arsonists after deadly wildfires

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmge4exg44v5o, 4 days ago

Algeria has adopted a law imposing the death penalty on people convicted of arson of forests or fields after a series of deadly wildfires swept parts of the country.

Members of the national assembly voted through the bill, which also made child abduction a capital offence, on Thursday.

Capital punishment has been in the country's penal code for some offences, but no execution has been carried out since 1993.

The official death toll from the blazes stands at 12, but independent news outlets believe the figure to be much higher.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune ordered the justice ministry to introduce the changes to the criminal law after more than 100 fires in the north-east of the country during an intense heatwave in northern Africa.

Under the law, anyone convicted of deliberately setting fire to forests, woods or fields could face execution.

The death penalty has also been extended to child kidnappings that involve torture, sexual assault or mutilation.

According to news agency AFP, Justice Minister Lotfi Boudjemaa told parliament: "The adoption of the death penalty for these acts is the appropriate legal response to curb these crimes."

The tougher penalties were justified because arson had reached "the level of organised crime", with investigations suggesting links to "foreign parties", Boudjemaa said.

The upper house, the Council of the Nation, will review the law before it is officially ratified by the president.

Investigative journalist Nozha Khelalef has been gathering the names of those believed to have died in the fires from death notices posted by families and information shared by some local authorities.

Her tally, listed on the independent news website Twala, puts the death toll at 200.

While Algeria regularly experiences forest fires in the summer, climate change has exacerbated the intensity and severity of recent wildfires in the country.

Explosions heard in Ethiopia's capital after drone flights banned

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3vgygpqky9zo, 4 days ago

Explosions were heard overnight in Ethiopia's capital, some in the area of the military headquarters in the west and another in the south of the city, residents and diplomatic sources say.

The blasts came hours after drone flights were banned over Addis Ababa and a week after fighting erupted in the north between the army and a newly launched alliance of armed groups including forces from the Tigray region.

A source linked to the opposition fighters told the Reuters news agency they were behind what they said were drone strikes.

"It was very loud. It was strong enough to set off car alarms," a resident in a southern area of the city, near the base of the secret service, told BBC Amharic.

He estimated that he heard the explosion in the Gotera neighbourhood some time around 00:30 local time (21:30 GMT).

Another resident told the BBC that he and his friends were playing games when they heard an explosion.

He lives in the western suburb of Torhayloch, a neighbourhood close to the military headquarters.

There were no official reports confirming the cause of the explosions, the exact locations affected or whether there were any casualties or damage.

The office of Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, the defence ministry as well as the federal and Addis Ababa police have not responded to BBC requests for comment.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia's foreign ministry has said it is closing its embassy in neighbouring Eritrea and expelling 10 Eritrean diplomats "for involvement in activities that pose a direct threat to Ethiopia's national security".

Earlier, in a BBC interview, Eritrea's government denied that it was backing the new rebel alliance.

Clashes broke out last week after months of tension between the government and the party that controls Tigray, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF).

They both accuse each other of violating a 2022 peace deal that ended a brutal two-year civil war, which according to an Africa Union mediator is estimated to have cost 600,000 lives.

Last month, seven armed movements, including the TPLF and an Amhara militia known as Fano, formed an alliance with the stated aim of removing the government in Addis Ababa.

There is disagreement over which side started the latest fighting.

The TPLF says it was responding to a federal offensive, including drone strikes, while the government says Tigrayan forces attacked first after seizing control of airports in the region.

The BBC is unable to report from Tigray and surrounding areas.

It is difficult to verify what is happening on the ground and access to the internet and the main telecoms service provider in Tigray have also been cut.

Within Tigray, the national army and a pro-government militia appear to be advancing towards the region's main city of Mekelle.

In the southern Tigrayan town of Alamata, a medic told the BBC on Wednesday that 52 civilians had died in three days of heavy fighting.

The TPLF is also reported to be fighting in neighbouring Afar region, a strategic area which connects landlocked Ethiopia to Djibouti and its ports.

A humanitarian source has estimated that tens of thousands have fled their homes in Afar, according to the AFP news agency.

Fighting around Lalibela in the Amhara region, a Unesco world heritage site where foreign tourists have been stranded for more than a week, has involved the national army and Fano fighters, now allied to the TPLF.

The government has accused neighbouring Eritrea of backing these groups.

One pro-government militia commander fighting in Tigray told the BBC that Eritrean soldiers were involved on the front lines.

But in a rare response to the BBC from Eritrea's government, Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel dismissed the allegations.

He accused Ethiopia's ruling Prosperity Party (PP) of seeking external scapegoats for the country's mounting challenges.

"The PP regime has made it a habit to apportion blame to its neighbours in order to deflect attention from the myriad internal conflicts that it is fomenting in various parts of the country," he told BBC Tigrinya.

Eritrea was a key ally of Ethiopia during the Tigray war, fighting against the TPLF.

But relations between the two neighbours have since deteriorated largely over the Ethiopian prime minister's ambition to take ownership of one of Eritrea's Red Sea ports.

Ethiopia lost access to them when Eritrea seceded in 1993.

Abiy has even hinted at taking the port of Assab - about 60km (37 miles) from the border - by force as he sees direct access to the sea as important for Ethiopia's long-term future and economic prosperity.

As concerns over security mount in Ethiopia, the country's National Intelligence and Security Service (Niss) announced on Wednesday that it was imposing an indefinite ban on drone flights in Addis Ababa and surrounding areas.

The agency said it would not issue permits for drone operations and warned that legal action would be taken against anyone flying drones in restricted areas.

Niss said the measure was necessary to protect national leaders, critical infrastructure and major public events.

Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.

Flydubai co-pilot attacked captain with axe, UAE official says

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c61wv7lgex13o, yesterday

The co-pilot who attempted to take control of a Flydubai plane travelling to Israel attacked the pilot with a crash axe, the United Arab Emirates prosecutor general has said.

The flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv carrying more than 170 people plunged 17,000ft (5,200m) two and a half hours into its journey, before passengers managed to overpower the attacker and successfully take control of the plane.

Capt Smit Machchhar said he was lying on the floor injured when he realised the plane was sinking and he had to act, explaining: "I told myself to go for one last push to open the door from inside", which allowed the passengers in.

Two reserve pilots then landed the plane safely in Saudi Arabia.

A crash axe is usually kept in the cockpit in case of emergencies.

The weapon used has been a key question for investigators, given the stringent security on such a sensitive route. Early reports from passengers on board had suggested it might have been a knife.

The UAE attorney general told state media that investigations were ongoing to determine the full circumstances and motives of the incident.

The co-pilot who launched the attack was an Omani national, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Multiple media outlets including Reuters, CNN and The New York Times have named him as Hamam al-Hammami. There has been no official confirmation of this.

While working at another airline, Oman Air, US media reported that Al-Hammami was removed from flight training because of concerns over his radical views, and was given another role at Oman's national airline.

Australian authorities confirmed on Sunday they were investigating his "links" to the country, but did not provide any details.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, citing sources, reported he was issued a student visa in 2014 and studied in Australia between 2015 and 2017 before leaving the country.

The ABC said his student visa was cancelled in 2019 as he was not enrolled in a course at that time.

Counter-terrorism officials will look at whether the man was radicalised in Australia, the ABC reported.

He then completed a three-year distance-learning course run by Buckinghamshire New University in the UK and graduated with a degree in aviation management in 2023, the university said. It added he did not take any pilot training at the school.

Speaking to Fox News, Netanyahu said that after the attacker was subdued on the flight, he called out to the crew "Kill me, kill me!"

The Israeli prime minister added: "So, it's clear that he was suicidal… It looks very likely that he was going to down the plane."

He also said the attacker "underwent Islamist radical indoctrination".

The UAE's attorney general, Hamad Saif Al Shamsi, said investigations into the incident revealed that the co-pilot attempted to carry out a "terrorist act", according to the country's state news agency.

He also said investigations were under way to establish the circumstances, motives and any links related to the incident.

Machchhar, who was stabbed in the attack, was taken to a nearby hospital before being airlifted to Abu Dhabi, where he is reported to be in a stable condition.

The pilot, who is from India, was in "good health and recovering well", the Indian embassy in the UAE said on Thursday.

"I am confident that the recovery will be there and I will become fit and healthy again," Machchhar said.

About two and half hours after the plane took off from Dubai International Airport it begun to plunge sharply.

The plane signalled a "general emergency" code, squawk 7700, before switching to squawk 7500, a code reporting "unlawful interference", or hijacking.

In an interview with the BBC, one passenger described the moment he realised that something was wrong.

Almog Itali said: "Suddenly the aeroplane started to, like a rollercoaster, to drop down [with] a massive G-force. It was falling down for 20 or 30 seconds, rapidly, and then balanced, and then started once again to fall down."

People then began to rush to the cockpit, he said.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Thursday that the alarm was raised onboard by an Israeli woman, Tali Manes, who heard a commotion coming from the cockpit.

Her husband, Zvika, along with three other men - Yaniv Hayun, Dr Shota Musayev and Asaf Rajuan - entered the cockpit after Capt Machchhar managed to open the door despite his injuries.

Hayun said, in a video released by the prime minister's office, that the attacker was "trying to destroy the instruments in order to disable the plane".

Hayun then described putting the attacker in a chokehold and pulling him outside the cockpit before other passengers helped to pin him down.

He added that he "pulled the controls" of the plane. "The plane started to level out, a bit more, and then [another] pilot told me he was taking control from there," he said.

In an interview with CNN on Wednesday evening, Netanyahu said the stabbed pilot, passengers and second crew had "managed to prevent a 9/11 disaster".

India's 'cockroach' protesters are back - this time asking poll chief to resign

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck62mped4rz9o, 3 days ago

India's influential Gen Z-led "cockroach" protesters are back on the streets - this time seeking electoral reforms and the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar over allegations of manipulating voter rolls.

A pressure group which began as an online satirical movement, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) recorded its first major victory in July when it forced education minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign after weeks of protests calling for education reforms.

CEC Kumar or the Election Commission have not responded to the calls for his resignation from the CJP or opposition parties. They have also not responded to allegations of vote theft or elections being rigged. The BBC has asked them for comment.

On Friday, thousands of people joined a protest called by the CJP at the sprawling Shivaji Park grounds in Mumbai city "to save democracy" and seek CEC Kumar's resignation.

The CJP has said this is the first in a series of demonstrations it plans to hold across the country in October, culminating in a rally in the capital, Delhi.

Most people in the crowds were young supporters of the CJP - some told the BBC they had come from the far suburbs of Mumbai and even from outside the city, from places such as Nagpur.

There was a heavy police presence at the venue. A small stage was set up on a truck from where CJP leaders are speaking.

In Delhi, however, police detained hundreds of people who were trying to protest at Jantar Mantar, a central site in the capital where the last CJP protest took place.

The CJP called the protest after last week's report in The Indian Express that CEC Kumar's two fellow election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected at least 14 times over 10 months to decisions and orders they said had been issued without their knowledge.

The differences were reported to be mostly over a controversial revision of the country's electoral rolls known as the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, which began last year.

The Election Commission says the exercise is intended to remove duplicate and ineligible entries - and so far, 130 million names have been struck off the voters' list.

But opposition parties and activists have alleged that many of those are eligible voters and that the process is being manipulated by CEC Kumar to favour Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during elections. Both the BJP and the Election Commission have rejected the accusations.

Last week's Indian Express report said the two commissioners had also been raising questions over the integrity of the voter database, changes to the way new voters are enrolled and the security of the electoral rolls itself.

The EC defended its way of working and said in a statement that "differing views" were part of the "decision-making process" and that all the decisions were taken unanimously.

But the revelations sparked a furore, with opposition leaders demanding Kumar's resignation.

Leader of the opposition and senior Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly accused the commission of "stealing votes from the opposition" and said those officers who were indulging in "vote theft" were "traitors".

Another senior opposition leader, Mamata Banerjee, has demanded the CEC's arrest.

On Wednesday, the INDIA alliance - an opposition grouping that includes nearly two dozen parties and has both Gandhi and Banerjee as members - said they would also organise protest rallies across the country in the coming days. On 6 October, all opposition MPs plan to march to the Election Commission office in Delhi, they added.

Forced to call him 'Dad': Sexual abuse of disabled residents that shocked South Korea

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmy4z93n9n1zo, today

"I was hurting inside, so I came to tell my story."

These were Seo Mi-hyeon's first words to the police.

Seo, who has an intellectual disability, struggles to form long sentences and can only communicate through brief words and gestures. But her memories of the abuse inflicted upon her were clear.

She was one of three residents at a state-run care home in South Korea who were sexually assaulted by the home's director, in a case that has shocked the country and raised serious questions about state care for the disabled.

Earlier this month, a court in Seoul sentenced the director - who has only been identified by his surname Kim - to 15 years in prison. Kim is appealing the conviction.

The court had heard that some residents were made to call the director "Dad", which prosecutors said illustrated the unequal relationship between Kim and those in his care.

The ruling came nearly two years after Seo, who is in her 40s, first disclosed the abuse to her mother.

We have changed Seo's name and the names of another victim in this story to protect their identities.

'I just endured it'

Seo first began living in Saekdongwon, a care home for the intellectually disabled, in 2016.

The institute, located in the city of Incheon, is fully subsidised by the state and still houses some 33 residents, although it has been asked to close down in light of this case.

According to Seo, the abuse began shortly after she began living there, with Kim visiting her at night or in the early hours of the morning to rape her.

Speaking through her lawyer Ko Eun-young, Seo said there was no adult at the facility she could speak to about the abuse, adding that she felt that other staff members would not help her. The care home has not responded to this allegation.

That was her life for almost 10 years, until the case came to light in February 2025, when Seo suffered a head injury.

She said it happened one of the times Kim tried to sexually assault her. She had blocked him with her hands, causing him to throw a glass at her.

Her lawyer told the court that the care home took Seo to hospital and informed her mother about the incident only after the wound on her head had been stitched up.

According to Seo's lawyer, Seo's mother had asked to see CCTV footage to establish how her daughter had been injured, but the facility refused, saying they were not authorised to release it.

As a result, her mother brought her home and decided to withdraw her from the facility. It was only after Seo was told that she would not have to return to the home that she disclosed the sexual abuse to her mum, who then reported it to the police.

"I thought it was safe to speak because I was told I didn't have to go back to Saekdongwon," Seo told the BBC via her lawyer.

When asked how she had managed on her own for so many years, she said: "I just endured it."

A police investigation into Seo's account was then widened to other residents.

They found at least two other alleged victims, including Lee Mi-Na, who said that she was also raped by Kim.

Earlier this month, a judge found all three victims' testimony credible.

He was sentenced to 15 years in jail for raping Lee and Seo, five years less than the original sentence prosecutors were asking for. He has denied all allegations and has since appealed the ruling.

For the third victim, Kim was found guilty of a lesser charge of sexual violence, with the judge saying the charge of rape against her was dropped as they could not find conclusive evidence that "force or threats [were used] that rendered the victim unable to resist".

A joint response committee made up of disability rights and other civic groups have criticsed this ruling, saying a victim's ability to resist an assault should not impact the verdict they receive.

The committee has also criticised the investigation process, saying there was a failure to identify more potential victims.

In November last year, following the initial allegations of abuse, local authorities from Ganghwa County had commissioned a team from Woosuk University to conduct an in-depth assessment of Saekdongwon's residents.

The report, which was submitted to the court as evidence, found indications that many more residents - at least 10 - could have been sexually assaulted by Kim.

But during the trial, the court did not address this finding.

According to local media reports, police had struggled to establish details of alleged abuse when interviewing residents, because most of them had severe disabilities and faced difficulties communicating. Some residents reportedly gave answers unrelated to the questions or did not respond at all.

Kim has not responded to allegations that he may have abused more residents.

Jeon Ji-su, the professor who led the Woosuk research team, told the BBC that investigators had accepted "only the accounts of people who could describe the abuse in complete sentences".

But activists said that this reliance on verbal testimony meant the police failed to recognise residents with greater communication difficulties as victims.

"If victims express their experiences differently from the way we expect, shouldn't the state make a greater effort to hear their voices?" said Baek In-seong, of Hansahoe, a counselling centre for survivors of sexual violence with disabilities.

Police have said that "while there may have been shortcomings in individual instances, these should not be taken as representative of the investigation as a whole".

Rights groups have also criticised others who have sought leniency for Kim.

Ahead of the verdict, a total of 13 petitions seeking leniency were said to have been submitted to the court. One of them, from a social welfare organisation, asked the court to take into account the defendant's "contribution to the welfare sector".

Welfare advocacy group Gyeol condemned the petitioning organisations, saying: "Past service in the welfare sector does not exempt anyone from accountability."

The judge's ruling on Kim's conviction stated that his offence was "particularly reprehensible" because "despite his professional duty to protect and support [the victims'] rights and interests and prevent abuse, he exploited the imbalance of power" with his victims to "gratify his own sexual desires".

Public scrutiny and protests

The case has shocked many in South Korea and raised questions about why the abuse was not prevented in the first place. More shocking is that it happened despite a move in 2011 to strengthen laws to protect people with disabilities from sexual assault.

That was the year a fictional film called Dogani, based on a true story of sexual abuse at a school for deaf children, premiered. Amid intense public scrutiny and protests, the school in question was shut and tougher laws were passed as a result.

These included more specific categories of sexual offences against disabled people, harsher penalties for offences committed by facility directors and employees, and the removal of the statute of limitations for some rape offences involving disabled victims.

But in the case of Saekdongwon, the abuse persisted despite regular regular inspections by Ganghwa County, the local authority responsible for overseeing the facility.

A county official told the BBC that such inspections focused largely on paperwork, and that residents were interviewed only when specific issues arose.

The official said there had also been an external monitoring team but it had received no reports from staff, and expressed regret that the authorities had not examined the situation more closely.

Jo Ha, a representative from the national council of a counselling centre who has supported some Saekdongwon victims, said some families she had spoken to had suspected there was abuse but felt unable to raise their concerns.

Leaving a facility would mean the family has to take on all care responsibilities, as finding alternative placements is difficult.

One survey conducted through a national association of parents of people living in residential facilities for those with disabilities found that around six in 10 people who secured a place in a residential facility had waited at least three years, highlighting the difficulty of accessing appropriate care.

Professor Kim Yoon-tae, the head of Woosuk University's Institute of Cognitive Science, points out that such facilities exercise great control over residents' actions, from what they eat to where they sleep in addition to their access to healthcare and even whether or not to grant they could go outside.

And while Saekdongwon is "a landmark case" because of the scale and duration of the abuse, it is also not an isolated incident, added Jo.

In 2023, an appeals court upheld an eight-year prison sentence for a worker who raped or sexually assaulted two women with intellectual disabilities at a facility in Yeongcheon the previous year.

In a separate case in Anseong, a care home worker was recently sentenced to six years in prison for repeatedly raping a female resident with a disability in 2022.

"The violence women with disabilities experience is not an individual problem," Jo said. "It is structural violence, shaped by overlapping layers of gender, disability, institutionalisation, poverty and social isolation."

'We want to live in peace'

Since the case came to light, South Korea's prime minister has ordered the formation of a cross-government response team, calling the incident "a grave matter that calls into question the very reason for the state's existence".

In April, the government said it had inspected 1,507 residential facilities for disabled people nationwide and identified 33 suspected cases of abuse. So far investigations have been opened into eight of them.

The government also said it would strengthen targeted inspections based on risk factors, as well as joint inspections involving local authorities, police and disability rights advocacy agencies.

Ganghwa County has ordered Saekdongwon to close and the local government has revoked the licence of the foundation that operated it.

However, the closure has been deferred until the remaining residents have been relocated and arrangements for independent living have been completed.

The local government has said it will draw up individual independent-living support plans for all 33 Saekdongwon residents. That process is still under way.

Saekdongwon has filed an administrative lawsuit challenging the revocation of its licence. It has yet to comment on Kim's conviction.

Asked what had changed most since leaving Saekdongwon, Seo said: "I just feel at peace. I'm happy every day."

She also said the best thing was being able to eat and sleep when she wanted.

What she wanted most now was "to cut ties with the director completely and never have anything to do with him again".

But, Seo added, people with disabilities still need somewhere they could feel safe.

"I hope there can be a facility without sexual violence, where disabled people like us can live in peace."

Indian police accused of sexual harassment against journalists at protest

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9e8lvm6nrr3o, today

Three female journalists have accused police officers in India of sexual harassment during street protests in the capital Delhi.

The claims were made on Saturday after the force detained scores of young people calling for the resignation of the chief election commissioner.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Delhi and Mumbai cities for a third day on Sunday demanding that Gyanesh Kumar step down over large-scale changes to voter rolls.

In a post on social media, Delhi Police said its New Delhi District had received the complaint, and it had been transferred to its crime branch for a "fair and impartial" inquiry.

The Election Commission says the exercise is intended to remove duplicate and ineligible entries - and so far, 130 million names have been struck off the voters' list.

Videos online show people being physically dragged away from the Jantar Mantar protest site in central Delhi.

The accusations by the women journalists include inappropriate touching by some police.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi said women fear for their safety and the home ministry must "answer for this".

"Police dragged me by my hair," Aahna Singh, an activist and student at Jawaharlal Nehru University told Reuters news agency during the protests.

She said the police were resorting to "brutality".

The protesters say the voter-roll revision will benefit Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Election Commission says the exercise is intended to remove duplicate and ineligible entries.

The protesters have included supporters of the influential Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) that began as an online satirical movement.

The pressure group recorded its first major victory in July when it forced the then Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign after weeks of protests calling for education reforms.

The CJP called for the latest protest after a report in The Indian Express said that Kumar's two fellow election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected at least 14 times over 10 months to decisions and orders they said had been issued without their knowledge.

The differences were reported to be mostly over the controversial revision of the country's electoral rolls known as the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, which began last year.

The Election Commission has defended its way of working and said in a statement that "differing views" were part of the "decision-making process" and that all the decisions were taken unanimously.

But the revelations sparked a furore, with opposition leaders demanding Kumar's resignation.

Japan's first mayor to take maternity leave lands on TIME100 Next list

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqj3d3d37nxgo, 3 days ago

Shoko Kawata, Japan's first mayor to take maternity leave, has been named one of the 100 most influential rising stars by TIME Magazine.

The recognition comes weeks after the 36-year-old gave birth to her first child on 15 September.

Earlier this year, Kawata, who is mayor of Yawata City in Kyoto prefecture, was plunged into a national debate about whether elected officials should take time off for childbirth.

Her decision to take maternity leave drew a mix of support and backlash across Japan, a country that is struggling to lift birth rates.

Some on social media said having a baby is tough and Kawata is doing her best. Japanese society has failed to design systems with pregnancy in mind, one claimed. Another said Kawata is setting a wonderful example by putting her family first and making it easier for other women to enter politics.

But critics argued that stepping away from public duties is "irresponsible", and that if Kawata wanted to get pregnant "she should have done so before taking office". One said top officials wanting to take extended leave "should resign".

Others insisted salaries should be cut during maternity leave.

In a sit-down interview with the BBC before giving birth, Kawata brushed off the criticisms, proudly declaring she enjoys her job and believes now is the time for her to have a child and start a family.

"If we were to criticise politicians taking maternity leave, it means we are effectively excluding all women in their 20s through 40s - women who are capable of becoming pregnant - from public office," she said.

While Japan provides maternity leave for city workers, there is currently no legal framework for local elected officials. So Kawata worked with her office to create a plan. She transferred her authority to her deputy mayor Shigeto Nose for 16 weeks, while working remotely when she could.

On 15 September, Mayor Kawata announced she gave birth to a baby girl. She posted a photo on X, thanking those who had supported her, and doubled down on her goal to advocate for social issues nationwide.

"As I face the countless challenges that lie ahead and learn what it truly means to be a parent, I want to reflect those experiences in real time into the policies I pursue," she wrote.

"I want to confront the many challenges facing parents and children today from that same perspective, as someone living through them myself, and think about how we can find a way forward together."

Japan raises permanent residency fee by 20 times

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6y8z8xeg8j1o, 4 days ago

Japan has raised fees for foreigners seeking permanent residency in the country by 20 times to 200,000 yen ($1,270; £955).

Those seeking permanent residency must now also meet new income, pension and Japanese-language requirements.

Long lines formed outside immigration offices earlier this week as applicants sought to beat the fee hikes, with Tokyo's main immigration bureau reporting wait times of over seven hours.

The fee increases are part of a series of changes to Japan's immigration policy under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, which aim to manage its rapidly growing foreign population.

In July, Japan implemented a five-fold increase in visa fees for all foreigners – its first visa fee hike in 50 years. Authorities said this was meant to "reflect inflation and exchange rate fluctuations".

Although immigration remains politically sensitive and restrictive in Japan, the nation's ageing population is increasingly relying on foreign workers to plug a labour shortage.

Japan's foreign resident population surpassed 4.12 million at the end of 2025, marking a record 9.5% increase from the previous year. This however has led to growing anxieties over immigration and social change.

Takaichi has made managing immigration one of her key priorities since she took office in October last year.

In an X post days before the residency permit hikes set in, Takaichi wrote that her government recognises that "some members of the public may feel a sense of concern or unfairness" as Japan's foreign resident population grows.

"To address these concerns, [the government] is working to ensure that its policies toward foreign nationals are orderly, and that both Japanese citizens and foreign residents can live safely and securely," she wrote.

Before the hikes, it would cost non-permanent residents in Japan 6,000 yen each time they applied to change their residency status or extend their period of stay.

From 1 October, the fee varies according to the duration of stay sought – from 10,000 yen for three months or less, to 75,000 yen for five years or more.

Applicants who face financial hardship or are designated as refugees would be granted discounts.

Aspiring permanent residents must now also earn a stable income at or above the Japanese average. Latest data released in July puts average household income at 5.75 million yen as of 2024.

Micaiah Stevens, who has been living and working in Tokyo for 10 years, was not able to compile the necessary documentation to submit his application for permanent residency before the price hike.

The 37-year-old still plans to apply, but questions the new measures aimed at foreign residents.

"My immediate reaction was that foreigners were being treated a bit too conveniently. We're being asked to make more than the average Japanese person, pay a significantly higher fee, just to be able to work in Japan and provide taxes," he tells the BBC.

"There's already a significant language and cultural barrier that prevents some talent from coming over. This just doesn't strike me as a plan that was thought out to the long term."

From April next year, permanent residency applicants will face even tighter requirements, including basic Japanese language proficiency. This has led to a surge in enrollments at Japanese language schools as well as people signing up to take the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test, local media reported.

Applicants' expected pension benefits must also be equivalent to that of someone who has enrolled into the employee pension system for 30 years, although the value of one's financial assets can be considered if their expected pension benefits fall short.

China funding UK research and sending it to Beijing's spies, MI5 warns

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy7zrljp527o, 5 days ago

More than 100 academics linked to British institutions have unwittingly assisted China's espionage operations against the UK via a front company working for its intelligence and security services, MI5 has warned.

In the highly unusual public alert, the UK's internal security service warned universities and academics that continuing ties with China General Technology Research Institute (CGTRI) could ultimately lead to criminal charges for aiding a foreign state.

Security minister Dan Jarvis said MI5's warning exposed attempts by Chinese intelligence agencies to use British academic research to undermine UK national security.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in London said the accusation was "imaginary and purely fabricated".

Universities UK, which represents more than 140 institutions, meanwhile said it was reviewing the alert and focusing on "supporting our universities as they assess any implications for existing or future partnerships".

In June, MI5 and its closest partners in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, issued a joint warning that China's military intelligence services were targeting professional networking sites and online job platforms.

This new UK-specific alert goes further, revealing what the service says is a threat that has been growing within British academic institutions.

MI5 says that the CGTRI, sometimes translated as the China Academy of General Technology (CAGT), has "very strong ties" to the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS).

"MI5 has identified that the primary purpose of CGTRI is to fund academic research that directly improves MSS technical capability for espionage," it says.

"More than 100 UK-linked academics have contributed to projects funded by MSS via CGTRI," adding that in some cases the researches would not be aware of the front company's role in their project.

UK academics have contributed to CGTRI-funded projects on topics including AI, cyber-security, covert communications systems and steganography, which means hiding a secret message or file inside an ordinary message or object.

"This activity supports Ministry of State Security espionage, which poses a threat to UK national security," MI5 said.

The security alert said that many academic institutions and individuals will have engaged with the CGTRI "in good faith" because the link back to Chinese state security had been "obfuscated".

It continued: "UK academic institutions are strongly advised to immediately review any ongoing or planned collaboration with CGTRI. This is to ensure MSS derives no further benefit from UK universities or research institutions."

The public alert raises the prospect that British academics who do not act on it immediately could ultimately fall foul of the law.

It stressed that the National Security Act, a key piece of legislation passed in 2023 to counter state espionage, created a new offence of assisting a foreign intelligence service where the individual ought to reasonably have known what they were doing so.

Jarvis said: "This alert exposes attempts by Chinese intelligence to covertly benefit from the expertise and research of our academics, undermining our national security, and that of our allies."

He said he had now written to all university vice-chancellors to end relationships with the organisation.

Conservative MP Sir Iain Duncan-Smith, co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, told the BBC that several reports had suggested "British universities' dependence on Chinese students has opened them up to all sorts of problems" and that security checks should be stepped up.

Responding to the alert, Universities UK said universities "take their responsibilities around research security and national security extremely seriously".

"The sector has made significant investments in recent years to strengthen due diligence, risk assessment and research security processes," said chief executive Vivienne Stern, "while continuing to support the international collaboration that is essential to world-leading research and innovation".

"Close engagement between Government and the higher education sector is vital to ensuring that universities and the country continue to benefit from international collaboration while effectively managing national security risks."

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in London hit back - saying it had already made "solemn representations" to the UK.

"The accusations made by the UK intelligence agency against the relevant Chinese entity are imaginary and purely fabricated," they said.

"Exchanges and collaboration between UK universities and China have always been conducted on a voluntary basis and in compliance with laws and regulations. Such exchanges and collaboration are mutually beneficial.

"We urge the UK intelligence authorities to stop spreading falsehoods and stop undermining educational exchanges and research cooperation between China and the UK."

Inside India's forest villages, where a dangerous mix of crises led to 32 child deaths

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmn9wr84v1qno, 5 days ago

Warning: This article contains details some readers may find distressing

At about 3am one morning in May, Bamita Markam began convulsing.

The three-year-old had spent days with a high fever and angry red sores on her body. Her mother, Koushila, had first taken her to a doctor, who prescribed an ointment.

Bamita seemed to recover, then became ill again. A faith healer, called to the house in Matla village, gave her syrups and tablets. Nothing worked. By dawn, Bamita was dead.

"She cried a lot," Koushila recalls. "She convulsed all night." The family tried to make her drink water. At one point she vomited blood. They buried her in a jungle after midday.

Bamita's death was one of at least 32 child deaths recorded since May in a cluster of remote villages in Balaghat district in India's Madhya Pradesh state, officials say. The victims ranged from babies just three or four months old to an 18-year-old, and most were Baiga, one of India's 75 "particularly vulnerable tribal groups".

Officials attribute the deaths to mainly measles and malaria, possibly aggravated by malnutrition and delays in treatment.

They believe eight to 10 deaths were associated with measles, roughly another 10 with malaria, with several children suffering more than one infection. The precise cause of every death is less certain.

"I have never seen an outbreak like this. My father was a two-term lawmaker, and I have served three terms, but neither of us has seen so many children die in such a short time," Sanjay Uikey, who has represented the area since 2013, told me.

But disease is only part of the story. In remote, forested parts of Balaghat, where Maoist insurgency once took root, reaching a health centre can be a challenge in itself.

In the monsoon, the terrain can make that journey harder. Paddy fields glow against red earth and low, forested hills. Narrow dirt tracks wind between fields and mud homes, often becoming slippery and impassable in heavy rain.

The countryside is lush, but the homes are sparse. Most Baiga houses have low mud walls, rough timber and bamboo, and tiled or thatched roofs patched with plastic against the rain.

Some homes are accessible only by these tracks. Doctors investigating the deaths have travelled through the mud in tractors. On a recent visit, we walked nearly 2km (1.2 miles) uphill to reach some of the more remote homes. The surrounding jungle was dotted with the graves of children who had died.

The nearest state hospital, a 100-bed facility in Birsa, is about 70km away. For families without vehicles, reaching it can mean muddy tracks, a makeshift bamboo stretcher or a motorcycle - and a day's lost wages.

When Bamita became seriously ill, the family did not get her to hospital. It was raining heavily. The tracks were muddy and slippery, and the family had no way of transporting her.

"If I was able to take her to hospital she might have lived," Koushila says.

Her other daughter, Ankita, keeps asking what happened to her sister. The six-year-old has been told what many children in these villages are told: "Mata aa gayi" - the goddess has arrived.

For some Baiga families, some illnesses - like chicken pox - are seen as the arrival of a disease goddess, who must be appeased rather than treated. Families perform a seven to nine-day ritual of bathing and offering cool water and neem leaves to the local disease goddess. Many believe that treating the patient before the ritual is completed could cause death.

For weeks, such beliefs shaped how families responded to sick children. Then the scale of the deaths began to emerge.

On 21 July, Parshuram Dhurwey, a local village council chief, heard that two children in the same household in Bondari village had died. The next morning, he heard of another death. He called local officials and went to the area.

They found a grim picture.

"Every other child was sick," Dhurwey says. "They had fever, they had rashes. Many were undernourished."

When government medical officer Nimish Gautam arrived, he found severely dehydrated children. The first case he saw was a teenage girl with several days of fever and rash, whose blood sugar appeared dangerously low. Her family refused to let the health team examine her properly.

"Police were brought in to persuade them to take her to a health centre. The family still refused," Gautam told me. "They said if we took her for treatment, she would die. So we kept her under observation, and she recovered."

In one village, Dhurwey says, officials forcibly entered homes and took five seriously ill children to hospital. All recovered.

By the time the outbreak became unmistakable to local authorities, children had already been dying for weeks. By September, Dhurwey says, 10 children aged about 18 months to 14 years had died across the four villages in his council - Adori, Kundekasa, Bondari and Usri.

The symptoms were frighteningly similar and frustratingly non-specific: fever, rashes, weakness, dehydration and, in some cases, seizures. Some children had scabies, fungal infections or bacterial skin infections alongside suspected measles and malaria. In a district where malaria is endemic, fever could mean several things at once.

Sagnibai of Bondari lost two children within 24 hours. Her daughter, Lamnin, 12, died on 26 June. Her one-year-old son, Sahil, died the following day. A local healer told the family it was Mata. They also had no money or vehicle to take the children to a doctor.

Her husband, Samaroo Dhurwey, remembers nights in which the children's bodies seemed to be "on fire". They could not digest food. They died at home.

Mahasingh Parte of Matla village lost two children - a six-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy - within two days of each other. The family followed a faith healer's instructions. "He said don't take them to hospital," Parte recalls.

Parte is a landless farm labourer who earns about 200 rupees ($2; £1.58) on a good day, he said. Work is scarce in the monsoon, and although a small primary health centre is just 5km away, he had never been there. Poverty and remoteness had stacked the odds against his children.

The question of what was making children sick became harder to answer as the deaths mounted.

An investigation by the ICMR-National Institute for Tribal Health Research (NIRTH) tested 10 samples collected from the affected villages on 7 August. Six tested positive for measles; four were negative.

Measles is highly contagious, causing high fever, cough, runny nose and red, watery eyes, followed by a rash. Most children recover, but malnutrition can make measles far more dangerous, increasing the risk of pneumonia, severe diarrhoea and dehydration, and inflammation of the brain. The infection also weakens the immune system, leaving children vulnerable to other infections. Malaria can compound that risk.

But doctors cautioned that malaria did not necessarily follow measles, and not every fever and rash was measles. Instead, several infections and vulnerabilities collided.

"Sometimes there is no single factor behind the deaths," Gautam said. "There are malnourished children and there's zero health education and hygiene at home."

The Baiga villages are not entirely disconnected from modern India. Seasonal migration takes families to other states for chilli picking and other work. Children watch reels on smartphones, while many families have minimum single-bulb solar-powered electricity, bank accounts and, in some homes, piped water.

Yet malnutrition remains widespread, with children often poorly fed. A five-year-old who died recently of measles weighed around 5kg. An earlier ICMR study found that among Baiga children in Madhya Pradesh, about 61% were underweight, 44.7% stunted and 37% wasted.

Gautam believes malnutrition is driven by early marriage and motherhood, with some girls becoming mothers at 16 or 17, when their bodies are still developing.

Closely spaced pregnancies, premature births and low birth weight can follow, while young mothers struggle to breastfeed and care for their children.

Diet is another problem: many families rely heavily on rice and lentil soup, with too little protein and dietary variety.

The traditional Baiga diet was diverse, drawing on forest produce, millets, locally grown foods, fish and other animal protein, according to P Shirisha, a public health researcher.

"But reduced access to forests and land, changing cultivation practices and greater reliance on farm labour have narrowed that food base, leaving families increasingly dependent on staples," Shirisha told me.

"This diet lacks adequate pulses, vegetables, fruits and animal-source foods, resulting in insufficient protein and micronutrients for optimal child growth." .

Studies of Baiga households suggest that these nutritional deficiencies are compounded by poor uptake of public health and welfare services.

The gap between services on paper and on the ground was stark: the state response came weeks after deaths began, while health teams struggled to reach and persuade families.

Once the outbreak was recognised, health workers began door-to-door screening in affected villages. Mobile medical units carrying oxygen, nebulisers, suction equipment, malaria tests and medicines visited more than 20 affected villages.

One mobile doctor, Neeraj Sharma, says teams routinely saw more than 50 patients a day, about half of them children. They conducted 10 or more malaria tests daily, sometimes finding two positive cases a day.

More than 6,200 patients - mostly children - were eventually treated at home, according to Gautam. More than 630 were referred to district hospitals. About 600 returned home, while around 30 remain admitted.

Vaccination became an emergency response. Although official records suggested 90-95% coverage in some areas, health workers found children without records and families reluctant to vaccinate.

Authorities therefore offered the measles-rubella (MR) vaccine to all children under 15, regardless of recorded status. Of about 40,000 children identified in Birsa, roughly 27,000 had been vaccinated, Gautam said. Of the area's 180 villages, some 67 are predominantly Baiga and among the most vulnerable.

But vaccination is only one part of the protection children need. There are wider questions about whether basic nutrition and other health services are reaching those most at risk.

A 2024 audit by India's Comptroller and Auditor General found "serious irregularities" in Madhya Pradesh's distribution of take-home rations meant to supplement the diets of children aged six months to three years, pregnant women and lactating mothers, including problems with beneficiary identification, production, transport and distribution.

The outbreak has now subsided. Officials say the last child death was more than two weeks before their late-September assessment, while teams continue visiting villages. In Kundekasa, a medical camp that once saw about 120 children a day was seeing fewer than 10.

Back in Matla, Bamita's mother speaks about the child who would ask for money for snacks, play with her sister and run inside whenever cars approached because vehicles frightened her.

"I had hope she'd study and make something of herself. I never regretted I didn't have a boy," Koushila says.

Then she looks at Ankita, the surviving sister.

"I want more kids," she says. "I feel alone. Ankita is alone. She keeps crying for her sister."

Pakistan launches deadly air strikes on Afghanistan

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw4grg92lmr5o, 4 days ago

Pakistan has conducted further air strikes on Afghanistan, killing nine civilians and injuring 11 others, the Taliban government said.

Islamabad's information ministry confirmed the strikes, which it said killed twenty-two militants.

Zabihullah Mujahid, the chief spokesman of the Afghan Taliban, said the strikes hit homes in the Kunar and Helmand provinces bordering Pakistan. Women and children are among the dead, he said in an X post.

"We condemn this act as an aggression and crime in violation of all accepted principles," he said.

Pakistan had very different claims, saying that the "well-planned and calibrated" attack targeted "terrorist camps" in Afghanistan, where large quantities of weapons and ammunition were stored.

Maximum precautions were taken to ensure no collateral damage occurred, Pakistan's information ministry said.

An eyewitness from Garmsir, Qudratullah, told the BBC that the airstrikes started around 03:30 local time (00:00 BST) and continued for 30 minutes.

"We were sleeping when the jets arrived. After the first bomb exploded, we woke up. After the second strikes, we took our children and fled the area. The third bomb hit our neighbours house; between four and give members of their family were killed while others were injured and taken to hospital."

Pakistan has repeatedly accused the Afghan Taliban of harbouring militant groups that carry out and plan attacks on it from inside Afghanistan's territory.

The Afghan Taliban deny it, saying Pakistan's militancy is an internal problem, but it has led to a significant deterioration in the relationship between the two neighbours.

Fighting between the neighbours escalated dramatically in February this year, with Pakistan declaring that it's in an "open war" with Afghanistan after a surge in deadly clashes and cross-border airstrikes.

Talks mediated by China established a fragile ceasefire in March, but it did nolast.

Last month, a deadly attack on a police facility in north-west Pakistan, which killed 24 people, was blamed on the Pakistani Taliban by the provincial police force.

Last week, Pakistan launched air strikes in Afghanistan which hit Kandahar, the Taliban's base of power, among other provinces. This earlier attack killed four civilians, according to the Afghan Taliban government.

The vanishing world of India's street magicians

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck7v4v8pmzdeo, 3 days ago

Sitting in his cramped Delhi home, Ishamuddin Khan can still make a rope appear to rise into the air.

The 55-year-old magician spent decades performing a trick once dismissed as legend, and still keeps photographs and newspaper clippings from his years of international fame.

These days, he spends more time looking back at those memories than performing the trick.

"The times have changed," he says. "Street magic is dying a slow death. It is on a ventilator."

Khan's story reflects a wider change in India, where traditional street performers are finding it increasingly difficult to make a living from their craft.

Magicians, jugglers, puppeteers and acrobats once made a living from crowds in public spaces. Changing entertainment habits and tighter restrictions have made audiences harder to find, pushing many out of the profession.

Khan, one of India's best-known magicians, comes from the Madari community, which has a long tradition of performing in public spaces.

There are no official figures, but Khan says community records identify about 400 Madari families in Delhi, with hundreds more in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Telangana.

Despite their small numbers today, the Madaris trace their roots back centuries.

Historian Ashok Mathur says Madari traditions have roots in Indian folklore, mythology and the long history of travelling performers.

"For generations, these skills were passed through families," he explains.

Khan followed the same path, learning magic from his father and uncles and performing from the age of 12. By his early 20s, he had mastered the rope trick that would later make him famous.

The trick – in which a rope appears to rise into the air before a boy climbs it – was long associated with the mythology of Indian street magic and widely considered impossible, until Khan performed it.

He says it took six years to master the trick, which he first performed publicly in 1995 outside Delhi's iconic Qutub Minar. Two years later, he performed it before 30,000 people on a beach in Karnataka.

His trick brought international attention, and that led to tours to the UK, France, Germany and Japan.

Khan hoped the fame would shine a light on India's traditional performers. For a while, it did. But the attention faded.

As audiences turned to new forms of entertainment and public performance opportunities dwindled, many magicians found it harder to make a living from skills passed down through generations.

One of them is 40-year-old Imam Khan.

Once a magician, Imam now makes a living collecting bottles and recyclables from Delhi's streets. He spends much of his time rag-picking near a western Delhi dump, earning about 200 rupees ($2; £1.57) a day.

Experts say the decline in street performance has multiple causes, chief among them the changing nature of public spaces.

Anurupa Roy, founder of Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust, says performers increasingly struggle to find audiences as public spaces shrink.

"Closed parks and residential societies that bar outsiders are limiting spaces for performance."

Researcher and performer Komita Dhanda says changing attitudes to public spaces are also driving the decline.

"With tighter security, especially in busy town and city centres, there is little space left for street performers," she says.

It is not just individual artists who struggle to get permission. Dhanda says her well-known street theatre group, Jana Natya Manch, often faces hurdles performing in public spaces.

For many artists, the challenge is not just finding a venue but navigating unclear rules over what is allowed.

Most street performers rely on voluntary payments, but experts say the line between performing for money and begging can blur.

Unlike the UK, India has no federal busking framework. Performers instead navigate state-level rules on public order, obstruction, noise and public land.

"This is why street performers often have to face municipal and police regulations governing public spaces, as well as state-specific anti-begging laws," says lawyer Kaushik Mitra.

For many artists, Covid made a bad situation worse.

When India imposed its 2020 lockdown, public performances stopped. Many magicians returned to their villages; some never came back.

"We saw a decline in public performances after this period," Dhanda says. "The brunt was especially harsh for street magicians and performers, many of whom did not return to cities."

For the artists who did return and continue the trade, the challenges only increased.

Shahim Khan, 42, still performs magic on Delhi's streets, sometimes with his 12-year-old daughter, Alia.

Much of his work is now confined to industrial areas, far from the busy public spaces where he once performed, hitting his earnings hard.

Before the pandemic, he could stage four or five shows a day, earning 1,000-1,200 rupees.

"Now I barely manage two shows and earn 200-400 rupees," he says.

The rise of short-form digital entertainment has added to the pressures on traditional performers, experts say. So have changing attitudes towards street arts.

"There was a lot of Western interest in things like the rope trick decades ago. But forms and tastes have changed, and so has what India chooses to showcase," Dhanda says.

For Khan, the loss is about more than money. He fears an art passed down generations could disappear if no-one learns it.

"A trick can survive only if someone learns it," he says.

His son, Altamash, began performing with him as a teenager but now works decorating parties with balloons. In his 30s, he has largely left performing behind.

Years without regular practice have dulled his skills. When he demonstrated his juggling for the BBC, he struggled to find the rhythm.

"I am slowly forgetting all the tricks," he said.

Khan had hoped his son would carry on the family tradition. Altamash had hoped to make a name for himself too, but it did not work out.

"I knew I may not achieve the fame my father has, but I did not think there would come a time when performing would not remain an option," he says.

Who is the 'hero' Indian pilot who was stabbed on Israel-bound flight?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cje3r3z7g0zzo, 3 days ago

The pilot who was stabbed on an Israel-bound flight on Wednesday has been identified as Indian national Capt Smit Machchhar.

Machchhar was attacked by another pilot onboard a Flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv, forcing the plane to divert to Saudi Arabia.

The captain, who has been hailed as a "true hero" by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was taken to a hospital in Tabuk, a city in north-western Saudi Arabia.

Describing the events, Machchhar said he was on the floor and still being attacked when he realised the plane carrying more than 170 passengers was in a dive and he had to do something.

"I was lying on the floor injured but I told myself to go for one last push to open the door from inside," he told Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a video call on Friday.

Years of experience

Machchhar grew up in the Indian city of Mumbai, where his parents still live. In 2008, he joined Mainland Air, an aviation college in New Zealand's Dunedin, before joining Indian airline SpiceJet as a commercial pilot three years later.

He moved to Dubai and joined Flydubai in 2022 as an experienced pilot.

Philip Kean, the CEO of Mainland Air, told the BBC he remembered Machchhar as a man who would remain calm in a crisis.

"We trained him for forced landing - not this kind of situation, which is very, very rare," Kean said. "It was a long time back but he came across as a good and honest worker."

Machchhar has more than 9,750 hours of flying experience, including more than 6,400 hours as pilot-in-command, according to his LinkedIn profile.

His former employer SpiceJet issued a statement calling Machchhar a "hero" who had saved "countless lives".

An old friend who worked with him at SpiceJet, Capt Dharav Gosalia, described him as outgoing and "very jovial".

Machchhar - whose nickname was "Smit Mac" - was a "disciplined flier" who had undergone years of training, he said, including from former Indian Air Force pilots who had moved into commercial aviation.

Last year, Machchhar spoke about how he started flying and his experiences as a pilot on a podcast called Bona-Fide Banter.

Aviation, he said, was "never a childhood dream". When he was around 19, he joined a management course, planning to work for his family's business. But then he came across an aviation seminar and "the bug bit [him]", he added.

Machchhar also spoke about how, when he wore his pilot's uniform, he was "no-nonsense" and thought "about work 100%". But unlike his younger days, he added, he now placed a greater value on having a healthy work-life balance and spending time with family.

"Give personal life equal importance - it will help you fly longer," he advised.

He also detailed challenges he had faced in the air, including when a passenger went into early labour and the crew worked together to ensure the baby was born safely.

"In aviation terms, I was lucky to grow up with people who helped me be the pilot that I am today," he said, crediting senior pilots with teaching him how to face stressful situations.

At the time of the conversation, Machchhar said that no plane he'd flown had needed to make an emergency landing. He had, however, faced medical emergencies and minor aircraft issues that had caused delays.

He said delays were "not my problem. As long as you're walking out of the aircraft [safely], that's what I want."

Indian social media has been awash with praise for Machchhar since his identity emerged, with commenters calling him a hero. Snippets from the podcast have also gone viral.

Stabbed mid-flight

Flydubai's flight FZ1073 took off from Dubai International Airport in the United Arab Emirates at 03:05 GMT (07:05 local time) en route to Ben Gurion Airport in Israel.

The flight was carrying at least 150 people, with Netanyahu saying "almost all" passengers were Israeli.

The Israeli prime minister later wrote on X that Machchhar had "saved the lives of 174 people" and prevented "a catastrophic mid-air disaster".

Data from flight tracking website Flightradar24 shows the plane made a rapid descent over Saudi Arabia around two and a half hours after take-off, dropping more than 17,000ft (5,000m) in less than two minutes at around 05:21.

Minutes later, the plane signalled an emergency code - squawk 7700 - before switching it to a squawk 7500 code, which indicates a hijacking.

At 05:40, the plane - which had briefly entered Jordanian airspace - looped back into Saudi Arabia, where it later started its manual descent for landing.

Less than an hour later, the plane returned to squawk 7700.

Initial local media reports cited Israeli officials as saying a fight had broken out between two pilots.

But speaking on Wednesday after the incident, Netanyahu confirmed later reports that one pilot had stabbed the other before "apparently trying to crash" the plane.

He said an Israeli passenger told him "the plane went into a spin and began to descend" before the passenger and a crew member broke into the cockpit and overpowered the "pilot who had carried out the stabbing".

The plane was diverted to Tabuk Airport in north-western Saudi Arabia and touched down at 06:58, according to location data.

The stabbed pilot, who has since been airlifted to Abu Dhabi, was later identified as Machchhar. The Indian embassy in the United Arab Emirates said he was "in good health and recovering well".

In his call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Machchhar said he had been flying planes for 17 years and "can tell what is happening to the plane even with my eyes closed".

Speaking about his recovery, the pilot said he is "looking at it as a journey" - saying that it "will take time" but he is "confident that the recovery will be there and I will become fit and healthy again".

Modi and Trump praise Machchhar

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Machchhar "showed immense courage and an unwavering resolve to protect the lives of others" despite being seriously injured.

"His valour helped save hundreds of lives and avert a great tragedy," he wrote in a post on X, adding that he hoped for the pilot's speedy recovery.

And during their call, Modi told Machchhar that "his courage, patience and quick decision-making saved the lives of so many people" and the whole country was proud of him.

Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar praised the pilot's "extraordinary courage and remarkable presence of mind, even in the face of grave danger".

Ambassador Deepak Mittal said he was "proud of Capt Smit for his bravery" and "very reassured" to meet him.

US President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that "the pilot was in very bad shape" but had the sense to open the cockpit door during the attack.

"Amazing, in a way he was a hero, to open the door. He was able to fall back and get the door open."

Additional reporting by Rorey Bosotti, Rachita Prasad and Meryl Sebastian

'He's taught us courage': Friend on Indian pilot hailed as a hero

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq33k36yp01no, 4 days ago

When Captain Dharav Gosalia first heard what had happened to his old friend Smit Machchhar, he had one immediate reaction.

"I had goosebumps."

The two men have known each other since they were about 20, when they were neighbours in Ghatkopar, a Mumbai suburb, and began their flying training in New Zealand.

Machchhar was Gosalia's senior. They later spent six years as colleagues at SpiceJet, flying Boeing 737s, before their careers took them in different directions. Machchhar moved to Dubai and joined Flydubai in 2022. Gosalia went on to fly Boeing 777s for Air India.

"We have been in touch with messages," Gosalia says. "If there are some routes we have to fly, we discuss destinations and family on WhatsApp and phone."

Sometimes their paths crossed in the air, too. In 2024, Gosalia was flying to London through Dubai airspace when he recognised Machchhar's voice on the radio. Machchhar was flying to Mumbai.

"We greeted each other," he recalls.

On Wednesday, Machchhar was captain of a Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv when another pilot attacked and stabbed him in the cockpit. The Boeing 737 Max was diverted to Tabuk in north-western Saudi Arabia, where Machchhar was taken to hospital.

He remains in a stable condition, according to the Indian embassy in Riyadh.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called Machchhar a "true hero", saying he saved the lives of 174 people and prevented a "catastrophic mid-air disaster".

For Gosalia, however, the man at the centre of the extraordinary incident is still "Smit Mac" – the nickname used by his friends and colleagues - and a "very brilliant person".

"Outgoing person, jovial. Very jovial," he adds.

They would meet during layovers in places such as Milan and Bangkok, and play tennis-ball cricket when they were back in Mumbai. Machchhar also helped younger pilots, teaching new recruits and passing on what he had learnt.

"He is a very disciplined flier," Gosalia says.

That discipline was reinforced by years of training, including from former Indian Air Force pilots who moved into commercial aviation.

"That training gives you more focus, more discipline, and more focus on motor skills," Gosalia says.

One part of that training, he says, is known among pilots as "chair flying": rehearsing an emergency procedure while sitting in a chair, mentally running through the sequence and moving your hands to where the relevant switches and controls would be in the cockpit.

The idea is to make those movements instinctive when something goes wrong and there is little time to think.

Machchhar had plenty of experience to draw on. He had more than 9,750 hours of flying experience, including more than 6,400 hours as pilot-in-command, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Gosalia says the exact sequence of Wednesday's confrontation will become clearer from the aircraft's flight data and cockpit recordings. But whatever happened inside the cockpit, he says, Machchhar had to make decisions under an extraordinary kind of pressure.

"What happened to him, what he did – he was the commander on the flight," Gosalia says.

For a pilot, there are procedures for an engine failure, a fire or a loss of cabin pressure. There is no conventional checklist for another person trying to overpower you in the cockpit.

And that, Gosalia says, is where courage matters.

"How much courage plays a role? A lot," he says. "This was a threat to life."

Then comes the thought that perhaps best explains why the incident has affected him so deeply.

"Smit has taught us courage. Now we will do the same thing if something like this happens."

Seoul warns 'further action' if Ukraine does not apologise over prisoner-of-war row

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm1dld14weero, 3 days ago

South Korea's President Lee Jae Myung has threatened to take unspecified "further action" if Ukraine does not issue a public apology for revealing that two North Korean prisoners of war had been sent to the South.

Ukraine's leader Volodymyr Zelensky made the disclosure to the UN general assembly last week, angering Seoul, who said the move was meant to stay secret.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha on Thursday described the situation as a "diplomatic misunderstanding", adding that Kyiv was "working" to resolve it.

Lee rejected this characterisation on X, saying it concerned "the dignity of the Korean people and the nation".

Lee's office said last week that it was Ukraine that requested for the move to be kept secret, partly to protect the North Koreans' families, and also because Kyiv wanted to avoid criticism that it had given up an opportunity to exchange the soldiers for Ukrainian prisoners of war.

Zelensky's office responded, saying the two countries had no such agreement to keep the move confidential, further escalating the situation.

Lee himself faced heavy criticism at home after Zelensky's disclosure, with the South Korean opposition accusing him of covering up the transfer to appease Pyongyang.

The two soldiers, who were among thousands of North Koreans supporting Russia in the Ukraine war, had earlier told local media they wanted to be sent to South Korea.

Speaking to Ukrainian media on Thursday, Sybiha, the foreign minister, said he "hopes that this situation will be resolved in the very near future".

"We are working on it. For us, South Korea is an important country. And I really hope for momentum, continuation, and concrete results that we are truly achieving with them," he said.

Lee, in response, accused Kyiv of attempting to "bring war on the Korean Peninsula".

"We express serious regret that, instead of acknowledging the facts of the agreement and apologising, they are talking about an imminent military clash between the North and South," he said in an X post.

Seoul has been sympathetic to Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion, but has adhered to its longstanding policy of not providing lethal weapons to any country engaged in active war.

K-pop star convicted of violating military service law

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjn5d52d3lk5o, 4 days ago

A South Korean court has handed a suspended one-year prison sentence to K-pop singer Song Min-ho after he was convicted of violating the country's military service law.

The 33-year-old member of the boy band Winner was found to have been absent multiple times at a community centre in Seoul, where he had worked as a social worker from 2023 to 2024.

All able-bodied men in South Korea have to serve at least 18 months in the military. But some are alternatively assigned as social service personnel for health reasons.

The prison sentence handed on Thursday is suspended for two years. That means he can avoid incarceration if he does not commit any crime during that two-year probationary period.

The court heard that Song, who is also known by his stage name Mino, had recorded 102 unauthorised absences during his 21-month stint as a social service agent.

Military service is a duty to be performed "faithfully", and social service agents are "no exception", the court said.

But the court also noted that Song had admitted to the charges and shown remorse.

Authorities launched an investigation into Song shortly after he was discharged in 2024, when local media reported that he was frequently absent from his social service duties and took excessive sick leave.

Song's supervisor at the social service centre was also given a suspended jail sentence for helping him dodge his duties, including falsifying records to make it look like Song had reported to work.

The conscription of South Korea's entertainers has long been a topic of national public debate.

Gangnam Style singer Psy famously had to enlist twice, once in 2003 and another time in 2007, after a Seoul court ruled that he had neglected his duties by continuing his showbiz activities during his first national service stint.

Steve Yoo, one of the country's biggest pop stars in the 1990s and early 2000s, was embroiled in a national scandal after he was found to have evaded military service in 2002. South Korean authorities banned him from the country after he renounced his citizenship and became a US national shortly before he was due to serve in the military.

Going on hiatus to serve in the military is often a threat for budding careers in South Korea's fast-moving entertainment industry. But the evasion of military service also comes with intense public scrutiny and legal repercussions.

Ahead of the ruling on Thursday, Song told reporters that he regretted his actions and was "sorry toward the people who gave me so much love", Seoul Economic Daily reported.

But he did not answer a question about whether he would re-enlist to serve the mandatory duty.

Australia investigating Flydubai co-pilot's links to country

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxly4nym57q9o, yesterday

Australian authorities are investigating the links between the country and a Flydubai co-pilot who attempted to take control of a plane travelling to Israel.

The co-pilot is alleged to have attacked the captain with a crash axe during a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv before passengers managed to overpower him and successfully take control of the plane.

The Australian authorities have not identified the co-pilot, who has been named by multiple media outlets including Reuters, CNN and The New York Times as Hamam al-Hammami.

The prosecutor in the UAE has said it is investigating the incident and any possible motives.

In a statement to the BBC, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) confirmed its investigation into "the man's links to Australia".

The investigation involves state police and the country's security agency, it said, adding that an update would be "provided at the appropriate time".

Sources familiar with the case, who have spoken to Australian media, have said the co-pilot was issued a student visa in 2014, and studied in Australia between 2015 and 2017, until he left the country.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) said the co-pilot's student visa was cancelled in 2019 as he was no longer enrolled in a course, making him ineligible for it.

Counter-terrorism officials will look at whether the man was radicalised in Australia, the ABC reported.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he was an Omani national.

The flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv on 30 September was carrying more than 170 passengers to Israel.

Two and a half hours into its journey, the plane plunged 17,000ft (5,200m) when the Omani co-pilot attacked the pilot with a crash axe, the United Arab Emirates prosecutor general has said.

The pilot flying the plane, Capt Smit Machchhar, described how he was lying on the floor injured when he realised the plane was sinking and he had to act, explaining: "I told myself to go for one last push to open the door from inside", which allowed the passengers in.

Two reserve pilots then landed the plane safely in Saudi Arabia.

Machchhar, an Indian national, was taken to a nearby hospital before being airlifted to Abu Dhabi, where he is reported to be in a stable condition.

The co-pilot was arrested after the emergency landing and is being questioned by Saudi authorities, according to Netanyahu.

The UAE's attorney general, Hamad Saif Al Shamsi, said on Saturday investigations were under way to establish the circumstances, motives and any links related to the incident.

He said investigations into the incident revealed that the co-pilot attempted to carry out a "terrorist act", according to the country's state news agency.

In the days since the attack more details have come to light about the co-pilot's employment history.

It is also known that, from 2020, he was studying on a distance-learning course run by Buckinghamshire New University in the UK.

He graduated with a degree in aviation management in 2023, the university said. It added he did not take any pilot training at the school.

The Frenemy: How Australia navigates superpower rivalry

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c61wxyzr4rwyo, 7 days ago

Snipers shatter the silence of the Australian bush. Then the missiles hit, the smoke rising in the distance. The buzz of drones starts up, soon to be drowned out by helicopters flying overhead.

Every piece of hardware is being deployed, no expense spared. But this is no war zone – the last time Townsville saw conflict was during World War Two. This is a show of military might.

" We live in a volatile world," says Australian Army Brigadier Ben McLennan.

"Training an army to be prepared to fight a war that is potentially more likely than it has been previously, [is] very important."

War is no longer an abstract concept for Australians who often feel removed from the problems facing other parts of the world. Thousands of miles from active conflict, the country, like everywhere else, is facing the knock-on effects of Iran and Ukraine such as higher fuel prices and rising inflation.

With China's military capabilities also on the rise and its increasing influence in the Pacific, there's also more concern about the threat it represents. Australia has responded by deepening its relationship with the US, its security ally and China's rival superpower.

But that also puts Australia in a tricky position - for China's rise has also given Australia its biggest trading partner.

It's a paradox that most people are well aware of - which is probably why we've been invited to report on what Australia is doing to protect itself but nobody is willing to say whom they're preparing to fight.

"We're rehearsing for a war - the worst type of war - a World War Two-like war, a World War One-type war, a total war," says Brigadier McLennan, preferring to remain vague when asked who the enemy is.

Binding tighter to the US

The war scenario playing out before us is part of a major joint exercise known as "Southern Jackaroo" - a training programme involving the Australian, American and Japanese armed forces aimed at strengthening defence co-operation across the Indo-Pacific.

"We like to call ourselves America's 911 response force," US Marine Kevin Hicks says.

And in terms of numbers, they are more prepared than ever. In 2012, just 200 US Marines were deployed to Australia for an annual six-month deployment. Today, that figure has risen to around 2,500.

A quick read of Australia's 2026 National Defence Strategy gives you an easy answer as to why these numbers are growing.

"Intense competition between major powers – principally the United States and China – will be an enduring feature of our strategic environment," it said.

"China continues to undertake the largest military build-up in the world today, without the transparency or strategic reassurance the region expects."

The military tie-ups aren't just being seen in terms of troops but in bases too - most obviously in the north of the country such as RAAF Tindal air base in the Northern Territory which has been upgraded to support long-range American B52 bombers.

But the security partnership between the US, the UK and Australia - Aukus - arming Australia with nuclear submarines, is arguably the biggest example of deepening ties.

The Australian approach differs from that of its fellow middle powers. While Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney has talked about middle powers reorganising their priorities in light of an increasingly unreliable US, Australia seems to be intent on tying itself ever closer.

But that comes as Australians themselves increasingly doubt their relationship with the US.

"Only 31% of Australians trust the United States to act responsibly in the world, and a mere 28% of Australians trust China to do the same," says Charles Lyons-Jones, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute, citing their annual poll.

"Those are striking findings when you consider the level of trust that the Australian government has with the United States."

The 'frenemy'

While Australia's alliance with the US is changing, so too is its relationship with China.

Armed forces might be prepping for a potential military conflict but the fact remains China is Australia's most important economic partner.

Australia and China have had diplomatic relations since 1972 but it was only in the early 2010s that China became Australia's biggest trading partner, hungry for all the commodities it had to offer.

Australia opened up its economy and encouraged business and trade, Chinese President Xi Jinping was invited to address parliament. And it culminated in the signing of a free trade agreement in 2015.

The golden era didn't last long though. When Australia suggested an investigation into the origins of Covid in 2020, China objected to this line of questioning and retaliated with tariffs.

And then in 2021, Australia became the first nation to perform a U-turn on China's Belt and Road Initiative - its massive global infrastructure plan - when they cancelled the state of Victoria's agreement with the Chinese government three years after signing up.

A number of Australians have also been detained in China, including journalist Cheng Lei, who was released in 2023 after more than three years.

Relations have improved in recent years under the Labor government of Anthony Albanese, but it's not without challenges.

In June this year for example, China slapped 55% tariffs on beef to protect its own domestic market - despite the free trade agreement.

Even with these hiccups, this year's Lowy Institute Poll found that a majority of Australians (61%) saw China more as an economic partner than a security threat. That was an 11-point increase from last year. When it comes to China investing in Australia though, they are more wary.

"There are a number of European countries which are larger investors in Australia than China, and that is because our jurisdictions are much more similar, and there is a greater level of trust between our governments," says Lyons-Jones.

This year's Lowy Institute Poll also showed that for the first time, a majority of Australians (51%) believed that Australia's relationship with China was more important than its relationship with the US.

Rise and fall of superpowers

Earlier this month, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd – a fluent Mandarin speaker - gave an address in which he talked of "radical changes" now reshaping Australia's national security, including "the rise and rise of China at a time when America continues to debate what sort of global power it wants to be".

Dr Marina Yue Zhang, an Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney agrees Australia's relationship with its closest ally is changing.

"The US is really doing something dramatic and more and more people in Australia - and I think globally - have realised 'is this the big brother we can all trust and put all our faith in?' " she says.

But old rivalries live on. With Australia caught between two superpowers, every exchange between their leaders carries weight. And in Beijing earlier this year, when Xi met Trump, the Chinese president invoked the idea of the "Thucydides Trap", the theory that conflict can become almost inevitable when a rising power challenges an established one.

"This is, if not the transition of great powers, at least [it's] power struggles of great powers, says Zhang.

And in that competition, Australia is inevitably affected. The US is a security ally that while more unreliable than in the past is still its mainstay. But economically so too is China. It's not an either/or relationship, it's a balancing act.

"There's no way Australia will choose one side and [dump] the other- it's not in their interests," Zhang says.

"It's getting harder and harder to maintain, but Australia has to do it."

Why Australia chose the world's biggest political stage to reveal OpenAI hack

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr3eqk15ld14o, 11 days ago

Australia made a dramatic revelation on Wednesday during the United Nations General Assembly.

Rogue AI agents had hacked one of its government bodies - the first known incident of its kind in the world. Private data, but not sensitive information, was taken from Medicare, Australia's universal healthcare scheme.

The breach happened in June, but OpenAI says it only became aware of it in August - and then took until 10 September to alert Australia's government, by sending an email to an address used by researchers and academics to alert authorities to concerns of vulnerabilities.

While worrying, the timing of the incident is somewhat of a gift for Australia.

A middle power that doesn't usually get as much of a platform as its influential allies, the country wants to be seen as punching above its weight on one of the most defining issues of our time - big tech regulation.

In the past year alone, it has implemented the world's strictest social media ban, announced what it says are the world's strongest algorithm controls, floated the possibility of "world-leading" limits on smart glasses, and is now the first government to confront AI firms over a rogue attack on its data.

It's entirely possible other governments have been the victim of rogue AI agents.

Former Australian government cybersecurity adviser Alastair MacGibbon told the BBC he'd heard whispers that several others have been notified of similar recent breaches by OpenAI agents.

"Some have chosen to not be public – that's every government's choice on how it wants to handle these things," he said. "The [Australian] government chose a time to release this to gain maximum publicity which is their wont to do."

Revealing a data breach can of course be a risky strategy for governments - it leaves them vulnerable to criticism that their security systems aren't up to scratch. But the fact that no sensitive information was leaked put Australia in a stronger position to use the incident.

"Nobody has died," says the University of Queensland's associate professor Michael Noetel, who studies AI risks. "This is another canary in the coal mine. This sort of loss-of-control incident, even though it's minor now, is what CEOs are worried about getting worse over time."

Though Australia has made a name for itself by taking a stand against social media companies, taking up the AI mantle now is another way for Australia to rein in big tech, says Tama Leaver, professor of internet studies at Curtin University in Perth.

"It's impossible to say for sure, but it seems incredibly likely that this was very carefully planned."

The fact that leaders were all together in New York this week has probably helped.

Albanese says he had a "frank" discussion with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to express Australia's "extreme concern" about what happened. Altman acknowledged "issues with protocols" at OpenAI, he said.

The Australian leader also posed with Donald Trump for a selfie - and the two may have had face-to-face talks. But Australia risks the ire of the US president, who wants to encourage AI, "not rein it in", and even rename it "super intelligence".

Earlier this week, Albanese had to deflect criticism from the Trump administration over his government's proposal to give users the ability to opt out of social media algorithms. The US said it amounted to "censorship of protected speech".

Back home, Australia's very own eSafety commission is currently arming itself with lawyers, preparing to take on social media platforms objecting to its social media law for under 16s.

Australia isn't popular with big tech. But its bold policies on social media and internet safety have been largely supported among Australians themselves, especially parents.

The government is taking advantage of the hack to position itself as a leader on one of the biggest talking points of our time. And it's wasting no time in using the incident to advance the country's broader crusade.

Within hours of the announcement, Communications Minister Anika Wells told reporters: "This is an example of an unregulated industry where big tech clearly feels like they can do whatever they like, and that's not going to wash here in Australia."

Lost songs from iconic Australian rockstar found in garage

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmrl6ylzy4zxo, 6 days ago

More than a decade after her death, the voice of Australian rock icon Chrissy Amphlett will be heard like never before after three lost songs were discovered in a garage.

The trailblazing frontwoman of rock band Divinyls, Amphlett's trademark husky voice and charismatic stage presence brought the world the 1990 number one track I Touch Myself as well as earlier hits Pleasure and Pain (1985) and Boys in Town (1981).

Years before her 2013 death, Amphlett recorded three songs with Tim Finn, former lead singer of New Zealand's Split Enz, in 1998. The tracks were thought to be lost until Finn found them in his garage in 2023.

On Friday, the songs will be released on an EP titled Some Times.

In an interview with Australian Story, a documentary programme by national broadcaster ABC, Finn recalled the 1998 recording session with Amphlett in Sydney.

"It was a good time for us to meet because she was looking for something new, something different in her life musically," Finn said.

Around that time, Amphlett had split from fellow band member, guitarist Mark McEntee after a tumultuous relationship and was growing close to drummer Charley Drayton, according to the documentary. The pair would later marry.

Over several days, Finn and Amphlett wrote a trio of songs and headed into the studio to record them, with Drayton on the drums.

"She was so focused," Finn said. "She just wanted to get it right... I was in the presence of great talent, great charisma."

In a social media post on Monday about the 1998 session, Finn said he had reached out to Amphlett having been a great admirer of her work.

"We hadn't met previously but instantly felt a bond, a camaraderie of shared history as ex-lead singers of two brilliant bands," Finn wrote on Monday.

When the session wrapped up, Finn took the recordings home and planned to work on it, but "they were never fully realised".

In 2023, Drayton contacted Finn, about the 1998 recordings.

"I thought they were lost to the universe but remarkably found the two-inch tape in my garage," Finn wrote in the post, describing the songs as "incredibly important to me, Charley and those close to Chrissy".

"It was still in perfect condition and we are now able to share these songs with you."

Plan for controversial Sydney data centre scrapped after push-back

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6n9wrqpj4yqo, 7 days ago

Plans for a data centre which would have been built metres from people's homes in a Sydney suburb have been scrapped following intense push-back by campaigners.

The data centre was being developed by Goodman Group, Australia's biggest property company, and would have seen it construct a A$1.2bn (£630m; $841m), 90-megawatt facility known as Project Mars in the Lane Cove area.

The company confirmed it was withdrawing its application in a letter to the local planning authority. It follows a concerted opposition against the data centre by local residents and campaigners.

The dispute captures a wider disagreement in Australia over the role of data centres.

With the mainstreaming of generative AI in recent years, there has been a huge swell in demand for data centres, and Australia - with its abundance of clean energy, natural gas reserves, and land - has become a global destination for their construction.

However, while the country's government has been keen to attract investment from global AI companies, there has also been stiff opposition due to the huge demands the centres place on water and energy supplies, and the disruption they cause local communities.

The proposal for Project Mars, which would have been constructed about 20 metres from the nearest house in the suburb of Lane Cove, received 374 submissions during a consultation - with just nine in support of it.

According to local news website In the Cove, this is highest number of submissions ever received for a data centre application.

In its letter to New South Wales Department of Planning, Goodman Group said since starting the planning process in March 2025, it had "undertaken extensive technical investigations, stakeholder engagement and community consultation".

"During this time, the policy and regulatory environment for large-scale data centre development has evolved significantly," it said.

It said it had "carefully considered these changes" along with the "views of the local community", and concluded it would not proceed with the development.

The decision by Goodman Group follows an announcement by the New South Wales government last month that it would be introducing a fast-track programme for data centres.

The programme would allow them to be assessed within 75 days, provided they meet requirements around certain standards and fund the additional supply of water and energy.

In a message posted to the Facebook page of Lane Cove Responsible Planning Group, Anthony Roberts, a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly representing Lane Cove, said it was "a huge win for the Lane Cove West community".

"This is a common-sense win for our community," he said.

"This victory sends a clear message to other data centre developers. To find suitable locations before putting proposals forward.

"Data centres have an important role to play, but developments of this size and scale need to be appropriately located and planned with the surrounding community in mind."

British rapper Yung Filly to face rape retrial in Australia next June

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmj643pd4e11o, 10 days ago

British rapper Yung Filly will face a rape retrial in Australia next June after a jury failed to reach a verdict during an earlier trial.

In July, a jury acquitted the 31-year-old - whose real name is Andres Felipe Valencia Barrientos - of three counts of rape, one of assault and one of strangulation but found him guilty of two assault charges. No decision was reached for three rape charges, which he has denied.

A fan, aged 20 at the time, alleges Barrientos repeatedly raped and assaulted her in his hotel room in Perth, Western Australia, after a 2024 concert.

The court previously heard that Barrientos and the woman had consensual sex before she alleged it turned violent and he refused to stop.

On Friday, Perth's District Court set 15 June as the start date for the retrial which is expected to last eight days.

Barrientos was not required to appear in court and is understood to have returned to the UK after the court granted him permission to leave Australia as part of his bail conditions.

Sentencing for the two assault charges that the jury found Barrientos guilty of in July will take place after the retrial.

Barrientos, who was born in Colombia and brought up in the UK, is known for his work with the YouTube collective Beta Squad.

He has appeared in the celebrity version of Bake Off on Channel 4 and presented BBC Three shows.

Kyiv bridge hit in further Russian drone attack as German chancellor makes surprise visit

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

Major bridges in Kyiv have been hit by Russian drone strikes for four consecutive days, as Moscow ramps up attacks on critical infrastructure in Ukraine's capital.

Two people were injured when the Pivnichnyi (Northern) Bridge was struck on Sunday morning for the second day in a row, while the Pivdennyi (Southern) Bridge was hit multiple times earlier in the week.

The latest attack came as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz made a surprise visit to Kyiv in a show of support against Russia's continuing full-scale invasion.

Russia's military said it would be intensifying strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian regions. It earlier said it had hit the two bridges used to transfer Ukrainian troops.

Video footage of Sunday's strike, verified by the BBC, shows cars moving on Pivnichnyi Bridge as a drone crashes into it before exploding, creating a ball of fire. A cloud of black smoke can be seen rising above the bridge.

Other videos and pictures have emerged on social media showing a gaping hole in the middle of a traffic lane on the bridge.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said two people were injured in the latest Russian attack. He earlier said that the Pivnichnyi Bridge's roadway was hit.

Kyiv's eight bridges across the wide Dnipro River link the western (right) and eastern (left) parts, and many of the capital's estimated three million residents rely heavily on the metro lines and trains to travel across the city.

Some 500,000 vehicles use the bridges every day.

The two struck bridges are still standing - but the damage and restrictions to traffic and public transport have caused gridlock in parts of the capital at times.

"To get from the left bank to the right one and back - it's just hell," Kyiv resident Roman told the BBC on Sunday.

Large numbers of commuters cross the river, especially on weekdays. Repair teams are working to fix the damage and officials say they are planning temporary pontoon bridges, ferry services and even a tunnel under the river to keep Kyiv connected.

Klitschko also said a separate Russian drone strike had damaged a heating main, adding that there would be a temporary lack of hot water in the north-eastern Desnyanskyi district as a result.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy said on Sunday morning Russian drones had also attacked a warehouse in the north-eastern region of Sumy, killing one person.

Meanwhile, in the central city of Dnipro, six people were injured after a communications facility was struck, he said.

Ukraine's Air Force said that overnight Russia had launched 135 drones, including 52 jet-powered ones. It said that 125 projectiles had been shot down.

As emergency services responded to the incidents, Germany's Merz met Zelenksy in Kyiv. They laid wreaths to Ukrainian soldiers who have been killed in the war.

Merz reaffirmed his country's support for Ukraine, writing on X: "Ukraine is facing decisive weeks. That is why I travelled to Kyiv today with the message: You can rely on us.

"Germany's security also depends on the outcome of this war. That is why we are helping out of our own self-interest as well."

Zelensky later said that a new aid package worth more than €1.3bn (£1.1bn; $1.5bn) had been agreed with Germany.

"These are weapons that will help [us] right now, as well as support for our energy sector ahead of winter," he said.

As Merz was visiting Ukraine's Academy of Sciences building badly damaged in a Russian drone attack earlier this week, fresh air alert sirens were heard across the city. Two people were killed in that drone attack.

Since Merz became chancellor in May 2025, Germany has become the single largest donor to Ukraine.

He said the country "needs all our support in the coming weeks", adding: "If Russia is not stopped, its war machine will sooner or later turn against us."

Zelensky said there would be "important agreements" made between Ukraine and Germany.

The Ukrainian president has made repeated appeals for Western allies to provide more military support to the country, including supplying advanced interceptors that can shoot down new jet-powered Russian drones and also ballistic missiles.

The Russian defence ministry said on Sunday it would intensify its strikes across Ukraine in response to comments made by Zelensky earlier this week, in which he said Kyiv would ramp up its attacks on Russian oil refineries.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had earlier said his military was carrying out retaliatory attacks following Ukraine's strikes on Moscow's energy facilities, despite the fact that it was the Kremlin that had first launched such attacks.

Putin began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and Moscow currently controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory.

The Russian foreign ministry on Saturday repeated a warning for foreign citizens, including diplomats, to leave Kyiv.

Responding to the warning, EU ambassador Katarína Mathernová wrote on X on Sunday: "The EU Delegation is staying. Threatening us will not stop Europe's support for Ukraine. It only reminds us why that support matters!"

German ambassador to Ukraine, Boris Ruge, reacted to Mathernova's post with: "Amen - we're staying".

Earlier attacks on the Pivdennyi Bridge prompted Kyiv's defence council to hold a crisis meeting on Friday.

Klitschko warned that the city was now in a "very dramatic situation" as Moscow was battering its "critical infrastructure, logistics, housing" and other key facilities.

Experts say Russian drones are unlikely to bring down the bridges - but repeated attacks will force their closure and risk weakening their structure, making them unusable.

School protests send shivers down French government's spine

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c69wzjjxex8po, 3 days ago

It is a piece of wisdom that all French leaders take care to heed: young people on the street equals trouble.

Since the student protests of May 1968 – memorably described by President De Gaulle as chienlit (bed defecation, in other words chaos) – every government has run scared of angry French youth.

Why? Because youth movements are unpredictable and shapeless, often with no clear structure to negotiate with. Because when they protest, other groups join in.

Also: because as they're young, the public tends to sympathise. And because if the police mess up and cause injury or worse, then the consequences are incalculable. And presidential elections are only months away.

For all these reasons, when la jeunesse en colère (angry youth) is at the barricades governments tread very carefully indeed.

Right now, French teenagers are at the barricades and if they are not visibly angry (the mood is more excitement), they certainly have the government of President Emmanuel Macron in what Le Monde called on Friday "the cold sweats".

A movement that started nearly two weeks ago in the low-income Seine-Saint-Denis area of northern Paris has in the last few days spread across the country.

On Thursday – the high point so far – hundreds of lycées (where 15-18 year-olds finish their schooling) were being blockaded. On Friday, the situation had improved but around 400 lycées were closed in order to protect staff and students. Universities are beginning to join in.

Violence has erupted. On Thursday the main hall of a lycée in Nantes was destroyed by fire. Smaller fires too numerable to mention were lit at school entrance gates around the country. The cost of the damage is millions of euros.

According to Education Minister Édouard Geffray, 65 teaching staff including 40 school heads have been injured. "Most of the staff who were hurt said that the people they were facing… were not their own pupils," he said.

In addition, the government says that around 300 police and firefighters have been treated for injuries, and some 2,000 people – mainly minors – taken into custody. For their part, student groups say they have a long list of people injured by police. Two teenagers have serious eye injuries and one has lost many of his teeth.

The problem would be hard enough if it was just a question of meeting the protesters' demands. But there is another dimension – a political and social one – which makes this student crisis far more dangerous than in the past.

The demands do exist, even if they remain vague. They are about money – the lack of it – and the need for more teachers, smaller classes and better buildings.

On such matters, many in France would agree with the teenagers. Certainly using protest to demand money from government is such a national habit that even governments agree it's legitimate. And of course, things are indeed getting worse in the education system – because money is so tight.

This week Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu published his draft for next year's budget. The motif is "More cuts – and this time we're serious!"

Whether or not he manages to remove €54bn (£46bn) from state spending, as he promises, remains open to question.

But it is surely obvious that the era of public largesse to defuse social unrest in France is now in its twilight. Students demanding an extra school nurse or insulation in the dining-block are likely to be disappointed.

But that is the lesser of the worries.

The far greater fear is that these student protests are being manipulated by the hard left – and that the violence of recent days is a foretaste of what awaits a dangerously polarised society in the year of elections that is coming.

For the right and centre, there is no doubt that behind the student trouble lies the cunning hand of the France Unbowed party (LFI) and its popular presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

LFI leaders have regularly appeared next to the students – notably in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis whose mayor Bally Bagayoko was criticised for saying that "violence can sometimes be legitimate."

An internal report prepared for the Paris police department which was leaked to the media analysed the opening of the movement in Seine-Saint-Denis. It concluded that students were being "egged on by far-left elements from students unions… and political groups such as… LFI."

It said the tensions "could be part of a flame-kindling strategy… aimed at imposing their ideas ahead of the national elections".

In support of its conclusion, the report's writers cited the presence of protesters who are not themselves lycéens, the vagueness of the demands, the flying of Palestinian and Algerian flags, and the use of tactics – like calling for supplementary protests at police-stations - that come from the radical-left playbook.

The LFI strongly denies doing anything more than lending its natural support to a movement it regards as legitimate. On Thursday Mélenchon called on students to avoid violence "which only serves our enemies' interests".

But his opponents believe that the 75-year-old veteran – who stands a good chance of making it to the second round of the presidential elections in May, probably against the hard-right's Marine Le Pen – knows exactly what he is doing.

Polls show he has massive support – some 40% -- among 18-24 year-olds in France, and that this is concentrated in the populous, high-immigration city suburbs where his talk of a "new France" and "creolisation", to reflect France's changing language and population, are highly appreciated.

But young people are also the biggest abstainers in French elections, so the strategy – as the elections approach – will be to give constant reminders to this part of the population that the LFI is at their side, and that their vote can count.

Whether this will be enough to ensure victory for Mélenchon is another matter. He must surely take seriously the polls which all show him losing massively in a run-off against Le Pen.

If that happens, France will be in very unstable territory - for which the young people's protests of recent days will indeed have been a harbinger.

Putin warns West that Russia is ready to use every weapon to protect Kaliningrad

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqg7k7v499jjo, 4 days ago

Vladimir Putin has said Russia will use all weapons at his disposal if it considers its Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad to have come under direct attack.

The Russian president insisted that Moscow was "not threatening anyone" and merely responding to statements by Western leaders that it was preparing for war in 2029 or 2030.

Throughout this week, Russia has accused Nato of preparing to blockade its territory, which borders Lithuania and Poland, warning that it would even be prepared to use nuclear weapons if the West tried to cut off Kaliningrad from the rest of Russia.

Nato has sought to calm the situation, stressing that it was a defensive alliance and urging Moscow to stop its "nuclear threats".

Western allies have faced a surge in so-called hybrid warfare incidents blamed on Russia, particularly in Poland and the Baltics in recent months.

Last week alone, Poland said a Russian helicopter had strayed into its territory adjacent to Kaliningrad and Lithuania said its population felt "constantly threatened" by Russia, in part because of drones entering the nation's airspace.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Thursday that his country was preparing for further hybrid attacks, "including serious ones", after a drone armed with explosives was found in August on the tarmac at Leipzig airport close to Ukrainian cargo planes.

In a wide-ranging speech at the Valdai foreign policy forum, Putin told his audience that he believed that international conflicts were highly likely to continue, but would get better as "Western hegemony" weakened.

Although the Russian leader himself began the full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022, he again blamed the West for provoking the invasion, arguing that Moscow had simply been forced to defend itself and take up arms.

He also insisted that Russia's attacks on Ukrainian economic targets were a direct response to Ukraine's strikes on Russia's oil refineries and its ships in the Black Sea.

"Now from every direction we're receiving calls 'let's stop'. But they started it," he said.

Putin admitted Kyiv had "got some results" from its refinery attacks and Russia had lost about 1% of its GDP. Ukraine maintains it began attacking Russian oil infrastructure because it helped the Kremlin finance the war.

Russia has targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure, ramping up attacks every winter since the war in Ukraine started in 2022. Other civilian infrastructure is also regularly hit, with a key bridge in Kyiv attacked by drones on Thursday.

Putin also accused the West of instigating other conflicts.

"If it comes to a direct attack on the Russian Federation, in this case we are talking about Kaliningrad but possibly some other territories, of course the issue of use by the Russian Federation of all arms at the disposal of our country will inevitably and immediately be on the agenda," he said.

He accused Nato of holding naval manoeuvres in the Baltic Sea that he argued represented serious threats to Kaliningrad. If the territory came under Western blockade, he said Russia would be prepared to use all means and forces, including nuclear.

"We are not threatening anyone. We do not intend to attack anyone in 2029, in 2030, in 2050. But if we come across an aggression we will have to respond. Citizens of European countries should be fully aware of that."

He added that while he was aware of the nuclear capabilities of countries such as the UK and France, the weapons at its disposal were unparalleled.

Western officials have long feared that, rather than invading Kaliningrad, Russia would use the relatively small distance between the exclave and ally Belarus - known as the Suwalki Gap - were it to attempt to seize Lithuanian territory by force.

Lithuania's prime minister told the BBC last week that his country had made evacuation plans in case Russia invaded and thousands of Nato troops are stationed there.

Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte made clear on Wednesday that none of the alliance's "exercises or activities" posed any threat to Moscow and that the Kremlin's messaging was "absolutely not called for and not helpful".

Putin spent some time talking about leading countries in the world having armaments at their disposal that could "swipe away all life or at least push the Earth to catastrophic consequences", and said that unfortunately no-one could be sure they would never be used.

He drew the analogy of a gun sitting on a theatre stage - if it was hanging there at the start of the show, it would certainly be fired at the end.

He appeared to call for the rules of warfare to be rewritten and warned of the increasing risk of artificial intelligence.

"The automation and digitalisation of warfare leads to its gamification. This leads to degradation and sliding back of humanity to barbarity," he said.

'Anger in the streets': Tens of thousands protest in Spain over housing crisis

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2kej47095no, yesterday

Tens of thousands of people have protested across Spain calling for greater protections for tenants after the government failed to pass emergency housing legislation.

About 50 marches took place on Saturday in cities including Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona.

"There is a lot of anger in the streets," a spokesperson for the Valencia Tenants' Union said. Clashes have taken place between some protesters and police in the city.

The measures put forward by Pedro Sánchez's leftist coalition government on Friday followed public outcry over the eviction of an 87-year-old woman from her home last month after she was unable to afford a sharp rent increase.

Her eviction triggered nationwide protests across Spain with protesters demanding lower rents, an end to evictions, and a ban on investment funds - or "vulture funds" as the government has termed them - buying property.

Sanchez's defeat in Congress on Friday heightens speculation that he might call an early general election, which was not due until next summer.

His coalition government, made up of his ruling Socialist party and junior partner the Sumar alliance, does not command a majority in parliament.

Photographs showed protesters in the east coast city of Valencia clashing with police officers on Saturday near arts centre Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, which was hosting a real estate summit.

Several protesters removed barriers and threw objects at officers, who responded with rubber bullets, Spanish media reported. Public broadcaster RTVE said nine police officers were injured and five people were arrested.

One of the biggest demonstration happened in the capital, Madrid, where estimates of the number of participants varied widely. The city's Tenants' Union said there were 500,000, while officials put the figure at 70,000.

Demonstrators held banners reading "There won't be peace for rentism" and "I study to have a future, not to have a tiny apartment". They shook the keys they were holding and chanted: "We have the keys of all the city".

Some had also camped in one of the city's main squares, Puerta del Sol, for days.

One protester, David, told RTVE ahead of the protest: "We're not here for pleasure or comfort. We're here out of conviction."

Another protester, 26-year-old librarian Marcos Sainz, told AFP news agency that he used to share a two-bedroom flat with friends, paying 900 euros (£766) a month in rent. Today, he said a one-bedroom flat often costs 1,000 euros.

Sainz said he would protest against rent rises "until someone dares to regulate it all", or "we'll all have to leave Madrid".

Spanish police said they had arrested three members of a far-right group, some of whom had performed Nazi salutes, as they tried to reach demonstrators in the square.

On Friday night, Madrid's Tenants' Union said that although the government's proposed measures were insufficient, the rejection of the proposed legislation "exacerbates the housing crisis which is costing the working class their lives".

It is calling for a general strike over the housing crisis.

The legislation put forward in Congress on Friday was divided into two decrees.

The second decree included the automatic renewal of rental contracts, a major demand of many on the left and the Tenants' Union.

MPs rejected the first decree by 178 votes to 172 and voted against the second by 184 to 166.

Prior to the vote, the conservative People's Party (PP) and far-right Vox had already said they would vote against both initiatives, leaving the minority government depending on the support of smaller nationalist parties in Catalonia and the Basque Country.

However, by the eve of the parliamentary session, the centre-right, pro-independence Together for Catalonia (JxCat) had signalled its opposition to both laws, condemning them to failure.

Sánchez's ruling coalition hurriedly drew up the decree laws in an effort to defuse the housing protests that were sparked when 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal was evicted in September.

The social backlash led to the company that owns Abascal's flat, Urbagestión, negotiating her return to the flat on a low rent. However, protests have continued.

The Bank of Spain estimates the country is short of 700,000 homes, based on the gap between demand and new construction.

House prices have risen by 12.2% in the past year, according to figures for the second quarter of 2026 from national statistics institute INE.

The shortage in rental housing means that costs rose by 8.5% in 2025, according to real estate firm Idealista, with Madrid alone seeing an increase of 9.7% in rents.

It said Barcelona and Madrid were Spain's most expensive cities to rent a home, at €23.80 per square metre and €22.70 per square metre respectively.

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Russia hits second major bridge in Ukraine's capital Kyiv

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c83vqxzdg1yko, yesterday

A Russian strike has hit a second major bridge in Kyiv, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko has said, as Moscow ramps up attacks on critical infrastructure in Ukraine's capital.

The attack on Saturday morning injured two people, and damaged the road surface and overhead trolleybus wires on the Pivnichnyi (Northern) Bridge, Klitschko said, causing traffic jams.

It comes after the Pivdennyi (Southern) Bridge was hit multiple times by Russian drones this week, with Klitschko warning that "the enemy is tearing Kyiv apart".

Russia said its drones had hit the two bridges used to transfer Ukrainian troops and military cargo. Moscow again urged foreign citizens, including diplomats, to leave Kyiv.

The two Kyiv bridges across the Dnipro River link the western and eastern parts of the capital and had not been hit before Thursday.

The Russian strikes have severed road, rail and trolleybus links across the wide river. The ongoing drone threat means restrictions on other routes, bringing traffic jams to the city's roads for a second day - though Friday's gridlock has not been repeated to the same level.

Many of the city's residents - which number about three million - rely on the metro to travel across the city every day. The fear is this new Russian tactic will result in sustained attacks which could effectively cut the city in two.

Writing on Telegram on Saturday morning, Klitschko said "emergency services are on their way" after the Pivnichnyi Bridge was hit.

"Traffic on the bridge from the left to the right bank is currently blocked," he added.

Earlier attacks on the Pivdennyi Bridge prompted Kyiv's defence council to hold a crisis meeting on Friday.

Klitschko warned afterwards that the city was now in a "very dramatic situation" as Moscow was battering its "critical infrastructure, logistics, housing" and other key facilities.

Experts say Russian drones are unlikely to bring down the bridges - but repeated attacks will force their closure and risk weakening their structure, making them unusable.

More powerful weapons could collapse the bridges, some of which are reported to be in poor condition after years carrying heavier traffic than they were designed for.

It was reported that Ukrainian lawmakers discussed the state of Kyiv's bridges in a recent meeting, setting out contingency plans to use ferries or temporary pontoon bridges to keep the city connected in the event of any bridges being destroyed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Russia is acting in response to Ukraine's strikes on Russian energy facilities, despite the fact that it was Moscow that had first launched such attacks.

After the Pivdennyi Bridge was attacked, passengers described how dust from a blast wave entered their carriage through the ventilation system.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Putin had decided that there were "no rules now" when attacking Ukraine.

In an interview with the Financial Times, he said: "The Russians have failed to occupy us. So now they are carrying out massive attacks and mass killings."

He added: "They want to destroy our bridges... our data centres, the internet, mobile networks, hospitals, kindergartens, schools, universities - everything. They want people to flee their cities."

Putin on Thursday insisted that Russia's attacks on Ukrainian economic targets were a direct response to Ukraine's strikes on Russia's oil refineries and its ships in the Black Sea.

"Now from every direction we're receiving calls 'let's stop'. But they started it," Putin said after a wide-ranging speech at the Valdai foreign policy forum.

The Kremlin leader admitted Kyiv had "got some results" from its refinery attacks and Russia had lost about 1% of its GDP. Ukraine maintains it began attacking Russian oil infrastructure because it helps the Kremlin finance the war.

Russia has targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure, ramping up attacks every winter since Putin launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022.

In other developments on Saturday:

* A sailor on a Liberia-flagged civilian ship was killed and another three crew members injured in a Russian attack on Ukraine's Black Sea port in the Odesa region, the Ukrainian port authorities said

* At least 12 people were injured in overnight Russian strikes on Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Kyiv regions, local officials said

* Two people were killed and three injured in a Ukrainian drone attack in the country's eastern Luhansk region occupied by Russia, the Moscow-installed regional head said

* Moldova, Ukraine's south-western neighbour, summoned the Russian ambassador after saying that five Russian drones and missiles had crossed its border and exploded near "several localities in four districts". No injuries were reported

Spanish PM Sánchez loses key housing crisis vote after eviction of woman, 87

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c623dlk4y75mo, 3 days ago

Spain's Congress has rejected a series of measures aimed at tackling the country's housing crisis, in a defeat for the government of Pedro Sánchez that increases pressure on him to call a snap election.

Lawmakers voted on two decree-laws presented by the government in response to nationwide protests that have followed the eviction of an 87-year-old woman, Maricarmen Abascal, from her home.

The decrees, which introduced a series of initiatives aimed at protecting tenants in the rental market, required parliamentary approval in order to remain in place.

MPs rejected the first decree by 178 votes to 172 and voted against the second by 184 to 166.

Hundreds of demonstrators had gathered outside Congress as the debate took place and there were angry scenes.

Protesters chanted "shame on you" and "your profits, our misery", after the results were announced.

The government's defeat underlines the fact that Sánchez, a Socialist, does not command a congressional majority and it has heightened speculation that he might call an early general election, which was not due until next summer.

Sources told Spanish media that the government would spend the weekend deciding its next step, and whether to dissolve parliament.

Sánchez's beleaguered government had already been mired in a series of scandals and judicial cases affecting his Socialist Party and close allies.

Abascal was evicted after she was unable to pay a sharp rent increase introduced by Urbagestión, the company that owned her flat in central Madrid.

Hundreds of protesters gathered to oppose the eviction last week and the case triggered a broader movement across the country demanding affordable rentals, which have soared in recent years.

The social backlash has seen Urbagestión negotiate the return of Abascal to her flat on a low rent. However, protests have continued, with people occupying squares in Madrid and other cities, pitching tents in squares and with a series of marches scheduled for this weekend.

The Sindicato de Inquilinas (Tenants' Union) activist association which has been co-ordinating protests, announced during the congressional debate that it was abandoning the tent protest in central Madrid. It said it wanted to "take the struggle to all the neighbourhoods, residential blocks and homes of Madrid, wherever there are rental increases, expulsions and abuses each day, and turn the energy of the last few days into a permanent organisation".

Protesters are also calling for a general strike over the housing crisis.

The left-wing coalition government responded to the social anger by hurriedly drawing up the two decree-laws in an effort to defuse the protests.

The first decree included the suspension of evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, a two-year extension to rental leases due to expire before 2028, tax increases for tourist apartments, and a restriction on the purchase of residential properties by what the government calls "vulture funds".

The second decree was more controversial, because it included the automatic renewal of rental contracts, a major demand of many on the left and the Sindicato de Inquilinas.

The conservative People's Party (PP) and far-right Vox had already said they would vote against both initiatives, leaving the minority government depending on the support of smaller nationalist parties in Catalonia and the Basque Country.

However, by the eve of the parliamentary session, the centre-right, pro-independence Together for Catalonia (JxCat) had signalled its opposition to both laws, condemning them to failure.

Friday's debate was fierce and at times angry, as supporters and opponents of the decrees clashed in Congress.

"I don't ask you, I beg you to be brave and consistent," Sánchez said, moments before the two votes took place. "Because they are not just ambitious measures, they are necessary".

He appealed to lawmakers "to put order and humanity into [the housing] market, because if we don't, it will bring down our society".

Social Affairs minister Pablo Bustinduy, of the Sumar alliance, the junior partner in the governing coalition, presented the debate in dramatic terms.

"Today is about defending an international oligarchy which is extracting the rent from salaries earned with the effort of working classes of this country in order to share it out with dividends and they don't even pay taxes in Spain," he said.

"Voting against these decrees today means defending the interests of this oligarchy and turning your back on your own people."

However, Miriam Nogueras, of JxCat, said the decrees had been hastily drawn up and lacked rigour.

She said the decrees "will allow [vulture] funds to keep buying, keep speculating and evictions to keep happening… these two decrees would provoke the opposite effect of what they aim to achieve."

The political right has argued that the government's attempts to intervene will frighten homeowners, causing them not to put their properties on the rental market and pushing prices up further.

Juan Bravo of the PP said "housing doesn't get cheaper with decrees, it gets cheaper with more homes".

Russian dissident Garry Kasparov says US warned him of danger to his life

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6y8z8kr5mk8o, 4 days ago

An exiled Russian opposition figure living in the US says he was warned by American and Lithuanian security services that his life was in danger.

Former chess world champion Garry Kasparov said he was one of two dissidents told to take precautions, which he had done.

His comments come after the US Justice Department unsealed an indictment earlier this month charging five people who allegedly work for a network linked to the Kremlin with plotting attacks and murders in countries including the US, focusing on Russian dissidents and defectors.

Kasparov wrote in his publication The Next Move that he had not been told explicitly that he and fellow Free Russia Forum co-founder Ivan Tyutrin were considered targets, but said both had been warned about their safety.

Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported that it had obtained information that Kasparov, along with another Russian opposition figure, Ilya Ponomarev, had been warned about the plot over the summer by US authorities.

Citing sources close to Kasparov, the paper said he had been placed under enhanced protection over the summer for the first time since he moved to the US.

Kasparov wrote separately: "I will not stop and I will not hide, even if I thought it was possible to do so.

"My family and I will not truly be safe as long as [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is in power in Russia - a circumstance shared by millions."

Kasparov retired from competitive chess in 2005 to pursue a career in politics, founding movements that openly opposed Putin before fleeing Russia in 2013.

He has not returned since. Russia classed him as a foreign agent following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and subsequently added him to a list of terrorists and extremists in 2024 - both categorisations he rejects.

The other reported target, Ponomarev, was the only Russian MP who voted against the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and later went into exile in Ukraine.

He declined to confirm or deny to the Moscow Times whether he had been tipped off about the alleged plot but said the allegations marked "a new level of escalation" by Russia.

A network of individuals working for the Russian intelligence services has operated since at least 2024, the US Justice Department said.

It said the so-called RIS Network had been conspiring and conducting attacks and murders on Russian dissidents and defectors around the world.

Five alleged members of the network had been accused of operating "as part of a global assassination network that reached into the United States, attempting to recruit US citizens and foreigners to carry out killings at the behest of the Kremlin", Assistant Attorney General for national security John A Eisenberg said.

The five people alleged to be responsible for organising the plots are Yuri Khrameev, Kirill Khrameev, Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, Yaidel Delgado Suarez and Angel Eduardo Castro.

All five remain at large, the Justice Department said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said when the indictment was unsealed that he would not comment on the charges until he had heard or seen "any credible evidence" or "tangible facts".

Ukraine's prized steel industry left in ruins by Russian missile campaign

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjkg7k6z9296o, 6 days ago

Like thousands of other residents of Zaporizhzhia, Denys Maksyshko has spent years working for local steel factory Zaporizhstal. For generations, it has been the biggest and richest source of employment in this major Ukrainian city.

"Zaporizhstal is not just a big company, it's the heart of the city," he says.

Now, following a series of Russian missile strikes, this heart has stopped beating. The huge factory that employs 8,500 people shut down indefinitely after four waves of Russian attacks - two in August, and two in September.

"All the equipment has been almost completely destroyed. There are no windows left, and there are holes in the roofs. The blast furnaces have been almost completely ruined," Maksyshko complains.

Russia fired a total of 17 missiles at Zaporizhstal, according to Oleksandr Myronenko, chief operating officer of steelworks owner Metinvest. Eight workers were killed and 31 wounded.

"We're now clearing rubble and trying to plan recovery," Myronenko tells the BBC.

At the moment it is far from certain Zaporizhstal will ever start up again.

Russia's persistent campaign of air strikes against Ukrainian metallurgical plants started in August. By now, all of them have been hit, some several times.

This is a key sector of the Ukrainian economy, and naturally an attractive target for Russia.

Before the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, metallurgy and mining accounted for roughly 10% of Ukraine's GDP and a third of its exports. It provided employment for more than half a million people, and every 13th job in Ukraine was linked to the industry one way or another.

Because of the recent Russian attacks, it has all but ground to a halt and its contribution to Ukraine's GDP now "is probably close to zero", says Myronenko.

Until recently his company was Ukraine's biggest producer of steel and iron, but all its steelworks are for now out of action.

"Clearly, they're trying to stop Ukraine's economy and stop Ukraine from getting [export] money from abroad, from paying taxes and wages, from ensuring that cities live and people have jobs," says Myronenko. "Their efforts have been very effective so far."

The damage to the metals industry could have devastating consequences for Ukraine's economy and society.

Ukraine had 12 metallurgical plants before losing parts of its industrial heartland in the east shortly after the start of hostilities with Russia in 2014.

By 2018, there were just nine, and three years into the full-scale war in 2025 that number had fallen to six. Among those lost were the Azovstal and Illich plants in Mariupol, Ukraine's south-eastern city captured after a months-long Russian siege.

Among the steel-making cities caught up in Russia's recent missile campaign is President Volodymyr Zelensky's home city of Kryvyi Rih.

On 25 September, Ukraine's biggest steelworks, Arcelor Mittal Kryvyi Rih, announced it was unable to reopen after repeated attacks over five weeks, praising the bravery of its workers, five of whom had died.

Local Defence Council head Oleksandr Vilkul issued an emergency address to the city's residents, in which he spoke of a "very serious blow" that would affect more than just thousands of jobs.

The situation, he admitted, was very difficult.

"It is taxes feeding into our community's budget," he said. "They provided funds for keeping the city's infrastructure running, repairing heating plants and their pipes, funds for nursery schools, social services and many other things."

Taxes paid by metal-making companies have funded 30-70% of local government spending in their host cities, says Stanislav Zinchenko, head of Kyiv-based consultancy GMK Center.

"In other words, the physical survival of these cities depended on these companies," he told the BBC.

"This is a catastrophic problem for Ukraine's economy. Before the war, the mining and metallurgical industry was a key industry," he told the BBC. "It was always the biggest investor in the economy, investing $2bn-$3bn (£1.5bn-£2.3bn) a year on average."

If the steelworks remain shut, hundreds of thousands of people may lose their jobs, and the resulting waves of migration will reach far beyond Ukraine, Zinchenko warned. "A humanitarian catastrophe is looming."

The end of steelmaking in Ukraine would also have severe consequences for its defence capabilities and reconstruction.

Steel is vital for producing military equipment, as well as for making shelters and repairing countless buildings damaged by Russia.

Russia has justified its attacks on the steel plants for that reason, alleging that the plants in Zaporizhzhia and Kryvyi Rih were all producing military hardware.

"We attempted relaunching Zaporizhstal. We restarted a furnace, and it worked for 10 hours before there was another air strike," Oleksandr Vodoviz of Metinvest told a conference in Kyiv.

There was no point yet on spending money on recovery as the situation was unclear, he added.

Even if production were to resume, it would not be business as usual for Ukrainian steelmakers any time soon.

Russian attacks on railways have made transporting their products within Ukraine difficult and dangerous, and strikes against ports have turned exports into a lethal lottery.

"Ports have essentially been blocked," said Oleksandr Myronenko. "Every ship is at risk of being attacked, and their chances are 50-50 - either you make it, or you don't."

EU quotas on steel imports introduced on 1 July may compound the problems faced by Ukraine.

But Denys Maksyshko, the Zaporizhstal worker, remains upbeat.

His colleagues are doing their bit to revive the factory, clearing away rubble and fixing whatever can be fixed.

"This is similar to what the military do in the trenches. Ordinary people are fighting to keep the factory alive like soldiers."

Putin shows no sign of stopping the war as Russia doubles down on Ukraine

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqx2ze420kpyo, 5 days ago

When Vladimir Putin arrived to address Russia's parliament on Wednesday, a warm welcome was guaranteed.

"The Special Election Operation", as one Russian newspaper dubbed last month's legislative vote, has produced a State Duma even more pro-Putin than anything before it.

The ruling party, United Russia, now has more MPs than ever.

It allows the Kremlin to claim it has been handed a huge mandate from the Russian people.

But for what? How will Putin use it?

Are there any signs he is prepared to halt what he calls the special military operation? Or should we brace for further escalation in Ukraine and in tensions with Europe?

On Thursday I'll be watching to see whether Russia's leader sheds light on his plans during an appearance at the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow. Traditionally the president's speech at this annual foreign policy forum provides insight into Putin's world view.

Right now, everything points to Putin continuing Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine: despite his country's huge battlefield losses to date and the damage being done to Russia's economy.

Putin's speeches and statements suggest he remains confident that Russia can secure a military victory.

Judging by what is being reported in Russian media, Moscow is encouraged by the shortage of air defence missiles in Ukraine, as well as the expectation that Russian strikes this winter will increase pressure on Ukrainians. Kyiv has spoken of its difficulty in shooting down Russia's ballistic missiles and new jet-powered drones, which have been targeting Ukraine every day.

And further afield?

The Kremlin has made no secret of the fact it wants European states to slash their military and financial backing for Ukraine: the kind of support Moscow says is prolonging the war - or, rather, getting in the way of a Russian victory.

To achieve this, Western officials believe Russia has been sending not so subtle signals.

They accuse Moscow of waging an escalating hybrid war on European countries through cyber-attacks, acts of sabotage, and Russian drones violating European airspace. In Germany, a drone carrying an explosive device was found close to Ukrainian cargo planes at Leipzig airport.

A covert campaign in the "grey zone", that space between peace and war.

This week I asked Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, does he admit that his country is waging a hybrid war against European countries?

"Do you mean when we destroy drones and missiles that Britain and continental Europe are supplying Ukraine with, and which are used to attack us?" Lavrov replied.

"If you admit your weapons are being used to strike us and we destroy them, call it whatever you want. But I have no doubt this is a war Europe is waging against us. We've been saying so for a long time."

That, indeed, has been the official Russian stance for some time: that what is happening in Ukraine amounts to a European war on Russia. It is a narrative that skips over the fact that in 2022 it was the Kremlin that launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and that Russia continues to wage war there.

How far would Russia go to sever European support for Kyiv?

Is Moscow, for example, actively preparing to initiate military conflict in Europe with a Nato member state? That seems unlikely. After more than four-and-a-half years of war Russia's army has not yet managed to occupy the whole of Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, right next door to Russia.

Fighting Europe may not be the plan, but freaking it out, to reduce support for Kyiv, could well be the intention.

Listen to the messaging.

"If they continue this war, a European war with American help, against Russia, on Ukrainian territory, sooner or later we'll feel the need to escalate," warns prominent foreign policy strategist Sergei Karaganov, honorary chairman of Russia's Council for Foreign and Defence Policy.

"According to my scenarios, the first series of blows will be conventional," he told me. "But if Europe does not surrender, unfortunately, we will have to go nuclear. There will be little left of some European countries."

But if Russia went nuclear there would be a response from Europe, and nothing would be left of Russia, I suggest.

"No, there will be no response from Europe," said Karaganov. "What, Britain will attack Russia with nuclear weapons? I hope you're not that crazy. I'm sure the Americans are not that crazy."

I asked him if he agreed the last four-and-a-half years had been disastrous for Russia, in terms of casualties and the worsening security and economic situation.

"We've lost a lot of people, yes," he admitted, "and I criticise my government for not being rough enough. But now we are getting rough enough in Ukraine. We're doing away with Ukraine as a viable state."

If "doing away with Ukraine as a viable state" is Moscow's goal, it is hard to imagine the war ending soon.

Meanwhile, Russia continues to rail against what it sees as the double standards of the West. In his recent address at the UN General Assembly, Sergei Lavrov accused the West of resorting to "brute force" around the world.

"What they did in Venezuela, was that soft power or brute force?" Russia's foreign minister asked me this week. He was referring to America's military operation in Caracas to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro back in January.

"The fact that [the US] bombed and destroyed Iran's leadership, along with their families, including children, is that not brute force?"

But was Russia not resorting to brute force every day in Ukraine, I replied.

"If you mean the destruction of infrastructure used by a Nazi regime backed by the West to wage war on the Russian Federation, then we are resorting to brute force to eliminate this direct threat to us."

Not only is this another element of Russia's official narrative: painting Ukraine as a neo-Nazi state, creating a false pretext to justify Russia's actions.

With the admission of Russia's use of "brute force" in Ukraine, it is also further evidence that Moscow is in no mood to stop fighting.

'I was lured into a trap': Evan Gershkovich on moment that led to 16 months in Russian jail

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck9qr8jy8ynyo, 6 days ago

US journalist Evan Gershkovich has said that he knew he was being set up by Russia when he was arrested by FSB agents and accused of being a spy.

In an interview with Radio 4's Today programme, Gershkovich spoke about the moment he realised he had been "lured into a trap" when masked men surrounded him at a restaurant in 2023, and detained him.

"I'm not interrogated, I'm not tortured… I'm accused of espionage," he said, describing a sense of relief: "They've set me up and fabricated this case so that I can be a valuable hostage - a pawn in a greater game".

Gershkovich, now 34, was sentenced to 16 years in prison, but freed 16 months later as part of a high-profile prisoner swap deal.

Gershkovich had been living in Russia since 2017, and was the Wall Street Journal's foreign correspondent in Moscow when he was arrested - he is now based in Berlin, Germany. He and his employer have always maintained that the charges were false.

On the day he was arrested, Gershkovich was in Yekaterinburg - about 1,600km (1,000 miles) east of Moscow - meeting someone who he thought was a source for a story.

They were sitting in a half-empty dining hall "and a group of about half-dozen masked men marched in and said 'I think we booked that table'." An odd phrase, Gershkovich said, but on reflection it is clever because it "freezes you in place".

The two men stood up and Gershkovich was told he was under arrest by the notorious and powerful FSB, Russia's domestic security service.

"It's at that moment that you realise it's something really serious… When it's the FSB, you know it's been planned."

What about the man he'd been meeting? Gershkovich saw him disappear into the crowd.

Not long after his arrest, the journalist said he realised that the fact he was not being interrogated or tortured - common tactics used by Russia's security service on spies - likely meant that he was being treated more like a commodity, not a true enemy of the state.

"I have this odd moment - a sense of relief flooding over me," he said. "I realised they're not treating me like a real spy. They've set me up and fabricated this case so that I can be a valuable hostage, a pawn in a greater game. That means it will take a while, but I won't be here for 12-20 years."

That realisation helped him stay "stable and disciplined in prison", but also gave him a unique way of predicting what might happen next - and one guess was a prisoner swap.

"I assumed that it would be really loud, that it would cause a global uproar. I mean, it's a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal," he said - and he was right.

Media organisations around the world reported on the case, his face was on a billboard in Times Square and then-US President Joe Biden said he had "no higher priority" than bringing Gershkovich home.

The journalist believed that this was all part of Moscow's plan - to have a high-profile prisoner that it could swap for one of its own - and that was Vadim Krasikov, an assassin who was serving a life sentence in Germany.

"They [Moscow] got away with it in the sense that there were no sanctions imposed. And so they played it really smart, if you think about it cynically."

Gershkovich was held in Moscow's infamous Lefortovo jail, which has held some of the country's most high-profile inmates over the years, including political prisoners and dissidents. During the Great Terror of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, torture and execution were commonplace.

He described it as a "really isolating experience", in a tiny space.

"That wears on you psychologically," Gershkovich said, but added that he was treated ok: "I was allowed to sleep, the food was fine."

Pictures of Gershkovich smiling at cameras during his court appearances in Moscow were broadcast around the world - and that was deliberate, he said - a way of showing that he was alright.

"I wanted to show people this kind of defiance... We know that this is a fabricated case, and so if this is a game of theatre, let's not let [Moscow] have it play out the way they want it to."

But he stressed that not everyone's time in a Russian prison is like his: "Some people... get tortured. They get broken as human beings, deprived of food, of hot water for showers, told that they're never going to see their families again. I was treated completely differently."

Gershkovich compared his experience to the case of Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, who died while in Russian captivity in 2024, aged 27. Months later, when her body was finally returned, it reportedly showed signs of torture and her organs had been removed.

Gershkovich knew there was a prisoner swap planned three weeks before it happened - an "excruciating" time, he said, "because now every day is painfully long".

When it finally did happen, on 1 August 2024, it was a moment of "pure joy". But then "the joy fades, the adrenaline subsides, and you're faced with the reality of having to return to normal life again."

Gershkovich said this period was difficult and sometimes overwhelming. He wasn't sleeping, suffered panic attacks in large crowds and had a short temper because he was trying to hold in his emotions.

He has seen therapists who specialise in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and said writing a book on his ordeal also helped.

And what about a return to Russia? Gershkovich has a deep history with the country - his parents moved to the US from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. He grew up in a Russian-speaking home, with a Russian name, moved there when he was 25 and made many friends, including his Russian girlfriend.

"I would hope to get back one day, but I guess we'll have to see what comes after [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. And it's not completely clear that the next government will be any better."

Migrants using longer, more dangerous routes across Channel

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6y8zzdjmrgvo, 6 days ago

A growing number of migrants are trying to cross the Channel on small boats using longer routes from beaches further south and west of Calais and Dunkirk, French authorities say.

Last week one boat set off from Normandy and spent more than 30 hours at sea, before being intercepted and taken to Dover by Border Force.

Although attempts from Normandy have been rare, authorities in neighbouring Seine-Maritime say there have already been 58 attempts this year, up from 30 last year.

The government says it is bearing down on dangerous small boat crossings, with figures showing a sharp drop in arrivals this year.

Despite overall crossings dropping, the stretch of coastline used for smuggling appears to be widening.

Earlier this month another migrant boat was met by lifeboats from the Isle of Wight having set off from the Cherbourg area.

These locations are nearly 80 miles (128 km) from the beaches where many of the small boats have crossed in recent years, with those on board spending longer at sea.

Audrey Baconnais-Rosez, the local government representative in Seine-Maritime, said: "The number of attempts to cross the Channel has increased in number and it is getting further and further from the north of France."

She added that authorities were "managing to stop half of them".

The number of gendarmes patrolling the coast within Dieppe and further to nearly the Le Havre area have been increased, she said.

"Nowadays it's about 50 gendarmes on the coast and we have nearly 20 police officers in Dieppe and the surrounding [area] to try to stop them," she said.

Baconnais-Rosez also said some smugglers were still attempting to use ferries to Newhaven in Sussex.

"We are still intercepting them and we are bringing them to justice as well," she added.

Dr Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford's Migration Observatory, says it is highly plausible that the new routes are due to police disrupting boat launches in northern France.

"It's not at all optimal for these boats to set off so far away from their intended destination," he said.

"Some of these journeys would not be 20 miles (32km) but 50 miles (80km) or even more, which substantially increases the danger of course on board the boats."

'Increased risk'

David McFarlane, a marine safety consultant, said the longer the voyage, the more risk of encountering hazardous sea conditions.

"If a low pressure system is developing over the Atlantic, it can mean that in advance of the winds picking up, a swell will start to increase, with the increased likelihood of sea sickness for some, which can lead to dehydration," he said.

"The wind of course can pick up very quickly and waves can get up to 3.5m (11ft) in height in the Channel.

"This increases the risk of the boat being swamped by sea water, with the obvious danger to human life by drowning or exposure."

So far, 2026 has seen 19,135 people make the Channel crossing, compared to 32,188 during the same period in 2025.

However, the Home Secretary ordered a review last week after two migrant vessels reached the Kent coast unintercepted.

A total of 781 migrants arrived in 10 small boats on Wednesday, the highest number for a single day this year, according to Home Office figures.

Tony Smith, the former director general of Border Force, said the smugglers would continue to adapt.

"We've seen the Normandy crossings and the undetected crossings," he said.

"They're not going to give up as long as the business model continues to exist and there's a market to bring migrants over from France.

"Every successful landing is a message to the next migrant waiting on a French beach that it's worth a try."

A Home Office spokesperson said joint efforts had seen more than 48,000 crossing attempts prevented and 1,100 boats and engines seized since the election.

"Our efforts are having an impact, with the number of small boat crossings down significantly this year and the lowest number recorded for the month of July since 2020," they added.

"But we must go further, which is why we have signed a payment-by-results deal with the French to put 40% more boots on the ground on French beaches, along with a surge unit of 45 additional officers to bolster action in Western coastal areas."

Follow BBC Kent on Facebook, 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.

Two men die in Channel crossing attempt off northern France

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq8jz7k4n8d1o, today

Two men have died after trying to cross the English Channel off the coast of Berck in northern France.

According to local media, police saw migrants leaving the beach on a boat at about 22:00 local time on Sunday, and when rescuers arrived, they were bailing water out of the overloaded vessel with their shoes.

"When we arrived, there were at least 80 people on board and a terrible smell of gasoline,"Jean-Marc Lamblin, director of the French national sea rescue service (SNSM) told La Voix du Nord newspaper.

Two women were taken to hospital after suffering burns that were caused by the mixture of gasoline in the seawater. Their condition has been described as not life-threatening.

Lamblin told the newspaper that there were so many people on the boat, including children, that about 20 people were left stranded in the water because they could not get on board.

He explained that when SNSM arrived, the two men, aged in their 30s and 40s, were in cardiac arrest.

The men and injured women were brought back to shore where firefighters and paramedics helped them, but the men died at about midnight.

Boulogne-sur-Mer public prosecutor's office has opened an investigation to determine the circumstances of their death.

The two women were from Somalia and aged 20 and 26, La Voix du Nord reported, adding that they are now recovering in Rang-du-Fliers hospital.

Separately, the UK Home Office said 149 migrants were picked up on Sunday in a mid-Channel rescue operation and were brought to Gosport, in Hampshire.

About 150 anti-migrant demonstrators had gathered at the south coast town to stop the group being brought ashore, with flares being set off and some scuffles with police.

Figures from the UK Home Office have recorded 19,451 people crossing the Channel in small boats this year.

The number is 43% lower than at the same time last year and 23% below the figure at this stage in 2024.

Teachers in Republic of Ireland begin industrial action

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr5yn390zjd1o, today

Primary and secondary school teachers across the Republic of Ireland have began industrial action over pay.

Two teaching unions, Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) and Irish National Teachers' Organisation (INTO), began work-to-rule action on Monday, and there will be a full one-day strike on 14 October.

INTO, which represents a majority of primary school teachers, has said schools "will be disrupted" as pre and post-school supervision will be withdrawn.

Members will also not attend staff meetings and parent-teacher meetings outside school hours.

The unions have said the Irish government has not made "meaningful commitments on pay" following the expiry of the last public sector pay deal at the end of June.

The industrial action comes as more than 100,000 workers, including nurses, school staff and civil servants, moved to work-to-rule measures last week.

Two days of fuller strike action have been planned for 14 and 21 October, when it is expected schools could be closed and picket lines formed across the country.

Members of another union, the Teachers' Union of Ireland (TUI), will begin industrial action in the form of a work-to-rule from 12 October.

The Irish government has said it is willing to enter talks but that it will not be held to a pre-determined outcome.

France to close up to 500 schools on Monday over student protests

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwkg5n7lm3y5o, today

Up to 500 schools across France will be partially or totally closed on Monday after clashes between riot police and student protesters in recent days, the French education minister said on Sunday.

Lessons will be "totally or partly suspended" in some "400 to 500" high schools as security conditions "have not been fulfilled", Édouard Geffray said.

He also said 24 schools had been "burned or ransacked" since the start of the protests.

Thousands of students have been demonstrating over education standards and the protests, which started last week, have spread from Paris to other cities, including Montpellier, Nantes and Marseille.

High school pupils and others have objected to a lack of teachers, overcrowded classrooms and run-down buildings.

On Friday, French Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said 735 of France's 3,700 schools had been affected "one way or another" by violent protests.

The education minister warned the number of schools potentially affected on Monday could be comparable to Friday's figure but promised a "partial, progressive return to lessons".

"There are activists - particularly from the far-left - who have infiltrated the high school student movement, hijacked it from the students themselves, and engaged in extreme violence," Édouard Geffray claimed.

"Clearly, this poses a risk to both our staff and our students," he said. Geffray added that 78 staff members in education had been wounded, which he described as "something we have never seen before".

On Friday 1,747 people were arrested, according to French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez.

Organisers of the protests have called for the demonstrations to continue on Tuesday after accusing the government of a lack of "concrete measures", according to the AFP news agency.

On Sunday, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said his government is taking further steps to "address the difficulties faced by high school students and educational staff".

He said this includes ensuring classes continue, improving facilities, better organising school days and making the French university admissions platform more transparent.

Lecornu also said the government is accelerating the review of its "vandal-pays" bill to ensure that people responsible for damage bear the cost of their actions.

What to know about Brazil's election as Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro face off

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6wyz0r2n0djo, today

Brazilians just finished voting in a general election in which the two front-runners for the presidency bear very familiar names.

Polls closed at 17:00 Brasília Time (20:00 GMT) on Sunday, with the nation's vast electronic voter system expected to deliver a result within a few hours.

The incumbent, veteran left-wing leader Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva, is challenged by 11 candidates, the most prominent of whom is right-winger Flávio Bolsonaro.

In the last election four years ago, Lula narrowly defeated Flávio Bolsonaro's father Jair, but the tumultuous aftermath of the election, which saw Jair Bolsonaro convicted of plotting a coup after thousands of his supporters stormed the Brazilian Congress, has had a lasting impact on the nation's political life and this election.

Here's what you need to know.

The man not on the ballot

Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing former army captain who governed Brazil from 2019 to 2023, has not run for president in this election.

Not only is the 71-year-old barred from standing for office, he is also serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup after he lost the 2022 election to Lula.

Due to recurrent health problems, he is currently under house arrest rather than in a cell, but he has had restrictions imposed on him prohibiting him from posting on social media or making public statements.

Despite these restrictions, his shadow - and sometimes his moving and talking image - looms large over this election.

At the event where Flávio Bolsonaro officially launched his presidential campaign, an AI-generated avatar of Jair Bolsonaro endorsed his son's candidacy.

When pressed by the Supreme Court about the deepfake, Jair Bolsonaro's lawyers may have denied he had given his permission for its use, but there is nevertheless little doubt that Flávio Bolsonaro has the backing of his father.

What do the polls say?

While 12 candidates are running for the presidency, there are only two who have reached double figures in the opinion polls, and they are Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro.

BBC Brasil's poll tracker shows them both hovering around the 40% mark, with Lula slightly ahead of Bolsonaro.

The other 11 candidates are polling at 4% or less.

If none of the candidates gains 50% of valid votes in the first round on 4 October, the top two contenders will proceed to a run-off election on 25 October.

The opinion polls suggest a run-off is highly likely - but with a relatively high number of voters still undecided just days before the election, an outright win cannot be entirely ruled out.

BBC Brasil's poll aggregator suggests that at the end of September, 9% of voters were either still undecided, or planning to spoil their ballot, cast a blank ballot or not go to the polls at all.

Brazilians who are 16 years of age or older are entitled to vote and it is compulsory for those aged between 18 and 70 who are literate, with a fine imposed on those who do not cast a ballot.

Almost 160 million Brazilians are eligible to vote in this election and, with polls typically surveying just thousands of people, the end result can differ considerably from the indications given by surveys.

What does Lula stand for?

Lula, the 80-year-old candidate for the left-wing Workers' Party, has been president three times already.

He served two consecutive terms - from January 2003 to December 2010 - and was widely praised for lifting millions out of poverty during this time with the help of a cash-transfer programme called Bolsa Família.

The former metalworker left office with record approval ratings of over 80%, but his party was later rocked by huge corruption scandals.

Lula himself spent more than 18 months in prison between 2018 and 2019 after being convicted of corruption and money laundering, charges he has always denied.

Those convictions were annulled in 2021, leaving Lula free to run for the presidency in the 2022 election, in which he beat Jair Bolsonaro by 1.8 percentage points.

When he started his third term in office, he vowed it would be his last, and yet his party endorsed him as their candidate again this year, even though he will turn 81 later this month.

There is no doubt he remains a towering figure in the left. But 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.

During Lula's latest term in office, relations with his US counterpart Donald Trump have been rocky.

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".

In another thinly veiled reference to both his rival Flávio Bolsonaro and those in the Trump administration who would like to see the right-wing candidate win, the Brazilian leader has also warned that he would not tolerate "foreign and local enemies of democracy" interfering with the polls.

What is Bolsonaro promising?

Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, is Jair Bolsonaro's eldest son and has been serving as a senator since 2019.

The younger Bolsonaro is running for the right-wing Liberal Party (PL) and, while he is widely seen as less confrontational than his father, he is appealing to the followers of the older Bolsonaro by promising to broadly continue in his footsteps.

During his time in the Senate, the trained lawyer has advocated a tough-on-crime stance, calling for longer sentences and laxer gun laws, arguing that "decent citizens" should be able to defend themselves from criminals.

He has successfully lobbied for the US to declare Brazil-based criminal gangs Comando Vermelho (CV) and Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, a move that was opposed by Lula.

The younger Bolsonaro has also courted evangelicals and the agricultural industry as part of his campaign.

He has said that he will cut what he says are unnecessary regulations and "get the state off farmers' backs".

Quizzed in an interview with Globo in August on whether he still believed - as he had said in 2019 - that climate change did not exist, he acknowledged that there had been "extreme climate events", but insisted that these events were "cyclical".

Flávio Bolsonaro has actively courted Trump and members of his administration by portraying himself as a loyal ally during a meeting at the White House in May.

More recently, he promised to join the US-led anti-crime alliance that the Trump administration has dubbed "Shield of the Americas", should he be elected.

What are the main issues worrying voters?

Up until a few months ago, Brazilians told pollsters that crime and security were their main concerns.

But in the weeks leading up to the election, a scandal involving a jailed banker accused of orchestrating one of Brazil's largest financial fraud cases has pushed corruption to the top of the list.

The banker, Daniel Vorcaro, is well connected and has ties to many powerful people in Brazil - both on the political right and left.

Flávio Bolsonaro acknowledged asking Vorcaro to bankroll a biopic about his father after voice recordings emerged in which he could be heard asking for 134 million reais ($25.9m; £19.5m).

Police have since then opened an investigation into Flávio Bolsonaro for suspected corruption and money laundering over the financing of the film.

But pollsters say Lula's campaign was also hurt by the Vorcaro scandal, after alleged links emerged between the disgraced banker and an ally of Lula, the Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

Moraes is the man who presided over Jair Bolsonaro's trial and has made a number of subsequent rulings about the conditions of his detention.

A police report suggested that Vorcaro had made numerous calls and sent a number of messages to a phone number which officers say is linked to Moraes.

The investigators say Vorcaro asked the person with whom he was communicating for help avoiding arrest.

Moraes has denied any wrongdoing but these latest revelations mean that, in the crucial weeks before the election, attention shifted away from the allegations against Flávio Bolsonaro to those against the Supreme Court justice.

Lula has tried to distance himself from Moraes, saying that "no one is above the law", but his rival has already pounced on the allegations against the judge to make political hay.

"Voting for Lula means voting for Moraes," Flávio Bolsonaro told his supporters at a rally, using the right's intense dislike of the judge to shore up his own support.

Hurricane Polo makes landfall on Mexico's Pacific coast

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw8d3z5y7958o, 6 days ago

Hurricane Polo has made landfall along the northern Pacific coast of Mexico, lashing the state of Baja California Sur with life-threatening winds and heavy rain that has already flooded some coastal areas.

Mexican officials said Polo moved ashore just south of the surfing and fishing village of Las Barrancas bringing maximum sustained winds of 110 mph (175 km/h).

Polo is moving northeast and on the forecast track, its core is predicted to continue passing over Baja California Sur before moving inland over the southern part of the Mexican state of Sonora later on Tuesday.

Residents in threatened areas have been encouraged to seek shelter.

Shopkeeper María Palomino, 57, spent the night at a high school which has been turned into a temporary shelter. "If something happens, it's better to come to the shelter," she told AFP news agency.

A whale-watching and fishing guide who was boarding up the facade of his home told AFP the storm was "coming with full force".

The US-based National Hurricane Center (NHC) said that while Polo was expected to weaken as it moved over the Baja California peninsula, it was forecast to still be at hurricane strength when it makes its second landfall in mainland Mexico.

Meteorologists said Polo could dump between 6 and 12 inches (150-300mm) of rain across parts of Baja California Sur, which they warned could produce life-threatening flooding and mudslides, especially in areas of steep terrain.

The NHC said a storm surge was also expected to produce significant coastal flooding in areas of onshore winds. "Near the coast, the surge will be accompanied by large and destructive waves," it said in an update.

Even before Polo made landfall, residents said there were power cuts in Baja California Sur.

US media reported some flooding in the fishing town of Puerto San Carlos and the Associated Press said waves crested sea barriers in the area, where many residents had been evacuated due to the threat.

Meteorologists said dangerous surf and rip currents were likely to continue along portions of the north-western coast of Mexico and Baja California for the next day or so.

The south of the peninsula is popular with tourists and acts as a base for surfers, sport fishers, and whale watchers.

In Cabo San Lucas, famous for its natural rock arch, authorities had restricted access to the beaches on Monday.

Polo has been slowly moving towards Mexico's coast line for days.

Meteorologists said it was being fuelled by extremely warm waters caused by the El Niño climate phenomenon, which has led to a more active hurricane season in Pacific waters.

As Polo moves north-east, it is expected to also affect the US, sending a surge of tropical moisture northwards for the next few days leading to excessive rainfall and flash flooding.

Rain has already been falling across Arizona and California but the remains of Polo and another hurricane - named Odalys - will become absorbed into that weather system, boosting the amount of rainfall. These fronts will push eastwards across the southern plains.

Some spots could see as much as 6 or 7 inches of rainfall by Thursday.

States affected include Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah into Tuesday.

Venezuela releases dozens of political prisoners as election calls grow

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c620lrw2xr12o, 8 days ago

Venezuelan authorities have released a slew of political prisoners, human rights groups say, days after the nation's interim leader met US President Donald Trump in New York.

Among those released in the early hours of Saturday morning was Wilder Vasquez, who was handed a five-year sentence in 2018 over claims he was plotting to kill former President Nicolás Maduro.

Opposition figures have renewed calls for free elections after interim President Delcy Rodriguez held talks with Trump, who captured Maduro earlier this year, at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday.

Her administration previously released hundreds of prisoners as part of a reconciliation effort following Maduro's seizure.

However, these releases slowed to a trickle in April after Rodriguez said the scheme was "coming to an end".

Venezuela's government has not made any statement concerning the latest releases, nor has it indicated whether they were the result of her conversation with the US president.

Gonzalo Himiob, vice-president of rights group Foro Penal, said "a significant number" of political prisoners had been released on Saturday morning from several of Venezuela's detention centres.

Foro Penal confirmed the release of Miguel Castillo Cedeño, who it said had been arbitrarily detained since June 2019.

Also released was Frank Cabañas, who rights groups say had been held in prison for nine years after being linked to the death of a police officer. Foro Penal said he was the only suspect who remained detained, despite family members reporting that he was suffering health problems last year.

Opposition and human rights groups have said Maduro's government used the detention of political prisoners to stamp out dissent and silence critics for years.

Rodriguez has sought to frame her interim government as more permissive of political dissent while currying favour with the US. The prisoner release scheme was a key concession by her administration to the US.

However, her decision to end the scheme attracted criticism from opposition and rights groups. Foro Penal said it was stopped with less than half of the nation's political prisoners released.

Rodriguez's government continues to deny dissidents are jailed. It has cast the release of prisoners as a gesture of goodwill and reconciliation.

Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, a minister closely associated with Maduro's authoritarian rule, called the interim president's meeting with Trump "a great triumph of the diplomacy of peace".

But opposition voices expressed their disapproval over the meeting, viewing it as a snub of their calls – that the US has previously endorsed – for swift elections.

Pedro Mario Burelli, a former Venezuelan state oil company executive and opposition commentator, called the two world leaders "the shameless puppet and her unscrupulous and undignified puppet-master", adding: "Little has changed in Venezuela under Washington's clumsy and selective oversight."

Venezuela's last elections, held in 2024, in which Maduro was declared the winner, were widely disputed as rigged. Opposition tallies suggested their candidate, who stood after Machado was barred from running, had won by 70% of the vote.

Despite this, the Trump administration backed Rodriguez, Maduro's former vice-president, as his successor rather than opposition leader María Corina Machado after Maduro was seized and put on trial on drug charges in January.

Analysts at the time cast this decision as the US choosing short-term stability in Venezuela until elections could be held.

Rodriguez used her UN General Assembly speech on Thursday to reiterate that there "will be elections in Venezuela", without specifying when.

More than 5,000 people killed or injured in Haiti due to gang violence this year, UN says

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmy0z00wr14xo, 3 days ago

More than 5,700 people have been killed or injured by gangs or during operations against them between 1 January and 11 September 2026, the United Nations has said.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk added that more than 230 people have also been kidnapped.

An estimated 1,000 women and girls have been raped - but Türk noted that the actual figure is "likely much higher".

Gangs have been exerting varying degrees of power in Haiti for decades. The most recent widespread outbreak of gang violence has been fuelled by the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse on 7 July 2021.

In an update on the situation in the Caribbean nation on Friday, Türk added that more than 50% of casualties occurred in the context of security operations against gangs, with hundreds struck "by stray bullets and explosive drones".

Gang violence had already been rampant under Moïse, but the power vacuum created by his murder allowed violent groups to seize more territory and become more influential.

Türk said gangs "continue to adapt and expand", with evidence collected by the UN pointing at "a strategy of seizing new territory and key transport routes, threatening stability".

The number of executions carried out by specialised police units dropped in recent months, he said, but people allegedly associated with gangs continue to face a high risk of summary executions.

The high commissioner added that recruitment of children into gangs has "nearly tripled", as to many minors joining a gang "can be the only mean of survival".

"No child should be forced to choose between their lives and the security of their neighbours," Türk said.

Haiti is preparing to hold its first presidential and legislative election since 2016 on 13 December.

However, Türk said that it is "hard to imagine the conditions to hold a credible election could be met this year", given the current situation.

A multinational police force has been operating in Haiti since 2025 to to tackle escalating gang violence in the conflict-torn country but it has struggled to even enter areas where gangs hold sway.

Venezuelan man shot by ICE in Texas is charged with assault

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c63eqgz41n0xo, 6 days ago

A Venezuelan man shot in the back by a US immigration agent in Texas has been charged with assault, accused of sideswiping the officer with his car as he tried to drive away.

Wilber Rafael Garces Perez's side-view mirror hit the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer during the traffic stop on 20 September in the city of Austin, it is alleged.

The 28-year-old faces one count of assaulting, resisting and impeding a federal officer. He could face up to 20 years in federal prison if convicted.

Garces Perez appeared in court on Tuesday. His lawyers said they only learned of his court appearance afterwards.

According to the justice department, the traffic stop was initiated by an ICE officer after confirming through a database that the blue Toyota sedan was registered to Garces Perez, who had been issued a final order of removal from the US.

The affidavit contains a conflicting account of the incident.

According to the court filing, Garces Perez said a law enforcement SUV had "caused a collision" with his car by pulling an abrupt manouevre during the traffic stop.

But the federal agents said there was "no contact" between their SUVs and Garces Perez's car when they first pulled him over.

According to the court filing, Garces Perez said he knew he would be arrested and admitted to declining to exit his car when ordered to do so.

He drove away, allegedly striking the officer in the torso with the driver's side-view mirror.

The court filing alleges that Garces Perez "led them on a high-speed chase through a commercial and residential area".

The short pursuit ended when a federal agent's SUV struck his car and "caused it to spin around", says the affidavit.

Garces Perez said that after coming to a forced stop an agent fired his pistol into the back right window of his car.

The justice department said the "officer caught up to Garces Perez, who allegedly attempted to strike the officer with his car, causing the officer to fire his pistol".

The Venezuelan national was struck with a bullet in his upper back, where his lawyers say it remains lodged, placing him "in grave danger".

DHS last week said Garces Perez has received "some of the best medical care he's ever received in his life".

A judge last week temporarily blocked Garces Perez's deportation.

He entered the US in 2024 using CBP One, an asylum-seeker programme introduced by President Joe Biden and cancelled by President Donald Trump.

Argentina threatens legal action against UK over Falkland Islands oil exploration

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq5yj1835y1wo, 6 days ago

Argentina's president has threatened to launch a legal challenge against the British government unless it halts oil exploration work off the coast of the Falkland Islands.

In a social media post, President Javier Milei set a two-week deadline for the Sea Lion oilfield project, a joint venture between Israeli and British companies, to be scrapped.

The companies insist they have valid licences issued by Britain.

The comments heighten tensions between the UK and Argentina over the sovereignty of the archipelago, known in Argentina as Las Malvinas, more than 40 years after a British military task force ejected Argentine forces which had invaded the territory in 1982.

Milei said that if the two-week deadline was not met, he had "instructed the Foreign Ministry and legal teams to initiate international arbitration" against the UK over what he called "the illegal plundering of our resources through the Sea Lion Project".

He continued to warn the UK that if the "illegitimate exploitation" of the region didn't end within two weeks, Argentina would take the matter before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

The International Tribunal is an independent judicial body based in Hamburg which is responsible for the fair application of the United Nations' Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The move comes soon after Milei roundly criticised the UN in his speech at the General Assembly for failing to act over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands.

He said the UN had become "a useless organisation" which only serves "arrogant parasites dressed up as well-intentioned bureaucrats".

Since then, the UK Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, said that Argentina "lacks the ability" to seize the Falklands by force.

Milei had previously said the Sea Lion oilfield was a "clear and present danger".

The Sea Lion oilfield, around 130 miles (209 km) from the Falkland Islands, contains an estimated 1.7 billion barrels of oil.

Two oil companies – Britain's Rockhopper Exploration and Israel's Navitas Petroleum – are due to begin extracting from the oilfield within two years.

Both companies have in the past stressed that Sea Lion holds valid licences from the Falkland Islands.

In a 2013 referendum, residents of the islands voted overwhelmingly to remain a British overseas territory - with 99.8% voting in favour and just three voting against.

Argentine forces landed on the Falklands to stake a territorial claim in 1982, sparking a 74-day war over the territory as a British military task force ejected them.

The conflict led to the deaths of 255 British military personnel, three islanders and 649 Argentine military personnel.

Brazil's Lula bans online gambling ahead of presidential election

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c914ddj21rzlo, 9 days ago

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has announced a ban on online gambling, just days before an election in which he is seeking a fourth term as the country's leader.

The left-wing leader, who is running against the son of the incarcerated former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, signed a provisional order on Friday that "prohibits all sports betting and online casinos".

The online gambling industry in Brazil was legalised in 2018 and has since been blamed for widespread household income losses due to addiction.

Flávio Bolsonaro accused his rival of playing politics, while Brazilian football teams said the ban could lose them income due to betting firms pulling their sponsorships.

Lula described the industry as a "cancer" in his announcement, adding that "either we remove the tumour, or it kills us".

The move comes just over a week before the first round of Brazil's presidential election. Recent polls have the 80-year-old leader almost neck-and-neck with the younger Bolsonaro.

Lula also separately signed a bill to establish criminal offences related to fixed-odds betting – the most common type of online sports betting.

Punters and bookies will have until 5 October to withdraw any existing funds from online betting accounts, while new deposits have been barred.

The new measures must receive congressional approval within 120 days to remain in force.

Lula acknowledged online betting was allowed under the former President Michel Temer's administration but said that it had grown "without regulation under Bolsonaro's management".

He said in a statement on X that there were "no restrictions" particularly for preventing children and teenagers from accessing online betting.

"We won't allow betting companies to profit at the expense of Brazilian families' income and lives," the president added.

Lula described how he had heard from families who had sold everything in their houses because of their gambling addictions.

Earlier this week at the UN General Assembly, Lula accused the industry of "transforming addiction into profit".

But Flávio Bolsonaro called the gambling crackdown "populist, hypocritical and politically motivated" during a campaign rally in Rio de Janeiro on Friday, according to Reuters.

Grêmio, one of the so-called "big twelve" Brazilian football teams, noted ahead of Lula's announcement that sports betting firms had become "one of the main sources of revenue for sports" since they were made legal.

It said a change in the law "will not only be an open door for illegal betting, but a fatal blow to Brazilian football, leading many clubs to insolvency".

The main clubs were paid 1.1bn Brazilian reais ($212m; £160m) by sports betting firms in 2025, while the industry took in 62.5bn reais at the same time, broadcaster Globo reports.

Most types of gambling, such as casinos and slot machines, are illegal in Brazil, but ever since online betting was legalised in 2018, it has exploded in popularity.

About 59.9% of Brazilian adults support banning internet betting, a survey by Atlas and Bloomberg published this week has found.

The Brazilian Institute for Responsible Gaming (IBJR), a trade body representing around 75% of the domestic betting sector, said a total ban on fixed-odds betting jeopardised the industry as a whole – and potentially 58-73bn real in revenue.

"The ban also doesn't eliminate existing demand," it said in a statement, adding that anyone turning to illicit betting would no longer have "access to protection mechanisms provided in the regulated environment".

It urged the federal government to strengthen betting regulations rather than outlaw online and fixed-odds betting entirely.

Yemen announces military campaign to reclaim land from Iran-backed Houthis

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx8dzj9vpp01o, today

Yemen's Saudi-backed government has announced a major military operation to retake territory from the Iran-backed Houthis.

It comes after an exchange of strikes between the Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition in recent days. On Sunday, the Houthis said they had struck sites belonging to Saudi national oil company Aramco.

The group said the attack was in response to what it described as 50 Saudi-led coalition air and missile strikes in Yemen in 12 hours. Saudi Arabia has yet to comment.

The conflict escalated in September, when the Houthis seized the country's entire Red Sea coast, including the vital shipping lane of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, further disrupting global oil supplies.

Yemen's capital, Sanaa, which has been held by the Houthis for more than a decade, has come under sustained attack as government forces try to weaken the group's military capabilities.

Attacks on the Houthis have also spread across Yemen, including to the Saada region, the group's northern heartland.

On Sunday, Yemeni President Rashad al-Alimi said in a televised address: "Today, I announce the start of military operations to retake the remaining territory of the republic and extend the authority of the state and its institutions across the entire national territory."

But it is not yet clear whether this represents a new phase in the conflict.

The frontline in Yemen remains focused around the key city of Taiz, which is still controlled by the internationally recognised government.

The Houthis are engaged in a fierce battle with government forces for control of the region, as they seek to secure coastal areas and, by extension, the Bab al-Mandab Strait.

On Sunday, the Houthis cut a vital supply route linking Taiz with Aden, the interim capital of the Yemeni government, AFP news agency reports.

Citing three Yemeni military sources, AFP also reports that the Houthis now control the area and supply route, effectively encircling Taiz.

"They've achieved the military objective of isolating Taiz from Aden, even if they haven't fully taken control of it," Farea Al-Muslimi, a research fellow at the Chatham House think tank, told AFP.

Away from Yemen, the Houthis are also trying to hurt the Saudis with an attack aimed at the country's economic lifeblood - oil.

On Sunday, Yemen's Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said the group had launched a ballistic missile and drone attack on Aramco sites in the capital, Riyadh, and the oil-rich Khurais area in the kingdom's east.

"Both operations successfully achieved their objectives," the spokesman said in a statement. "The strikes were precise, causing large fires at the targeted sites."

It is not the first time the group has said it has hit Saudi oil sites. Saudi Arabia has yet to comment on Sunday's claimed attack, but has previously dismissed some claims as misleading, mocking the Houthis for "chasing imaginary victories".

But it has once again shown the price Saudi Arabia - and, as a consequence, the global economy - could pay if it launched a new all-out war against the Houthis.

In retaliation, Saudi Arabia has also been striking Houthi targets, according to the Houthi-run Al-Masirah TV channel. It said at least two people had been wounded in strikes on Sunday.

On Saturday, Yemen's government also said its forces had hit Houthi targets across the country, including in Sanaa, Saada and the group's positions near Taiz in the south-west.

Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the world and remains gripped by a vast humanitarian crisis.

A war erupted in 2014, when the Houthis seized the capital, Sanaa, from the Saudi-backed government, before going on to take control of swathes of the country's north.

Riyadh intervened in the war the following year, leading an international coalition.

After several years of relative calm, the war reignited in July amid the widening conflict in the Middle East.

The Houthis have launched a blockade of Saudi energy exports, which have already been squeezed by Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Netanyahu says Flydubai attacker had 'Islamist radical indoctrination'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crje8edqyej9o, 4 days ago

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says investigations suggest the man who stabbed his fellow pilot and tried to take over a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv had undergone "Islamist radical indoctrination".

The Flydubai plane plunged more than 17,000ft (5,200m) two hours into its journey on Wednesday, before passengers and crew overpowered the attacker and retook control to land safely.

Netanyahu told Fox News that it was looking "very likely" that the attacker, who he said was an Omani national, "was going to down the plane".

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) state news agency reports investigations have begun there to determine "whether the incident was linked to any terrorist activity or purpose".

The Interior Ministry of Saudi Arabia - where the plane made an emergency landing - said that both the pilot and co-pilot had been sent back to the UAE on Thursday morning after medical teams had cleared them.

UAE officials earlier claimed jurisdiction over the incident because the aircraft on which the attack took place is registered there and flies under its flag.

Netanyahu told Fox that once the attacker had been subdued and tied up by passengers and crew, he was "calling out to the aircrew 'kill me, kill me', so it's clear he was suicidal - that's not a question".

"And with all the passengers in there, and if you couple that with what I just told you about the Islamist tendencies, that radicalisation that were found in his background, I think... that'll give us a pretty good clue."

However, he stressed that he did not want to draw any firm conclusions as to motive yet.

Both US President Donald Trump and UAE officials have indicated to the media that Iran may be responsible for the incident, without definitively blaming Tehran.

Trump told reporters on Thursday that Iran would be "hit very hard" if it was deemed to have been involved in the attack.

Pilots from countries without diplomatic relations with Israel were usually not allowed to fly there, Netanyahu said when asked about how the suspected Omani pilot came to be on the plane.

He added: "Obviously there was a loophole here and we're taking care of that among other things... with the full co-operation, I have to say, of the Emirati government, so we're both interested in making sure this doesn't happen again."

Oman has not formally established official ties with Israel, unlike the UAE.

The prime minister was also asked earlier on the same network whether there was an indication if Iran was involved, he replied: "It's too early to say".

Both Netanyahu and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the stabbed pilot, Indian national Capt Smit Machchhar was a "hero".

India's ambassador to the UAE Deepak Mittal visited Captain Machhar in hospital on Thursday, the Indian Mission confirmed on social media, stating he was "in good health and recovering well".

Preliminary findings from a separate Israeli investigation into the incident, suggest that the alleged attacker intended to crash the plane, an Israeli security source told BBC Arabic.

The source said the investigation - led by Israel's intelligence agency Mossad - interviewed passengers after they arrived in Tel Aviv to establish what had happened on the plane.

Flydubai's flight FZ1073, with more than 170 people on board, took off from Dubai International Airport in the UAE at 03:05 GMT (07:05 local time), en route to Ben Gurion Airport.

Two hours later, the 17,000ft drop in altitude was reported on the plane tracking website Flightradar24 and minutes later the plane signalled an emergency code.

At about 05:40, the plane - which had briefly entered Jordanian airspace - looped back into Saudi Arabia, where it later started its manual descent, landing safely at Tabuk Airport in the north west of Saudi.

Flydubai has since suspended flights between Dubai and Tel Aviv as it carried out its own investigation into the incident.

Israel's Transportation Ministry said the suspension aligns with Netanyahu's directive.

Israeli airlines including El Al, Israir and Arkia said plans were in place to operate rescue flights from Dubai starting on Friday to bring back stranded passengers.

The Transportation Ministry also said it sent an urgent request to Etihad Airlines to increase the number of flights between Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv.

Flydubai passenger describes hugging his children as plane nosedived during attack

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6d949ydnw3po, 4 days ago

A man has described how he hugged and reassured his two young children as their plane suddenly descended after one pilot stabbed the other in an attempt to seize control of the flight.

A Flydubai plane plunged more than 17,000ft (5,200m) in less than two minutes around two hours into its journey from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, before passengers and crew overpowered him and retook control to land safely.

Adam Polovincik told BBC Newshour that he hugged his six-year-old son and three-year-old daughter "really hard" and tried to stay calm for them as the attack unfolded.

He praised the pilot who was stabbed and passengers who fought off and subdued the attacker, saying they were "true heroes".

The stabbed pilot is in a stable condition in hospital, while the alleged attacker has been arrested.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said it was too early to say whether Iran was involved in the attack, but that the alleged attacker had undergone "Islamist radical indoctrination".

Polovincik, who was sitting in aisle 13, was flying home with his wife and children after an "amazing" holiday in Singapore and Thailand.

He said there had been a "huge degree of panic" on the plane as there was a "very, very, very sharp decrease in height".

He thought at first that this was simply because of an air pocket, but "it took a lot of time, almost a minute".

Everyone who had not been seated fell to the floor, the 40-year-old said.

"After a couple of seconds, we started to hear screams. 'There is blood, there is stabbing, we need help'," Polovincik said.

"At the end of the day, you understand very, very quickly that literally there is nothing that you can do at this point in time," he said.

Polovincik, a performance marketing analyst, said he tried to "be cool" for his children.

"You just tell them, yeah, everything's going to be all right. It's just a malfunction in the aeroplane, there is a crew under control, the passengers are helping them, [you] hug them really hard and try to keep your face so it doesn't look very panicked, try to keep your tone of voice."

But he said there was naturally a "high degree of panic" on the flight.

There were lots of families with children on the plane because the flight took place towards the end of a Jewish holiday period.

After about 10 to 15 minutes, he said a passenger in the cockpit told them the incident was "under control" and other staff were flying the plane.

In a video released by Netanyahu's office, passenger Yaniv Hayun described putting the attacker in a chokehold and pulling him out of the cockpit before other passengers helped pin him down.

Two other pilots who were onboard the flight then took over the controls and safely landed the plane, which had been carrying more than 150 passengers.

Polovincik said: "After they told us that the situation is, again, 'under control', then it was a bit harder to tell the kids that it's malfunctioned because people start to walk around the aeroplane covered with blood."

Polovincik was praised Indian pilot, Capt Smit Machchhar, who fought off his attacker and opened the door to the cockpit, allowing passengers to step in.

"Without him opening the door, we're probably not speaking here right now," he said, adding that he "can't even start saying our gratitude for this human being".

Polovincik said that, although he was not religious, he could not escape "the feeling that it was the hand of God yesterday" that had put "the pieces on the board in the way that they did".

"It's remarkable."

After the situation onboard was brought under control, the flight was diverted to Saudi Arabia, where Polovincik stressed the passengers, who were almost all Israeli, were treated well.

"They brought us water and food and coffee and even sweets for the kids - even though we don't have any diplomatic relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia," he said.

The alleged attacker, who was arrested in Saudi Arabia, is expected to be transferred to the United Arab Emirates, from where the plane departed, Netanyahu told Fox News.

The passengers were taken to Tel Aviv on another flight later on Wednesday and were greeted at the airport by crowds of onlookers playing music, singing, dancing and waving Israeli flags.

Polovincik said it had been "such a terrible ending" to an amazing family trip and that it would take some time for his family to come to terms with what had occurred.

'I was not going to let others die' - pilot of Flydubai flight describes cockpit attack by co-pilot

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c639m98gde00o, 3 days ago

The Indian pilot of the Flydubai plane who was stabbed by his co-pilot and opened the cockpit door to let others in has said he was determined not to let others die.

Capt Smit Machchhar said he was on the floor and still being attacked when he realised the plane carrying more than 170 passengers was sinking and he had to do something.

"I was lying on the floor injured but I told myself to go for one last push to open the door from inside," he said in a video call with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"Others came in and also played a role [in controlling the situation]. I was of course fighting for my own life but at the same time I knew I was not going to let others die," he added.

Flydubai's flight FZ1073, which was bound for Tel Aviv from Dubai early on Wednesday morning, plunged more than 17,000ft (5,200m) two and a half hours into its journey.

It first sent an emergency signal to air traffic controllers before switching to code squawk 7500, which indicates hijacking.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later told the media that one pilot had stabbed the other before "apparently trying to crash" the plane.

After fellow passengers overpowered the attacker, two reserve pilots, who were onboard, safely landed the plane at Tabuk Airport in north-western Saudi Arabia at 06:58 local time.

Machchhar, who has been hailed as a "true hero" by Netanyahu, was taken to hospital in Tabuk before being airlifted to Abu Dhabi, where he is reported to be in a stable condition.

Netanyahu told Fox News the attacker was an Omani national and said investigations suggested he had undergone "Islamist radical indoctrination".

He said that once the attacker had been subdued and tied up by passengers and crew, he was "calling out to the aircrew 'kill me, kill me', so it's clear he was suicidal - that's not a question".

The United Arab Emirates has begun investigating "whether the incident was linked to any terrorist activity or purpose", according to the country's state news agency.

Indian social media has been awash with praise for Machchhar since his identity emerged.

He told Modi he had been flying planes for 17 years and "can tell what is happening to the plane even with my eyes closed".

The prime minister told him that "his courage, patience and quick decision-making saved the lives of so many people" and the whole country was proud of him.

The Indian embassy in the UAE on Thursday said Machchhar was "in good health and recovering well". Ambassador Deepak Mittal said he was "proud of Capt Smit for his bravery" and "very reassured" to meet him.

"I am not looking at this wound like a wound because that would make my recovery even more difficult," Machchhar said.

"I am looking at it as a journey which is slowly going on and will take time but I am confident that the recovery will be there and I will become fit and healthy again."

UK believes Iran involved in RAF Fairford incident, Burnham says

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjwyz59k5y75o, 5 days ago

The government believes that Iran played a part in the RAF Fairford incident which resulted in five men being arrested and then bailed, Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said.

"There are strong indications that Iran played a part in what happened over the weekend at RAF Fairford," he told the BBC. He did not provide further details.

Iran has responded, with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi saying the UK leader was "barking up the wrong tree".

"I can confirm Iran's belief that releasing supposed terrorists working for foreign states really says it all," he wrote on social media.

Asked why the suspects had been released on bail - a decision which has been openly questioned by President Donald Trump - Burnham insisted the men were subject to the "strictest possible bail conditions".

Speaking at the White House on Monday, Trump said: "I will tell you, I would have said, 'don't let them have bail'. I'm surprised that they released them. I wouldn't have done that."

But Burnham said: "I think people need to understand that when it says released - that isn't as people might think. It's obviously with the strictest possible bail conditions.

"The authorities have this under the strongest grip and closest control, and I can assure you of that."

Burnham's comments come after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday that the incident at RAF Fairford "clearly involves the hands of a foreign actor".

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Rubio said "I think it ties us to the reality here, and that is we are dealing with elements in the world, and in the case of Iran, for example, who have openly threatened to attack American interests globally".

Burnham said that the government had been "talking to our counterparts in the United States all week to explain what is happening here, how things are being done", and that he had "complete confidence in the way British security services are handling this".

"We will say more in due course but we can confirm our belief that we believe Iran to have played a part," he told the BBC.

"Of course it remains an ongoing, complex and serious police investigation, and of course we are working closely with our colleagues in the United States of America," Burnham added.

Burnham's comments came after it emerged that one of the five men had dialled 999 himself before the group were arrested.

The five men were arrested in the early hours of Sunday morning after police were alerted to "three suspicious vehicles" in Whelford, a village which lies directly east of the base.

They are all UK nationals aged between 23 and 25. Four of them live in Westminster and one in Camden, and searches of their homes are now complete.

The men were released on bail in what police described as an "investigative decision" that was "grounded in experience and strategy".

Police said a quantity of petrol but no explosive devices were found during searches of the vans.

The RAF base has been used as a forward operating location by the US Air Force for decades.

In recent months, US bombers have taken off from the base for the Middle East, after the UK approved a US request to use it for what it called defensive strikes on Iran.

In July, Iran said "any base used for aggression against Iranian territory constitutes a legitimate target for our forces".

Before Araghchi's comments the Iranian embassy in London had said it rejected "unfounded and malicious speculations" linking Iran to the latest incident.

Last UK and US troops leave Iraq as anti-Islamic State mission ends

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c65ym1dyn92mo, 5 days ago

The last British and American troops have left Iraq after a military presence of more than a decade in the country.

The exit of the remaining UK military personnel - around 100 - from Irbil, in the northern Kurdistan region, was co-ordinated over recent weeks with US forces, who also departed on Wednesday.

It follows an agreement between the US and the Iraqi government, signed two years ago, to withdraw foreign troops by the end of this month.

British and US forces have been present in Iraq since 2014, as part of the international coalition to help defeat the extremist Islamic State (IS) group. Their departure brings the mission, known as Operation Inherent Resolve, to an end.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi said the end of the coalition's mission marked "Iraq's transition to a phase in which it assumes full responsibility for its security and stability".

Iraq is set to hold four "Sovereignty Days" as a national holiday to mark the withdrawal.

"Following more than a decade of operations, training and capacity building, Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and the Kurdish Peshmerga have secured the enduring territorial defeat of Daesh in Iraq and are now well placed to take primary responsibility for the country's security," the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) said in a statement, referring to IS by an Arabic acronym.

"With these objectives achieved, Iraq and its international partners can begin a new chapter focused on enduring security co-operation under Iraqi leadership."

US President Donald Trump celebrated the withdrawal, calling it a "victory for the United States, a victory for Iraq, and a decisive victory over ISIS".

Writing in a Truth Social post, the president added: "It has been a long time, with very bad decision-making that got us involved in this quagmire in the first place, but soon, that will be part of History."

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell also said the coalition's departure from Irbil marked "the successful conclusion of the military mission that defeated [IS] in Iraq".

He added: "The primary responsibility for addressing Iraq's remaining security challenges, including [IS] remnants and Iran-aligned militias that undermine Iraqi sovereignty and regional stability, now rests with the government of Iraq."

The Iraqi government declared the military defeat of IS in 2017, but coalition forces remained to help prevent the group's resurgence.

A recent UN report assessed that sustained counter-terrorism pressure by Iraqi security forces had left IS with several hundred fighters who were "able to carry out unsophisticated operations only".

The Iraqi government also faces the challenge of Iranian-backed militias in the country.

Zaidi, who took office in May, has vowed to disarm them and bring all weapons under state control following the coalition's exit.

But several powerful factions have resisted his plans and could now see their influence grow without the US presence.

Since the start of the US and Israel's war with Iran earlier this year, militias have been targeting the remaining US and UK forces stationed at Irbil air base.

Hundreds of Nato troops stationed in Baghdad left the country in March as tensions rose.

A BBC team visited the coalition base in Irbil in April this year, during a fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran.

They were forced to circle the base in an RAF transport aircraft while drones were being launched nearby.

At the height of the US bombing campaign against Iran, the coalition base was being targeted by up to 28 drones and missiles a day.

RAF Regiment Gunners, who were among the last British military personnel stationed there, had shot down more than 100 drones in the first six weeks of the war. Many of the attack drones were being launched by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.

On Wednesday, signalling the end of the mission, the MoD paid tribute to UK personnel who had contributed to the counter-IS mission.

It said they had provided "valuable support, training and assistance" to more than 111,000 members of the Iraqi Security Forces, including more than 21,000 Peshmerga forces in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region.

It also said the RAF had conducted thousands of sorties, striking more than 2,300 IS targets. The RAF is expected to continue flying missions over neighbouring Syria, to prevent the remnants of IS from gaining a foothold.

The Pentagon said the US would continue to provide "targeted training and intelligence support" to its Iraqi partners.

US Central Command said the coalition's joint taskforce remained operational and was now based in Jordan.

US forces will also continue their mission against IS in Syria, where the UN estimates that the group has up to 3,000 fighters.

This is the third time US and UK forces have withdrawn from Iraq.

Tens of thousands of US and British troops were deployed to the country in 1991 following Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.

They returned to Iraq in 2003, when US President George W Bush ordered Operation Iraqi Freedom to remove the dictator from power and eliminate weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist.

The fierce sectarian insurgency that engulfed Iraq following the invasion cost tens of thousands of lives, including those of nearly 4,500 US military personnel and 179 British military personnel.

US and UK forces left Iraq in 2011, only to return three years later, when IS threatened to take control of the country.

Israeli settlers attack West Bank village and block Palestinian family's return home

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvlylj41egxgo, 6 days ago

More than 100 Israeli settlers have carried out attacks in a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank, stopping a family escorted by the Israeli military from returning to their homes, which had been seized weeks ago by settlers.

Two houses belonging to the al-Tubasi family in Jalud, south of Nablus, were set on fire in the raid on Monday night and Israeli security forces were also targeted by settlers. Human rights groups say the events show how Israeli authorities are failing to take effective action against settler violence.

"It was extremely terrifying, beyond words. It's hard to imagine the situation," Mahmoud al-Tubasi told the BBC.

"My feeling now is that I am happy to have escaped death. I genuinely expected they were going to kill us."

Al-Tubasi, 60, his wife Aida, 51, and their 33-year-old son, Wael, had returned to their properties accompanied by Israeli forces after Israel's High Court ruled earlier this month that they must be allowed to go back.

The family was forced to leave this summer after weeks of settler harassment and attacks. Extremist settlers had set up an illegal outpost close to Jalud and besieged three houses, including two belonging to the al-Tubasis' sons who are married with young daughters.

Al-Tubasi said that he was called at about midnight and told that there was coordination with Israel's military for his family to go back to their houses. He received a message from Israeli officials saying that if he wanted to reclaim his property he had to go immediately with the army and Israeli border police.

By torchlight, the family inspected one home. A video shared with the BBC shows that the settlers had already extensively damaged it - smashing holes through doors, tearing out electrical fittings, ripping up tiles, breaking windows and leaving rubbish strewn about. The toilet was smashed and appeared to be full of human waste.

A large number of extremist settlers arrived in Jalud after alerts were posted in WhatsApp groups they use to coordinate action, saying that the Palestinian family they had forced out was returning and should be stopped.

"As soon as we entered the house, which had already been completely destroyed, settlers started throwing stones at us. The army responded by firing tear gas at them, but there were so many settlers, more than 150, that the army could no longer control them," al-Tubasi told the BBC.

The grandfather says that a group of Israeli soldiers protected his family from the settlers who tried to approach them, using pepper spray to force them back. Settlers slashed the tyres of a military van they were put in and then they were transferred to an armoured military vehicle.

As the family was being driven away, the settlers set fire to their car and both of their houses. Video shot from a distance shows smoke billowing from them.

Al-Tubasi says that the Israeli security forces "essentially formed a barrier, took us out safely and got us away from there. But they did not take any action against the settlers themselves."

An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) statement said that "more than 100 Israeli rioters were present in the village, blocking roads, setting tyres on fire, and throwing stones at security forces."

The Israeli military said that three police officers were lightly injured and a security forces vehicle was damaged. It described the Tubasi family as victims of "nationalist crime" adding that "due to the violence, the mission to return the family to their home was not completed."

The head of the local council in Jalud told reporters that residents had confronted the settlers leading to clashes which even spread to a nearby village, where a Palestinian woman was assaulted by settlers and her house set ablaze.

One month ago, Aida al-Tubasi was attacked by masked Israeli settlers and injured along with American journalists who were interviewing her in Jalud.

The high court decision, which criticised Israeli authorities for failing to crack down on settler violence, ruled that the family should be safely returned home by 20 September - more than a week ago.

The legal ruling was strongly worded describing Israeli settlers' actions as "a completely unacceptable phenomenon that stands in contrast to the basic values and moral principles of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he strongly condemned the attacks on security forces, calling on law enforcement, "to prosecute the rioters to the fullest extent of the law." Israeli police said that they had arrested three people suspected of being involved in the attacks.

Speaking at the UN General Assembly last week, Netanyahu dismissed international concerns about settler violence. He accused the media of ignoring attacks on Jewish Israelis and covering "a handful of juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number, who throw stones, who chop down olive trees, occasionally they light some fires."

According to the Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, fewer than three per cent of police investigations into settler violence over the last two decades have led to a conviction.

Ziv Stahl, its executive director, said the lack of effective law enforcement was because, "the violence is part of a systematic government policy aimed at pushing Palestinians out of the area and expanding Israeli control over land in the West Bank".

Netanyahu's government has overseen a rapid expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank claiming biblical and legal rights to the land. Some ministers have said they aim to "bury the idea" that an independent Palestinian state could be set up in the territory along with East Jerusalem and Gaza. Settlements and outposts are illegal under international law.

Levels of settler violence have reached an all-time high this year, according to the United Nations, which says that since 2023, more than 6,500 Palestinians have been displaced due to settler attacks and access restrictions in the occupied West Bank.

In the same time period, the UN's Humanitarian Office (OCHA) has logged 6,199 attacks by Israeli settlers causing casualties or damage.

According to OCHA, at least 82 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank this year and four Israelis have been killed - members of the security forces and civilians. At least 23 Palestinians were killed in the context of settler attacks.

Three Egyptian security officials convicted of kidnapping Italian student

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw7v4ppj9yd6o, 7 days ago

Three Egyptian security officials have been convicted by a Rome court over the kidnapping of an Italian student whose tortured body was found in Cairo a decade ago.

The men, who were tried in absentia, denied the charges. On Monday they were sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of aggravated kidnapping. A fourth Egyptian defendant was acquitted.

Giulio Regeni, 28, was studying for a doctorate at Cambridge University when he went missing while on a research trip in Egypt in 2016.

Days later, his mutilated body was found in a ditch near Cairo. An autopsy later revealed he had been tortured.

Italian and Egyptian prosecutors originally investigated the case together, but reached opposing conclusions.

Egyptian authorities argued criminal gangsters were to blame for Regeni's murder and suggested various other explanations for his death, including a car accident, failed drug deal, or botched robbery.

They also denied any state involvement in Regeni's disappearance or death.

But prosecutors in Rome concluded that the Egyptian national security agency was involved in the crime.

The four defendants were Gen Tariq Sabir, Col Usham Helmi, Col Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim and Maj Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif. Sabir was acquitted.

Rome's chief prosecutor and a lawyer for Regeni's family welcomed the verdict.

"From today, people around the world can feel safer," Alessandra Ballerini, the family's lawyer, said. "Impunity can be defeated and democracies can place limits on arbitrary power."

Regeni's family have campaigned throughout the decade for justice. As the verdict was read out, there was silence from family members and supporters in court who wore yellow t-shirts and badges, the colour of their campaign, AFP reported.

Regeni was abducted on 25 January 2016 while carrying out research for his PhD at Cambridge University on Egypt's independent trade unions - a politically controversial topic in Egypt.

His mother told the Italian parliament in 2018 that her son's body was so disfigured that she was only able to identify him by the tip of his nose. Prosecutors said he sustained injuries that showed he was beaten with "kicks, fists, sticks and clubs", and that he died from a broken neck.

The verdict was the end of a years-long effort by Italy to prosecute the security officials.

The trial, initially scheduled for 2021, was suspended due to concerns prosecutors had been unable to track down the defendants to issue the charges.

However, in September 2023, Italy's Constitutional Court allowed the trial to go ahead.

While extradition remains unlikely, the convictions could renew diplomatic tensions between Italy and Egypt.

What we know about stabbing on Flydubai flight to Israel

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqjdv7pmj9dno, 4 days ago

A flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv was diverted to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday after one pilot stabbed the other and "apparently tried to crash the plane", Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said.

The pilot who attacked his colleague on Flydubai flight FZ1073 is an Omani national, who was arrested after the emergency landing and is being questioned by Saudi authorities, according to Netanyahu.

The stabbed pilot, Indian national Capt Smit Machchhar, was hailed as a "hero" by the Israeli prime minister. He said Machchhar managed to open the cockpit door, allowing passengers to overpower the attacker as the aircraft descended sharply.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz called the incident an "attempted jihadist terror attack". But authorities have not yet issued any statements regarding the attacker's motive.

Here's what we know.

What happened to the flight?

Flydubai flight FZ1073 took off from Dubai International Airport in the United Arab Emirates at 03:05 GMT (07:05 local time) on Wednesday, en route to Tel Aviv Ben Gurion International Airport.

The Boeing 737 MAX aircraft was carrying more than 170 people, with Netanyahu saying "almost all" passengers were Israeli.

Data from flight tracking website Flightradar24 shows a rapid descent by the plane over Saudi Arabia around two and a half hours after take-off, dropping more than 17,000ft (5,180m) in less than two minutes, at around 05:21.

Minutes later, the plane signalled a "general emergency" code, squawk 7700, before switching to squawk 7500, a code reporting "unlawful interference", or hijacking.

At 05:40, the plane - which had briefly entered Jordanian airspace - looped back into Saudi Arabia, where it later started its manual descent for landing.

Less than an hour later, the plane returned to squawk 7700.

At 06:58, the plane landed at Tabuk Airport in north-western Saudi Arabia.

Initial Israeli media reports cited Israeli officials as saying a fight had broken out between two pilots. But on Wednesday afternoon, Netanyahu confirmed later reports that one pilot had stabbed the other before "apparently trying to crash" the plane.

He said an Israeli passenger told him that "the plane went into a spin and began to descend" before the passenger and a crew member broke into the cockpit and overpowered the "pilot who had carried out the stabbing".

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Thursday that the alarm was initially raised by an Israeli woman, Tali Manes, who heard a commotion coming from the cockpit and alerted her fellow passengers, according to a statement from his office.

Manes' husband, Zvika, along with three other Israeli men - Yaniv Hayun, Dr Shota Musayev and Asaf Rajuan - rushed to assist and entered the cockpit door, which Machchhar had opened after being attacked, Herzog said.

They overpowered the attacker while Hayun steadied the aircraft's controls, the president added. Once the attacker had been subdued, Musayev provided life-saving medical treatment to the seriously wounded pilot.

An on-duty flydubai crew travelling on the flight were then able to enter the cockpit and managed to stabilise the plane before landing it safely at Tabuk.

A flydubai repatriation flight carrying passengers left Tabuk at 14:40 GMT (17:40 local time) and arrived in Tel Aviv at around 15:40.

The stabbed pilot is in a stable condition in hospital in Tabuk, according to the Indian embassy in Saudi Arabia.

Paying tribute to Machchhar, Netanyahu hailed him as a "true hero" and said "he saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals".

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also praised Machchhar's actions.

"His valour helped save hundreds of lives and avert a great tragedy. India is proud of Captain Machchhar," he wrote on X.

What have passengers said?

In an interview with the BBC, fellow passenger Almog Itali described the moment he realised that something was wrong.

"Suddenly the aeroplane started to, like a rollercoaster, to drop down [with] a massive G-force. It was falling down for 20 or 30 seconds, rapidly, and then balanced, and then started once again to fall down," he said.

He added: "We saw that people were rushing to the cockpit. Apparently, one of the pilots stabbed the other one. A couple of passengers and crew members took over and knocked [him] down. And the third pilot managed to take over the aeroplane and to balance it."

Itali described the passengers who subdued the attacker as "real heroes".

"They are very brave, they're like, they literally saved our lives. For sure. And we thank them all day long. They are our heroes."

Yaniv Hayun, who was greeted on arrival at Ben Gurion airport by Netanyahu, said in a video released by the prime minister's office that he and others tried to open the cockpit door, but the stabbed pilot was very close to it.

Before he collapsed, the injured man managed to open the door, Hayun said.

He said that inside, the attacker was "trying to destroy the instruments in order to disable the plane".

Hayun then described putting the attacker in a chokehold and pulling him outside the cockpit before other passengers helped to pin him down.

He added that he "pulled the controls" of the plane, explaining to Netanyahu that he watches the Canadian documentary series Air Crash Investigation. "The plane started to level out, a bit more, and then [another] pilot told me he was taking control from there."

Zvika Manes told Israeli public broadcaster Kan that he and other passengers tied the attacker up "with his own zip ties and with the multimedia headphones".

"There are children and families here who have been through a very severe, highly traumatic event," he added.

Rajuan was meanwhile quoted by the Israeli president's office as saying: "We felt helpless, suspended in midair, and I didn't know who to turn to. But it was all instinct: to survive, to save the family, the people, and the children."

What has the response been so far?

In an interview with CNN on Wednesday evening, the Israeli prime minister said the stabbed pilot, passengers and second crew had "managed to prevent a 9/11 disaster".

He also said that the pilot who attacked his colleague was from Oman and that he expected the man to be taken back to the UAE once he had been interrogated by Saudi authorities. "We'll be following and possibly also participating in this investigation," he added.

Netanyahu said Israel did not have any warning or advance intelligence about the incident. "What we had was a lot of information streaming in that Iran's proxies, in particular Hezbollah and Hamas, were planning attacks against Israel and Israeli civilians abroad," he explained.

Asked by Fox News whether there was any indication of Iran's involvement, he replied: "It's too early to say."

Investigators are looking into the motives of the attacker, including whether he was connected to a state actor or armed group.

On Thursday, Netanyahu told Fox that, after being subdued, the attacker called out to the crew, "Kill me, kill me!" He added: "So, it's clear that he was suicidal… It looks very likely that he was going to down the plane."

He also said the attacker "underwent Islamist radical indoctrination".

The UAE's foreign ministry said a team of public prosecutors had been ordered to examine "all circumstances and motives surrounding the incident, including any possible connection to terrorist activity or intent, and whether it involved prior planning or direction", according to state news agency WAM.

Flydubai said in a statement that the underlying reasons and motives behind the incident remained unknown and warned against "premature speculation".

The airline also said it had suspended flights to and from Israel while the investigation continued.

Israeli authorities are also increasing security checks on pilots flying to the country in response to the incident.

The incident has heightened security fears in Israel ahead of the third anniversary of the deadly Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023, which triggered the Gaza war, and a general election later this month.

Inside Yemen's front-line city as Houthis battle for control

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw98005ndz7no, 8 days ago

"This is the first drone," said the soldier accompanying us in south-western Yemen. "It's usually followed by an attack."

The buzzing sound overhead got louder as we took cover under the bushes, before climbing back into the vehicle and driving away.

Within about 10 minutes, the loud thuds of strikes followed, one after another, though it was unclear where they landed.

It is hard to tell where the front line begins in the mountains south-west of the city of Taiz.

Saudi-backed pro-government forces are battling to push back Houthi fighters, who swept down the coast of the Red Sea earlier this month, taking control of a key shipping chokepoint and escalating Yemen's civil war.

We travelled with government forces from Taiz through checkpoints to the line where their control ends and no man's land begins, in order to see the fighting up close.

Homes are scattered across the slopes, but many stand abandoned after families fled to escape the fighting.

It is eerily quiet, no sound of the cars or motorbikes that are continuously whizzing through the city. All you can hear is the bleating of livestock and the sound of incoming and outgoing fire.

"Two mortars landed here on my property," said Ali, sitting outside his home with a herd of goats, about 1km (0.6 miles) from the front line.

He told me he had sent his children to a displacement camp because they could no longer cope with the shelling and gunfire. He had stayed with his wife and sisters to look after their animals.

"I am terrified," he said, "but I have no choice, we will all go hungry without our animals and die anyway."

He gave only his first name, fearful of repercussions if the Houthis take over the area in the days ahead. Contacts from the Houthi side have told us they are consolidating troops, preparing for a major offensive. When we asked government forces about this they said they are aware and were preparing too.

At the closest checkpoint to the front line, we met some fighters who had just returned from positions high on the mountain, just a few hundred metres from advancing Houthis. One of them said the bodies of 18 government soldiers lay in an area his unit could fire across but not reach.

"We shoot over them, but we can't pull them out," he said.

Fighting around Taiz has intensified since the Houthis seized the strategic Red Sea port of Mokha, 85km to the west of the city, on 10 September, after a ceasefire that had largely held for four years unravelled.

The group took control of a swathe of territory overlooking the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait – a crucial shipping corridor linking Europe and Asia. This contributed to a rise in oil prices as fears rose of further disruption to supplies from the region.

Taiz is Yemen's third biggest city and its cultural capital, and is home to close to a million people. It sits at a vital intersection between Houthi-controlled areas in northern Yemen and government-held ones in the south – and is hemmed in by front lines in several directions.

Government forces hold the centre of Taiz, while Houthi positions lie to its north and east. The fiercest recent fighting has been on the western approaches, where the two sides are contesting high ground overlooking the city's route south. If the Houthis secure these areas, government forces could find it much harder to retake Mokha.

We travelled to Taiz from Aden in the south, where Yemen's internationally recognised Presidential Leadership Council and government are based.

About 30 checkpoints along the route marked stretches of road controlled by different commanders – a clear sign of the fractured make-up of the forces fighting on the government side.

As we neared the city, ambulances began to pass us. We counted at least five within half an hour, heading towards Taiz's main hospital. It was clear that we were driving into a city at the heart of a brutal battle.

We arrived after dark. The shops were lit, the restaurants were packed and children were playing in the streets. But every so often, other sounds broke through – the thud of shelling and the crack of gunfire from the mountains around the city.

Taiz has been a major battleground in the country's devastating civil war. After ousting the government from Sanaa in 2015, the Houthis attempted to also seize control of Taiz but were driven out of most of the city by local militiamen.

Now, in their latest offensive, Houthis are making extensive use of drones alongside other weapons.

Their main outside supplier is Iran, which has provided weapons, funding and military advice, according to Saudi Arabia, Western countries and UN experts. Iran, however, has previously denied supplying weapons to the Houthis and says it only supports them politically.

There have been persistent reports over many years of the Houthis recruiting child soldiers, and a government soldier told us he had faced them on the front line.

"It's difficult to look at a Yemeni child and shoot at him. But then they are pointing the gun at you and you have to defend yourself," he said.

The Houthis signed an "action plan" with the UN in 2022 pledging to end the practice. The BBC has also spoken to teenagers serving with government forces.

Meanwhile a coalition led by Saudi Arabia is backing the Yemeni government, and providing it with weapons. The Saudi military has carried out hundreds of air strikes on Houthi positions on the Red Sea coast, while the Houthis have launched drones and missiles at cities and infrastructure in south-western Saudi Arabia.

In the evening, at al-Thawra hospital in Taiz, casualties from the front lines were being brought into an intensive care unit where every bed we saw was occupied.

Some patients were fighters, others were civilians. Twelve-year-old Ghana Nabeel had been herding goats when shrapnel struck her head. Her family said an incoming Houthi mortar had landed nearby.

She lay unconscious, her head wrapped in bandages, her face swollen and bruised. Her family were waiting at her bedside to learn what life might be like if she wakes up.

A doctor told me the injury had damaged her brain. "She will never be the same again," he said.

About 20km south of Taiz, at the al-Monig displacement camp, families who had fled Mokha and villages hit by fighting were arriving, among hundreds of tents.

We were told that 200 families had arrived in the previous 10 days.

Maryam Saleh, not her real name, had come a week earlier from Mokha with her husband and five children. The youngest is aged seven. Maryam sat weaving a hat to sell so she could buy food for the day.

"We walked barefoot and we didn't carry anything with us, just our children," she told me.

Her nephew was killed by shrapnel from a mortar as they fled, she said. He had been walking behind her. She described clashes and sniping both ahead of and behind the family and said she then saw armed men on the mountain.

"We thought we were finished," she said. The children were screaming and crying, but the family kept walking, she added.

Fatma Mohammed Saleh was lying on an empty rice sack outside another family's tent. She has a disability and cannot walk, and told me she had nowhere of her own to sleep: "I have nothing… no shelter, no mattress, no family. Nothing."

Fatma said she had been with her two sons and their children when the fighting reached their village. But she was slowing them down so told them to take the children and run, she said.

She spent the next two days crawling on her hands and knees, she said.

"I was crawling and the bullets are coming from here and the shells are there. And the bullets are here, and the shells are here. And above me it was like thunder. I was praying to God."

A man on a motorbike then saw her and drove her to the camp, she said. She has not seen her family since.

On 22 September, the UN refugee agency said more than 130,000 people had been displaced across Yemen so far this month, on top of 5.2 million already displaced by the civil war.

It warned that another 100,000 could – like Fatma – be forced from their homes over the next three months.

Additional reporting by Jasmin Dyer

Who are the Houthis and what do they want?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqy7z228kee3o, 11 days ago

Yemen's civil war has flared up in recent weeks as the Iran-backed Houthi movement, which controls much of the country's north-west, seized large strategically important stretches of the Red Sea coast in a rapid offensive.

The territory includes the port of Mokha, which overlooks the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a chokepoint for global shipping.

Oil prices have risen on fears of further disruption to the global economy, following six months of war between the US, Israel and Iran.

Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed on both sides during the Houthis' advance, which came after the collapse of a four-year informal ceasefire. The UN says more than 120,000 people have been displaced by the escalation.

Neighbouring Saudi Arabia, which opposes the Houthis and backs Yemen's internationally-recognised government, has launched air strikes, while the Houthis have fired drones and missiles at south-western Saudi Arabia. The group has also targeted commercial vessels linked to Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea.

Who are the Houthis?

The Houthis are an armed political and religious group from northern Yemen which champions the country's Shia Muslim minority, the Zaidis.

They declare themselves to be part of the Iranian-led "axis of resistance" against Israel, the US and the wider West - along with armed groups such as Hamas and Lebanon's Hezbollah movement.

Formally known as the Ansar Allah (Partisans of God), the group emerged in the 1990s and takes its name from the movement's late founder, Hussein al-Houthi. His brother, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, has been its de facto leader since 2004.

In the early 2000s, the Houthis rebelled against Yemen's long-time authoritarian president Ali Abdullah Saleh. They wanted greater autonomy for the group's homeland in the north of Yemen. The group seized the capital Sanaa after the 2011 Arab Spring, when a popular uprising forced Saleh to hand power to his deputy.

The Houthis have continued to grow in strength, with troop numbers estimated to have risen to 350,000 last year, and now control between one-quarter and one-third of Yemen's territory, but 70-80% of its population - about 30 million people.

The group wants an end to a Saudi blockade, control of the whole of Yemen and access to Yemen's oil and gas revenues.

How are the US and Saudis involved?

Neighbouring Saudi Arabia feared the Houthis would take over Yemen and make it a satellite of its regional rival, Iran.

In 2015 Saudi Arabia formed a coalition of Arab countries that intervened on behalf of Yemen's internationally-recognised government.

But years of air strikes and ground fighting were unable to dislodge the Houthis from most of the territory they seized, and also triggered one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. A temporary ceasefire was brokered in 2022.

Soon after the start of the Gaza war in October 2023, the Houthis began firing drones and missiles towards Israel and at merchant vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, saying they were acting in support of the Palestinians.

Western countries deployed warships and the US, UK and Israel carried out air strikes. An Israeli strike killed senior Houthi figures including the prime minister of its self-declared government.

In 2025 the US and the Houthis agreed to stop targeting each other. However the Houthis resumed missile attacks on Israel after the US and Israel attacked Iran in February 2026, having paused them after the October 2025 ceasefire in Gaza.

How did the recent escalation begin?

The informal ceasefire between the Houthis and the Saudis began to unravel in July.

The Houthis announced a "maritime embargo" against Saudi Arabia and began missile and drone attacks on Saudi airports, oil facilities and tankers in the Red Sea. They said they were retaliating for what the Houthis say is a years-long Saudi blockade, and for an air strike on Sanaa airport.

This was followed by a rapid Houthi advance in September that captured as much as 130km (81 miles) of the country's Red Sea coastline as well as the island of Perim.

The move gave the Houthis significant control of the strategic Bab al-Mandab Strait, but they have insisted that they pose no threat to international shipping, except for Saudi-linked vessels.

The Houthis' actions have caused renewed concern about disruption of world oil supplies. Bab al-Mandab has become an increasingly important route for oil exports from Saudi Arabia since shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, was curtailed due to the US and Israel's war with Iran.

The situation has also been exacerbated by Houthi attacks on Saudi oil installations, as well as an attack on the East-West Pipeline blamed on Iran-backed Iraqi militias, and the escalation threatens to again draw in Western powers.

Media reports said both the Yemeni government and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had urged President Trump to strike the Houthis following the offensive. Trump did not do so, saying the Houthis had agreed not to hit US targets.

The UK meanwhile agreed to a Saudi request to deploy a military aircraft to help refuel Saudi Arabian fighter jets for "purely defensive missions".

Who funds and supplies the Houthis?

Saudi Arabia and Western powers say Iran smuggled weapons - including drones, and cruise and ballistic missiles - to the Houthis during Yemen's civil war in violation of a UN arms embargo.

A panel of UN experts concluded in 2024 that the Houthis had been transformed into a powerful military organisation due to the transfer of materiel, assistance and training from Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Lebanon's Hezbollah movement and Iraqi specialists.

And a report in May 2026 by Conflict Armament Research (CAR) - after the start of the Iran war - found that whereas in the past Tehran shipped finished weapons to the Houthis, it was now increasingly sending parts which its proxies were able to assemble and was also sharing increasingly advanced missile technologies.

Iran has denied supplying weapons to the Houthis and says it only supports them politically.

Reports of violence against women in Gaza surge, UN agency finds

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c94gm7dp40y0o, 12 days ago

There has been a sharp rise in reports of violence against women and girls in the Gaza Strip, including early and forced marriage, according to a series of recent reports from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).

One report, which analyses data collected by 10 organisations, says the protracted crisis in war-torn Gaza has "created conditions in which women and girls face escalating risks of gender-based violence".

It also warns that there has been a "severe escalation" in the number of early and forced marriage incidents in the second quarter of this year. Both are considered types of gender-based violence (GBV) by the UN.

Another report presenting testimony from 230 women in crowded displacement camps in Gaza City and Khan Younis makes for a grim read, describing the violence they have experienced or witnessed.

Some readers may find some of the details in this report distressing

One displaced woman in a school-turned-shelter in Gaza highlights how rape victims are often married to their rapists to avoid shame and scandal. "When rape cases are discovered in schools, you find weddings and celebrations at the school the next day," she says.

Another woman tells how last year, at the time of famine, "a man married off his 14-year-old daughter in exchange for two bags of flour so he and his [other] children could eat". Six women in different displacement camps shared stories of such exchanges - which would have been unthinkable before the conflict between Israel and Hamas began in 2023.

Although data collection to establish actual figures remains tricky, in the second quarter of this year, the UNFPA says the number of reported cases of early and forced marriage had increased by 123% on the first quarter. Early or child marriage involved girls aged 12 to 17.

"The trends are shocking," says Nestor Owomuhangi, the UNFPA representative to Palestine. He says that the extreme circumstances over the past three years - which have seen tens of thousands of people killed, mass destruction and multiple waves of displacement in Gaza - have broken down social structures, so "everything is eroded... there is no system".

While food markets have reopened, many cannot afford the goods on offer, there is still extreme poverty and hunger with reliance on charitable handouts. Nearly all the population of more than two million Gazans have been driven from their homes, leaving most living in squalid tent camps or damaged buildings. Public services have largely collapsed, and Israeli air strikes have continued despite the ceasefire.

Prior to the war, girls in Gaza outnumbered and outperformed boys at every level of education above primary school. Now, with prolonged school closures, many children have dropped out of education. For boys there is pressure to find informal work to help support their families, for girls there are heightened issues around safety.

Living among strangers, without privacy, in a socially conservative society, there are complaints of heightened sexual harassment and abuse - many families see marrying their daughters as a way to protect them and preserve modesty. The UNFPA report - based on research carried out in late 2025 and early 2026 - reveals how girls orphaned during the war are especially vulnerable.

One woman in a Gaza City camp interviewed for the report says she attended the wedding of two girls from her family, aged just 14 and 15.

"Their uncles married them off very young. Do you know why? Because their father and mother were martyred, and their uncles wanted to get rid of the responsibility and expenses," the woman said. "By God, they don't understand what marriage or life is."

The Women's Affairs Center in Gaza - a Palestinian NGO which works with the UNFPA - and other support groups have documented distressing cases of girls who have been married and suffered abuse, often becoming pregnant. They say that those in their early teens are much more likely to have miscarriages and underweight babies than adult women.

"We see adolescent pregnancies going through the roof because of child marriage," says Owomuhangi. "A child who is at an age when the body is not fully developed to sustain another body, who is hungry, in unhygienic circumstances, who doesn't know how to take care of the infant, who doesn't even know how to take care of herself, the consequences of that pregnancy are always really, really bad."

The UN and most humanitarian organisations categorise marriages of girls under 18 as early marriage. Even before the war, this was more common among Palestinians in Hamas-run Gaza than it was in the occupied West Bank, but it was declining.

The law in Gaza allows exceptions to the minimum marital age of 17 with parental consent and authorisation by a judge. Court officials can approve marriage for those as young as 14 years and seven months old, although a local Sharia expert told us that "legal safeguards" had been removed when Islamic courts - which officiate over family matters for Muslims - were closed for a large part of the war.

The BBC has been speaking to some families in which bereaved relatives were married. Zuhair, who is 25, says his uncles pushed him to marry a 16-year-old girl from his extended family after her father - her sole guardian - was killed in an Israeli air strike.

Challenged on why he agreed to go ahead with the plan, he said: "One of the reasons that led me to marry her was that there was no one to take care of her. That's the first point."

"If it were not for the war, she would still be a young girl spoiled by her father. She would be going to school," Zuhair adds. "She still has a child's mindset, not a mature mindset. She misses school, her family, friends. She even misses simply sitting at home."

A couple says they allowed their 17-year-old son to marry his 16-year-old cousin after their older son and the girl's father were killed. The teenager is now pregnant so will not return to school. "She needs to care for her child," her father-in-law says, "her education would be in vain."

Sexual violence in Gaza remains acutely under-reported in large part due to fear of stigma and retaliation. UN safety audits have shown particular risks to women and girls at night, causing them to avoid camp toilets and bathrooms.

The latest analysis report by the UNFPA-led task force stated that incidents of sexual violence, including rape and sexual assault, "have become critical in Gaza". They accounted for 2.7% of total reported incidents of GBV from April to June 2026 - up from 2.1% in the quarter before; this represented a 61% surge in absolute case numbers.

This rise is being linked to efforts to raise awareness and provide better ways to make confidential reports. Demographic data indicated that the majority of survivors were women aged 18-59, followed by adolescent girls at 8% and adult men at 5%.

Women who are widows or have husbands who are detained or missing are at increased risk of sexual abuse and exploitation. Nearly one in four households is now reportedly headed by a woman - double the proportion before the war.

"One widow was looking for a tent, and a [camp] representative told her, "I'll give you a tent, we'll put you in our camp, and you can come stay with me tonight," recalls a woman in Gaza City, interviewed for the UNFPA report.

Aid agencies argue that the dangers for women in Gaza could be greatly eased by improving humanitarian conditions. There are calls for Israel to allow higher quality shelters into the territory as well as equipment to upgrade latrines and sanitation as well as lighting. Israel restricts items it classes as having a potential dual use for military purposes.

There are ongoing efforts to improve education and healthcare and longer-term plans for campaigns to combat domestic violence and child marriage. While the course of so many lives in Gaza has already been permanently changed, women say they hope for a future in which they at least feel safer.

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

Yemenis flee across Red Sea as Houthis and Saudi-backed forces escalate war

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw4gm7l742dmo, 14 days ago

Ibrahim Issa, 50, is from the Yemeni coastal town of Dhubab, right on the front lines of the war between Yemen's Houthis and the Saudi-backed pro-government forces fighting them.

Today he sits, surrounded by his family, on a tarpaulin spread over a sandy floor inside a vast open-sided warehouse at Markazi camp in Obock, northern Djibouti, packed with Yemeni families who have fled by boat across the narrow Bab al-Mandab Strait.

After their sea crossing, Yemeni refugees have made their way by truck and on foot to this camp, jointly administered by the government and the UN.

"How could I just sit there when my kids are screaming and shaking in terror?" says Ibrahim Issa. "When the sound of the planes start, and the kids hear the planes, they begin shouting and screaming. As parents it is our responsibility, what can you do when you see this? That is why we fled, to save them."

As a fisherman, Ibrahim Issa already owned a boat large enough to bring out his family from Yemen.

He even brought several of the family's goats which I can now see nibbling at scraps nearby, foraging amidst the discarded canisters of cooking gas and empty plastic bottles. Some families have been able to bring small bundles of possessions with them from Yemen – one family has even brought a "jeraak", a tall metal shisha pipe – but others have arrived, exhausted, in just the clothes they left in.

In just the last few days more than 3,000 refugees have arrived here from Yemen, many entire families. The UN estimates that in all, more than 120,000 Yemenis have been displaced by the sudden surge in fighting along Yemen's Red Sea coast.

This month, the country's Houthis, who had already seized most of the populated parts of Yemen years ago, made a lightning dash down the coast towards Bab al-Mandab, the narrow, maritime chokepoint where the southern Red Sea flows into the Gulf of Aden and the wider Indian Ocean.

Saudi Arabia, which backs the internationally recognised government of Yemen, has responded with hundreds of air strikes along the flat, coastal plain where the Houthis are now digging in. The Houthis have also launched hundreds of drones and missiles at cities and infrastructure in south-western Saudi Arabia.

"We don't care which side it is that's attacking," is the message I got loud and clear in Arabic from everyone here I spoke to. "It's the bombs falling all around us that have caused us to flee."

Djibouti, a tiny former French colony that sits just across the water from Yemen, has made it clear it has no intention of involving itself in the war between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government.

And yet Djibouti is one of the most militarised nations in Africa. Since 2003, the US has run a huge multinational base here, Camp Lemonnier, once home to the French Foreign Legion. China too has a major base here, its largest military presence on the Indian Ocean and recently upgraded.

Back in Markazi camp, one of those I spoke to is Qassim Abraham Abssy. Once also a fisherman, his identity card shows him to be 100 years old.

"What led us to come here?" he asks rhetorically.

"It was the planes. The sounds of the planes, boom! That's what made us flee, for the sake of our children. It burns ours hearts. We don't know which side they are from. They are bombing everywhere, because the Houthis are everywhere, in the mountains, in the roads. A plane comes, bombs everywhere."

Outside in the blazing 37C heat, close to the neat lines of tents supplied by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, I met Mohammed Abdullarim from Aden, a 63-year-old former tour guide old enough to have been born when Aden was still a British protectorate.

Unlike the new arrivals, Mohammed has been here since 2015. He fled to Djibouti soon after the fighting first flared up between the Houthis and the government of the now-ousted President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.

He has been at the camp ever since but suddenly, as we were talking, the sadness of what is happening to his country overwhelmed him and he turned his head away, choking back tears.

"Most of the people here are in the worst condition, inside the tents here. I am very touched, I'm crying for these people, for my people, for their suffering. I want our voices to be heard by the NGOs and the Djibouti government. And I'm thankful to them for accepting us."

How long will they have to stay here? That depends, of course, on the fighting. Yemen has been wracked by a horrific civil war that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions since 2014.

A shaky, UN-brokered 2022 truce between the Saudis and the Houthis has broken down spectacularly in recent months, with the two sides trading missiles, drones and air strikes.

Yemen's war may be a remote one to most people but the effect of choking off Saudi Arabia's oil exports through the Bab al-Mandab Strait are well publicised. But as ever, it is often the human cost that goes unnoticed.

Sitting beside his wife on their tarpaulin, amid the cacophony all around them, Qassim Abssy the fisherman is wary of leaving the safety of Djibouti: "If the war continues then we're not going back because we have peace here."

His wife, Aisha Abdulkadir Mohammed, agrees. "We are willing to go back in peace if peace returns to our country, and we are praying to God that peace does return. All we need is peace, even for our children's future, they get safety first, then food, water and an education.

"As you see we just fled with our clothes, and left everything behind, because [in Yemen] there is no peace."

Too early to say whether Iran involved in Dubai-Tel Aviv flight attack, Israeli PM says

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqgmrm7xd8wyo, 4 days ago

It is too early to say whether Iran had any involvement in an attack by a pilot who stabbed another pilot and tried to take over a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, Israel's prime minister has said.

The Flydubai plane plunged more than 17,000ft (5,200m) two hours into its journey on Wednesday, before passengers and crew overpowered the attacker and retook control to land safely.

The stabbed pilot, Indian national Capt Smit Machchhar, is in hospital in a stable condition and was hailed a "true hero" by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

One passenger, Yaniv Hayun, described how he put the attacker, who was trying to disable the plane, in a chokehold before other passengers helped pin him down.

The alleged attacker, who was arrested in Saudi Arabia, is expected to be transferred to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where the plane took off from, Netanyahu told Fox News.

Asked whether there was any indication as of now of Iran's involvement, he replied: "It's too early to say". He added that the pilot was "now being investigated in Saudi Arabia".

The UAE's chief prosecutor said on Thursday an investigation had been launched into the incident, including if there was any link to "terrorist" activity.

Meanwhile, he and India's leader Narendra Modi called stabbed pilot Machchhar a "hero".

"Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker - preventing a catastrophic mid-air disaster," Netanyahu wrote on X.

Modi praised the pilot's actions, writing on X: "In the face of the gravest danger and despite being seriously injured, he showed immense courage and an unwavering resolve to protect the lives of others."

Israeli President Isaac Herzog told the BBC it was "an amazing, heroic event of resilient people who work together".

"There was a huge miracle and huge bravery and we are grateful to the Indian pilot who was such a hero," he said to Radio 4's Today programme on Thursday.

Netanyahu told CNN Israel did not have any warning or advance intelligence about the incident on the plane, which was flying 174 people to Israel.

Preliminary findings from a separate Israeli investigation, suggest that the alleged attacker intended to crash the plane, an Israeli security source told BBC Arabic.

The source said the investigation - led by Israel's intelligence agency Mossad - interviewed passengers after they arrived in Tel Aviv to establish what had happened on the plane.

Flydubai's flight FZ1073 took off from Dubai International Airport in the UAE at 03:05 GMT (07:05 local time), en route to Ben Gurion Airport.

Two hours later, the 17,000ft drop in altitude was reported on the plane tracking website Flightradar24 and minutes later the plane signalled an emergency code - squawk 7700 - before switching it to a squawk 7500 code reporting a hijacking.

Around 20 minutes after these codes were signalled, the plane started its manual descent for landing into Saudi Arabia. Less than an hour later, the plane returned to squawk 7700.

Eyewitness accounts and a statement by Netanyahu confirmed one of the pilots had stabbed the other and, according to the Israeli prime minister, "apparently tried to crash" the aircraft.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz called it an "attempted jihadist terror attack", without giving any details.

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said he had spoken with Netanyahu, and said it seemed as though the attacker was "perhaps a terrorist" or there were other reasons behind the attack.

One passenger, Hayun, described how he and others on the flight had restrained the attacker.

"The pilot who was stabbed was simply very close to the door, so it was hard for us to open it," Hayun said in a video posted on social media by the prime minister's office, but before the stabbed pilot collapsed, he was able to open the door.

Yaniv said he put the attacker, who was trying to disable the plane, in a chokehold before other passengers helped pin him down.

He added that he "pulled the controls" of the plane and after it levelled out, another pilot took over control.

Airline Flydubai confirmed two on-duty crew travelling on the flight landed the plane.

Zvika Meness, another passenger, told Israeli public broadcaster Kan News that he and other passengers tied the attacker up "with his own zip ties and with the multimedia headphones".

He said: "There are children and families here who have been through a very severe, highly traumatic event."

The passengers, who were almost all Israeli, were taken to Tel Aviv on another flight later on Wednesday.

They were greeted at the airport by crowds of onlookers playing music, singing, dancing and waving Israeli flags.

A number of people were "very emotional and crying as they came off the plane," a paramedic from Israel's ambulance service told the BBC.

Flydubai said "an altercation occurred in the flight deck" and the flight was "successfully secured by on-duty Flydubai crew travelling on the flight, who diverted and landed the aircraft safely at Tabuk airport".

All of the airline's flights to and from Israel will be suspended during the investigation, a spokesperson said in a statement.

"Our immediate priority is to ensure the ongoing safety, health, and wellbeing of all passengers and crew members involved in this incident and support the official investigation," they added.

Correction 1 October: This article originally reported that Netanyahu had said that it was too early to say what the attacker's motivation was. This has been amended to make clear that Netanyahu's comments to Fox News concerned it being too early to say whether Iran was involved.

Flydubai passenger describes putting attacker in chokehold after cockpit stabbing

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmx2z92xx57no, 5 days ago

Passengers on a flight to Israel have recounted how they subdued a pilot after he stabbed the other pilot and appeared to be trying to disable the plane, while others described the "terrifying" moment they thought they would die.

Appearing in a bloodstained shirt after the ordeal, Yaniv Hayun told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he realised something was wrong when the aircraft suddenly dropped.

The plane, en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv, plummeted 17,000ft (5,200m) in less than two minutes.

"Someone screamed... the light went out," Hayun said in a video posted by the prime minister on social media.

He and others tried to push open the cockpit door, but the pilot who had been stabbed was very close to it, so it was hard to open. Before he collapsed, the injured pilot managed to open the door.

When Hayun and another man entered the cockpit, he said he saw one pilot down and the attacker on the instruments, between the two seats, "trying to destroy the instruments in order to...disable the plane".

"I grabbed the attacker, put him in a chokehold, and pulled him - first and foremost - outside," Hayun said.

"We pulled him out; it was a matter of seconds. I called out to the Israeli guys with us on the plane - I called them, and two other guys came over to me... we pinned [the attacker] down to keep him secure."

Hayun said he then jumped back into the cockpit and "started pulling the controls".

When asked by Netanyahu whether he knew what he was doing, the passenger answered: "I watch Air Crash Investigation, Mr Prime Minister."

Hayun said the plane then started to level out. By then, two on-duty pilots who had been in the passenger cabin were at the front of the plane, and one told Hayun he was taking control from there.

Netanyahu praised Hayun, calling him a "great hero" and a "lion".

Another passenger, Zvika Meness, told Israeli public broadcaster Kan he helped overpower the attacker, and the passenger and two others "tied him up with his own zip ties and with the multimedia headphones".

"Another pilot who was sitting in the passenger cabin went in to replace the additional pilot, and they essentially landed the plane," he added.

The Flydubai flight eventually landed at Tabuk airport in northwestern Saudi Arabia, and the passengers were later taken to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport on a repatriation aircraft.

They were greeted by crowds of onlookers playing music, singing, dancing and waving Israeli flags.

"Thank God I'm alive," passenger Haim Lazarovich told journalists, adding that "the most terrifying moment in this flight was when the pilot loses control".

Oran Choen, an 18-year-old passenger, described the incident as "a very tough moment".

"Maybe it was five minutes, but it feels like hell - I heard my brother behind me scream that we was going to die," he added.

A paramedic from Israel's ambulance service later told the BBC that a number of people were "very emotional and crying as they came off the plane".

The stabbed pilot, Indian national Captain Smit Machchhar, was taken to hospital but is in stable condition, according to the Indian embassy in Saudi Arabia.

Netanyahu praised Machchhar as a "true hero" of "extraordinary bravery".

The attacker was arrested and is being questioned by Saudi authorities.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has called it an "attempted jihadist terror attack". No official motive for the incident or further information has been given.

US President Donald Trump said he had spoken with Netanyahu following the incident, saying it seemed as though the attacker was "perhaps a terrorist" or there were other reasons behind the attack.

Kemi Badenoch has cemented her image. Now she wants to put her party back on the big stage

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmn8e887716vo, 2 days ago

The 2026 Conservative conference is big enough to justify using Birmingham's Symphony Hall as its main stage again.

So, Kemi Badenoch will tread the same stage ageing rockers Marillion took last month - and where sequinned soprano Katherine Jenkins will perform next week. She'll also avoid the humiliation of a national party leader being squashed into a side room at a corporate conference centre (with drapes portioning off the empty space). Simply, the party is able to put bums on seats again - and by that measure, things are looking up.

Badenoch goes into the conference with her own position secure in the party. One senior Tory says "she has actually defied cynics like me" who initially disapproved of her leadership. Her standing with the public has improved and she is now, again on a very simple but crucial measure, much better known. Her allies are sure she has developed a clear identity among the public, confiding: "People now know who she is and they enjoy her interventions - the thing we hear most is I don't always agree with her but I know where she stands."

But Conservative MPs are aware that the party itself still has a much bigger issue - in the words of one shadow cabinet member: "The problem we still have is trust of the party and the brand". The shadow of the years of chaos still looms. And while Badenoch has made good progress since she took the job, most of that was up against an unpopular prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, on whom she landed plenty of political punches. She has to show "what being Conservative is now", says another senior Tory, taking on a different, more popular, rival in Andy Burnham.

The Tories' warm-up to conference has been so far, so traditional. A proposed dramatic expansion of prison places kicks off Badenoch's second big party get-together. With it, a message that echoes the well-known mantra of the early 1990s Tories, issued by former leader Michael Howard at party conference: "Prison works". They are not just talking about adding on a few cells here and there, but spelling out a monumental increase in the numbers of people that the country locks up.

That follows the announcement of a new "tough love" approach for young people trying to claim benefits. Don't expect the shadow work and pensions secretary, Helen Whateley, to produce a moment as controversial as when the then-welfare secretary, Peter Lilley, proclaimed from the stage that he had "a little list" of benefit claimants he wanted to root out. But the Conservatives are determined to keep concentrating on the size of the welfare bill – believing it's right to do so for financial and moral reasons.

You can expect to hear more in the week about fundamental conservative principles: people keeping more of their own money, government only stepping in when really required to, pointed concern about the level of the country's debt and public spending. And again, of course, that means Kemi Badenoch disavowing much of what the Conservatives did in office between 2010 and 2024, when the civil service grew, the tax burden grew, a law was passed to try to combat climate change, the list goes on.

She'll set out at some length in the coming days what she sees as classic conservative first principles: the core beliefs the party was founded on and drifted from, she reckons, in the years gone by. If anything, Badenoch told interviewers this week the party was "finally saying what we believe" and "should be more aggressive" in displaying the party's core.

She believes the arrival of Andy Burnham makes that easier. There's a clearer contrast between the two. A senior ally of Badenoch says Burnham has "opened the door to it quite well, as he has harked back to the '70s in a way that I'm astonished by". Suggesting the pleasing atmospherics of Burnham's Labour are just that, atmospherics, the ally adds: "It's like a fairy story where he has come to the rescue of Britain and he has a wand in his hand and nothing else".

As we talked about a couple of weeks ago, the contrasts between Labour and the Conservatives are sharper now Burnham is in post, and the conference season is only serving to exaggerate that. They are both only too happy to emphasise it with their messages, retro or not, designed to show the true souls of their tribes.

But while Badenoch might find it easier to argue clearly with Burnham, rather than tangle with Starmer over process, it is harder to face an opponent who, at least for now, is proving more appealing to the public. And while plenty of Conservatives are hopeful in private that Reform might have peaked, they can't be sure that's true, or that the swathes of voters who abandoned the Tories for Farage's party will return.

Badenoch has always seemed allergic to the idea of doing any kind of deal with Reform, who she dismisses as a party of protest. And her allies hope, and some believe, that Reform's appeal will fade, making the Conservatives again the obvious alternative government. But fundamental arithmetic displays that, for as long as millions of voters on the right are tempted by Farage, it's harder for the Tories to triumph. One shadow minister admits "we've still got a whole battle on the right" even though "Kemi's boldness" is beginning to break through.

So, in the coming next days, prepare for a "classic showing of Tory wares": an attempt by the party's leader to set out their fundamental beliefs about the country and how it should be governed.

There are pockets of nerves that Kemi Badenoch risks rewinding to an previous era. One when another newly confident leader, David Cameron, ushered in the modern Tory party on the conference stage in front of digitally produced green foliage and sunlight. One former cabinet minister warns that it's "the big risk – so easy to slip into an alienating divisive manner – nasty party stuff".

When it comes to policy, and striking the right tone, they warn that Badenoch must "be mindful that she has to win Cheltenham and Maidenhead as well as Clacton".

But Kemi Badenoch is visibly more confident and is aware of the chance in front of her – seemingly unworried about the possible downsides of making an increasingly direct argument to you, eager to stride that mercifully bigger Birmingham stage.

How long can Labour's feel-good factor last?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwn8mn0rzkzlo, 9 days ago

"He just loves being prime minister," a government insider observes.

Andy Burnham might not yet have delivered his all-important conference speech, but he has been preparing for this moment for years.

He'll lap up the inevitable whoops and cheers – not just as Labour's leader, but the kind of leader who chimes with the party's rank and file, who puts social justice at the top of his list, who is not averse to cranking up the greatest hits – whether taking a pop at Mrs Thatcher, privatisation, or the divides between north and south.

Speaking to MPs, ministers and advisers inside the party, there is no doubt whatsoever that Labour is in a much, much happier place than this time last year.

There is a very simple reason, according to one cabinet minister, fans of Sir Keir Starmer, look away now, "people like the new prime minister more than they liked the old one – that's the truth of it".

Another minister tells me: "There is no appetite for destruction – very little naysaying."

But Labour is in a position that's been all too rare for all our political parties in the last few years – there are no whispers about chucking out the leader, no-one stirring revolt.

And even those who don't like the direction of travel are labelling their opinions as a desire to be helpful, they're not trying to criticise the boss.

"The mood's good – everyone is going into conference with their ears open," one MP said, keen to hear more from the prime minister.

The feel-good factor is also driven by the party inching up a little in the polls – one senior figure says: "We're all witnessing the Burnham bounce – whether that's how you feel when you see the polls, or how we all feel when we have meetings together."

And those who work inside government also credit a more effective political operation around the prime minister. "The system's better, you get clearer decisions, better steers when you need them," says a minister.

Another government source also credits the new Downing Street operation but notes wryly, "it's unfair to compare the end of a regime which is always pretty nasty, with the arrival of a new one which is always more hopeful… these things can change".

There are whispers of announcements in the next few days on housing and defence. Some MPs also want to hear Burnham expand on themes they, and the country, have heard plenty about but that aren't specifically defined – "public control" and "re-industrialisation".

And frankly, the happy prime minister would probably be only too glad to talk for as long as necessary about those favourite subjects.

But however much he loves being PM there are also less tempting realities he'll have to confront.

"It's a new front man," says a minister, "but the song hasn't changed."

And the soundtrack to this autumn might prove to be downright miserable.

While Andy Burnham will be pressing the flesh at dozens of party events in the next few days, his Chancellor John Healey will be spending a lot of time holed up in his hotel room making decisions about the Budget which is only a month away.

The pressure on public cash is intense as the budget approaches – the choice for the chancellor doing the rounds is, "10 billion of cuts or 10 billion of tax rises," according to a well-connected senior figure.

Treasury sources say they don't recognise that simple number. However the figures shake down, the increasing cost of paying the interest on the country's debts weighs heavily.

Don't forget the rising welfare bill, demands for more defence spending. It's unusual that a party conference is happening with a budget just weeks away, and it looms over the conference, just as the state of the economy looms over Labour's current feel-good factor.

The UK can't force the US and Iran to find peace, to get traffic flowing freely through the Strait of Hormuz, to bring the oil price down. Nor can the prime minister make Putin bring his war on Ukraine to an end, with pressure on European gas supply as we enter another winter.

There are already predictions of our annual energy bills going up by £500 early next year.

You know the script – higher energy costs raise the spectre of price rises everywhere.

"We're really suffering at the hands of energy prices," says an insider.

One influential figure predicts an array of grim economic consequences, unconvinced that Burnham and his team have grasped what might be coming down the track and planned accordingly.

"The big economic challenges coming – rising housing costs, rising inflation, downward pressure on public spending because of the cost of borrowing, 500 quid on energy from January - I just don't see what the game plan is."

And there are nerves about whether the new No 10 is concentrating on getting the economy growing.

Many of Burham's priorities so far are about spending money, not helping people make it.

One of his own advisors publicly described the administration as a "traditional tax and spend socialist government with better TikTok". Ouch.

Now, the former business secretary, Peter Kyle, has very politely, but firmly, expressed concern that Burnham and his team are not thinking hard enough about helping the country make money, perhaps more focused on how to spend it. You can read more about his comments here.

He told me: "We must act with more urgency, and we must feel the need for economic growth as acutely as we do about tackling things like rough sleeping and about social care, and some of the social reforms that we want because they are inextricably linked."

Kyle is not the only person in the Labour Party who worries Burnham and Healey are more interested in spending money than helping business generate it.

And budget speculation is full of chatter around increasing taxes on property or other assets like stocks and shares.

At the other end of the spectrum there are demands on the left for the prime minister to ease the pressure on less well-paid workers.

One prominent figure warned: "Labour has a second hearing. One shot to get this right. It is beyond doubt that if they do not keep to the promises made to everyday people - workers and communities will turn their back."

Expect union leaders to renew calls for tax cuts for workers and more investment. It's a tug of war.

In the next few days, Labour are likely to look like a happy political tribe. The new chief delighted to be in charge. The rank and file relieved to have a leader they can cheer.

But one senior figure warns that what's coming could turn things sour. "The budget looks like a disaster – by Halloween we'll be looking at something else," predicting a big change in mood.

That portent of doom doesn't match the overall atmosphere around Labour right now, but there is a quiet creeping concern about whether Burnham's rhetoric of hope, and change, the classic political mantras, can be matched with people's experience.

A senior source says: "His political will needs to be more bold than the machine around him – don't write cheques you can't cash."

One minister niggles that it's easier to talk in broad terms about your long-term ambitions than to grapple with problems affecting people today, "there is comfort in dealing with some of the largest possible questions because it's a way off delivering them. But the cost of getting to work, or getting across town is expensive, going out or staying in – that's right now".

Conferences are a chance for political parties to enjoy each other's company, but also to show off to the country.

But the reality of paying the bills is, of course, more present in most people's lives, one minister tells me: "If you go into Tesco and the cereal you buy is noticeably more expensive, that has more cut through than any political clip you see on telly or Facebook."

Labour's spirits have been transformed by Burnham's soft coup that saw off Starmer.

But the minister says: "The contrast is not between now and hard times, but between the new regime and the old regime."

The question that beckons beyond the conference hall – can that carry on if hard times hit?

My hometown shows that high streets have to change or die

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crd689de186jo, 8 days ago

The empty building that used to be the home of Marks & Spencer in Aberdeen is one of the first things you see when you arrive off the train and come into the city centre. The sign has gone, though the shape of the lettering can still be made out; the windows are blacked out and the doors boarded up.

This is my hometown. As a teenager, I spent hours on Union Street, its main thoroughfare, nicknamed the Granite Mile after the local silver-grey stone. It was the place to try on all the latest fashions from the likes of Clockhouse and Chelsea Girl.

The street used to be packed with shoppers from across the north-east of Scotland.

Now, it's pockmarked with empty shops.

"I come to Union Street to take a bus somewhere else... there's nothing to shop for now… it's horrendous," complains Marie Sim, a lifelong Aberdeen resident.

It's a similar story across the country: High Streets, once bursting with shops, hit first by the rise of out-of-town retail centres and then by online commerce.

But Aberdeen is in the thick of an ambitious turnaround plan. The port city has essentially declared war on its empty shop problem, taking an unusually hands-on approach to filling vacant units and bringing long-neglected upper floors of buildings into use.

On top of that, the council is pouring tens of millions into trying to make the city centre a destination again. Like many other places, it's leaning into the "experience economy", with a new indoor food and drink market and a major redevelopment of the seafront.

High Streets are integral to how we feel about where we live. The sight of vacant shops and graffiti can quickly become a vicious circle, deterring shoppers, discouraging investment and leading to anti-social behaviour.

Politicians of all stripes have been trying for years to breathe new life into town centres - and Andy Burnham, who has made a focus on "place" part of his political identity, is the latest. He argues they should become "symbols of Britain's renaissance".

But can it be achieved? And if they're to survive, do town centres need a fundamental rethink?

'Too much retail space'

One in eight properties on British High Streets are currently vacant, according to Green Street, the property and retail analytics company, a number that's stayed stubbornly high for years.

"If there was a silver bullet, it would have been fired years ago," says Jackie Sadek, a former government adviser on urban regeneration, who has spent nearly four decades working in town centre renewal.

One of the biggest obstacles is fractured ownership. Shops and buildings are often owned by dozens of different landlords, sometimes through offshore companies or complex structures, each with their own interests and priorities. That can slow decision-making and make large-scale regeneration difficult.

But even with empty units that are available, you need to find someone willing to take them on.

Many units are old and need modernising.

The cost of running a High Street business has also risen; employment costs are higher, and there's the burden of business rates.

Firms need customers. Footfall on many High Streets has been in long-term decline as shopping and services move online, and this enormous structural shift has yet to play out fully.

Two-thirds of town centre experts think there is still 20% to 40% too much retail space, according to a survey by retail body Revo and real estate consultancy Lambert Smith Hampton.

Whack-a-mole shop filling

In Aberdeen's boom years of North Sea oil, from the late 1970s through to the early 2010s, it didn't have to work hard to fill its hotels and restaurants and get the cash tills ringing because of the wealth the energy industry brought to the city.

I remember weekends with friends as a teenager, spending whatever cash we had in the fashion chains and shoe shops. Later came the pubs and bar-hopping, and trips to the art deco Capitol Theatre (now office space), where I saw Duran Duran.

But by the end of 2022, Union Street had hit rock bottom. Aberdonians had long deserted the High Street for a shopping centre, which opened in 2009 next to the railway station.

"They'd fallen out of love with their city," says Bob Keiller, head of Our Union Street coalition, a community-led group formed after an emergency summit to reverse the decline.

The first thing it did was listen to what residents wanted, receiving thousands of submissions. Restoring a bit of civic pride and filling empty units became the focus.

It's been a co-ordinated effort, involving letting agents, the council, landlords, businesses and a big team of volunteers, led by Keiller, a former FTSE 100 CEO, who isn't getting paid. He has a map on his office wall, detailing the status of every property, unit by unit, with colour-coded Post-it notes.

They audited the street, tracking down absent landlords, and logging what was empty and why. Volunteers offered to give the empty properties a clean and a lick of paint, to make them more attractive to let. They also spruced up the streets, picking litter, weeding, and painting bins. A small team still goes out once a fortnight.

There's a website where all the available properties are collated; crucially, all of the financial incentives are also listed. These can include council fit-out grants (where a new business gets money to decorate premises), and a two-year discount from business rates.

In 2023, 57 of the 198 units on Union Street were empty. As of today, 33 have been filled, with a further 14 in the process of being let.

But it can feel like a game of whack-a-mole because since the initiative started, another 20 units have become vacant. "The key thing is, we're filling quicker than emptying," Keiller insists.

Keiller's operations director, David McKeith, describes it as putting an arm round the shoulder of those they can help and being a "wasp in the ear" of people who just say no.

At one end of the office, a small, young team produces social media content, linking visitors and residents to a new Our Aberdeen app, showing what the city can offer.

For Keiller, the "small wins" - like tackling graffiti - are needed to help change public perception.

"We've realised the psychology is not to do it once but be prepared to do it two or three times before people that do these things eventually say, 'there's no point in putting it there because somebody's going to paint over it.'"

The upper floor problem

Attention is also turning to the often-forgotten upper floors of buildings along the once-iconic Union Street. In a separate initiative run by the business group Aberdeen Inspired, experts are getting inside those vacant high-up spaces to identify the barriers to bringing them back into use.

Aberdeen sought the help of a High Street troubleshooter, Iain Nicholson, who's worked with dozens of towns and cities through his Vacant Shops Academy.

Out of more than 1,000 empty units he helped audit nationally, on average more than half didn't have a letting agent actively marketing the property. He says some councils don't even know who the landlords are.

Empty shops, he says, won't all be filled by the market alone. Towns and cities need to encourage a broader range of occupiers, from arts and culture to leisure, health and well-being.

He says what's striking about Aberdeen is its joined-up approach, and the fact people "rolled up their sleeves" and overcame differences. "That's not something you can yet say about everywhere."

New markets and widened pavements

Can other places learn from Aberdeen?

Every town and city faces its own mix of challenges.

Nicholson also helped Crewe in Cheshire. As a smaller place than Aberdeen, it is focusing on arts, culture, and community, with a new women's centre opened this month.

And English councils are being encouraged to take a more interventionist role.

They can now force an empty commercial unit that's been vacant for at least a year to be offered to tenants through a High Street Rental Auction, even if the landlord doesn't want to let it.

It's early days but the mere prospect of losing control of a property is delivering some results. Bassetlaw Council in Nottinghamshire, an early adopter of the scheme, says more than 30 shops across the district have been let or are currently under offer as a result of the policy.

But filling empty units is only part of the challenge. The bigger question is what town and city centres are actually for.

Changing habits mean we won't need so many shops. Instead, it's argued, town centres will need more people living and working in them, with new homes and office space alongside services that can't be done online. With an ageing population, for example, bringing NHS health centres into the heart of a town could be a big opportunity.

In Aberdeen, the building that used to house BHS - a department store shuttered in 2016 - is being converted into an entrance plaza for the new food and drink market.

The physical appearance of Union Street is changing too. Like many Victorian shopping thoroughfares, it was built with a wide road (probably to give space to horses and carriages). Now parts of the pavements are being widened to make it a more pleasant place to spend time, though many Aberdonians are weary of the disruption, and of new traffic restrictions.

Money is a big barrier. Aberdeen's new indoor food and drink market is costing £40m, funded by the council and the UK Levelling Up Fund. In other places, regeneration schemes can struggle because the cost of redevelopment outweighs the likely financial return, making support from the public sector essential. And the economics are becoming more challenging.

"Higher interest rates, rising costs of construction and other issues are impacting the viability and delivery of new housing and big redevelopment projects," says Steve Norris, a director at Lambert Smith Hampton. He says that big projects usually require cash from both the public and private sectors.

He wants to see "more creative ways of funding".

Part of Burnham's plan is to give local leaders more freedom to invest in town centres and drive regeneration, building on the approach he has championed in Greater Manchester. But bigger projects take years.

Making it easier and cheaper to open and run a High Street business is one of the more immediate solutions being called for, with business rates a particular concern.

Burnham has promised further rates reform. All eyes are on this month's Budget to see how far he will go. All eyes are on this month's Budget to see how far he will go in England. Business rates are devolved in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The chief executive of Next, Simon Wolfson, argues that the bigger challenge is not business rates, but planning reform.

"The most important thing that the government can do for high streets is let them develop," says Wolfson, who's also a Conservative peer.

Rome 'not built in a day'

Back in Aberdeen, there are some signs of traction.

Lauren Reid and her mother Rose moved their fashion boutique to Union Street in 2024. A council grant helped with the refurbishment after they decided to make the leap.

Can they make the sums add up? "We're getting there," she says.

She feels the same about the future of her street. "I always say Rome wasn't built in a day."

Right now the area feels like a construction site - but another gaping hole will soon be filled. Robert Keane is a local property developer who in 2023 bought the Trinity shopping centre, once home to Debenhams. The space is now set to be re-occupied by a national leisure brand. A notoriously tiring stairway leading to the Trinity from the train station is also being replaced by an escalator.

"We saw a real good opportunity, because it was dying," he says.

He reckons he can make a go of it, cutting the cost of parking and overheads, resetting rents and being more nimble than previous far-flung owners.

It was a bold move given Lambert Smith Hampton suggests that more than one in 10 UK shopping centres is ripe for demolition.

But he's betting the dynamics of Aberdeen are finally changing.

"I think by 2027 it should look and feel like a different city."

That is certainly the hope. Yet walking along Union Street today, past the boarded-up shopfronts and roadworks, it can still feel like a city caught between its past and whatever comes next.

Top image credit: Getty Images

Europe's car makers are in crisis. Will the threat of war rescue them?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6vgyq598k9po, 10 days ago

It's green, bulging and intimidating. Ford's latest vehicle looks like a pick-up truck that has been through an Incredible Hulk transformation. Based on its popular Ranger series, this beefy number parked outside the front door of Ford's Dagenham plant can carry a load of two tonnes, tow up to four tonnes and is also shouldering the hopes of the 2,000-strong workforce that still makes engines here.

Inside the factory, the three-litre diesel engines that will power this camo-painted beast drift down a production line that has seen output cut from 90,000 engines a year to about half that over the last decade.

Ford is hoping that a pivot towards military vehicles can help fill the void created by what the company's UK boss calls the most challenging environment since the invention of the motor car. Once mighty, the European car industry is starting to look puny and is hoping surging defence budgets as Europe re-arms can help it flex its industrial muscles once more.

Ford is part of a joint venture with defence specialists General Dynamics and Ricardo bidding for a Ministry of Defence (MoD) contract to supply 9,000 vehicles over the next five to seven years to replace the Army's ageing Land Rover-based fleet.

Lisa Brankin, chair of Ford UK, says it is a chance to showcase their abilities to respond quickly to defence needs: "As a manufacturer you look at every opportunity that comes at you and this is a great opportunity that we would love to take advantage of."

This is not the first time Ford has busied itself with defence work.

Ahead of World War Two, Ford's factory in Dagenham, east London, was the largest car plant in Europe.

When war broke out, civilian car assembly stopped completely, and the factory was converted entirely to military production. Between 1939 and 1945, the Dagenham plant built 360,000 vehicles for the Allied war effort.

Ford workers in Manchester manufactured 34,000 Rolls-Royce-designed Merlin engines, which powered Spitfires and Hurricane fighter planes.

Eighty years later, the UK and European car industries are hoping that the engines of war can help defend against what one supplier told the BBC was a "terminal decline".

As Europe feels compelled to commit hundreds of billions to ramp up defence spending in the face of the menace from Russia and US reluctance to be Europe's protector, car makers that are under commercial attack from Chinese rivals have taken notice.

So can the rearmament of Europe save an auto industry and a supply chain facing crisis?

The shift to defence

Ford is far from the only car company that sees defence as a growth industry - and one that can utilise the growing overcapacity at car plants across Europe.

French car maker Renault has signed a strategic agreement with defence giant Thales to produce military drones - targeting an output of up to 1,000 units per month. The French military and Directorate General for Armament want to tap into Renault's mass-production capabilities to bypass traditional, slower defence supply chains.

Meanwhile, Volkswagen has agreed to sell an under-used factory in Osnabruck, western Germany, which will become a military manufacturing hub in a joint venture with an Israeli-based defence investor.

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which makes the Land Rover, is also bidding for the same contract as Ford - as the Army retires its existing Land Rover-based fleet by 2030. JLR has also established a new dedicated business unit to support its global military ambitions.

It makes sense for under-utilised auto manufacturing capacity to switch to defence, says Mike Hawes of the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) trade association.

The UK car industry and its suppliers are heavily reliant on a few big manufacturers – Nissan in Sunderland, Toyota in Derbyshire, BMW in Oxfordshire and the biggest of them all by value of output, JLR at multiple sites in the Midlands and Merseyside.

And Hawes says the supply chain is very vulnerable.

"UK automotive output has been in decline over the last eight or nine years," he says. "We're probably half of what we were 10 years ago. Now, that's obviously going to hit the supply chain because they're not making the same number of parts. So they've got capacity. They may be quite dependent on one particular manufacturer as well."

So they will welcome "the opportunity to broaden their customer base and potentially move into defence", he says.

Just two weeks ago, JLR announced it was cutting 4,000 jobs from its 30,000-strong UK workforce in order to reduce costs to stay competitive with international – particularly Chinese – rivals. Dave Roberts of the firm Evtec, which supplies cooling systems components to JLR, is worried about the implications of this.

"JLR is the critical mass in the UK automotive manufacturing space," he says. "It is the glue that holds the whole of the sector together. Because remember, when you're making volumes for JLR, they're significantly higher than any other car maker in the UK.

"If they suffer, the ripples run deeper through the supply chain."

Earlier this week, major JLR suppliers urged the government to help automotive manufacturers move into aerospace and defence, warning that large-scale car production in the UK faces long-term decline.

In an open letter to the prime minister, chancellor and West Midlands Mayor Richard Parker, industry leaders argued Britain's automotive supply chain was "not in decline" but "in the wrong market".

The letter was signed by executives representing businesses with more than 8,600 direct employees, alongside the Confederation of British Metalforming, which represents about 75,000 workers.

Signatories to the letter said the redundancies were "the first visible crack" in a UK automotive supply chain supporting about 183,000 manufacturing jobs.

Across Europe, the industry is facing what Sigrid de Vries, director general of the ACEA auto industry manufacturers' association called "a perfect storm". Car makers are spending billions to shift to electric vehicles and insist that government sales targets for EVs are outpacing consumer demand.

And the EVs people are buying are increasingly from the biggest new threat to the industry – China.

The China syndrome

In the early 2000s, Western firms saw China as a land of opportunity. The country's rapidly growing middle class had plenty of money and a seemingly insatiable appetite for cars, including the most profitable upmarket models. It was a lucrative business – the Chinese market once accounted for half of Volkswagen's profits.

However, it didn't last. China wanted a home-grown car industry and lavish state funding was ploughed into making the country a leader in high-tech businesses, including electric cars.

Today, the Chinese market is overloaded with brands, both foreign and domestic, and is characterised by cut-throat competition. Chinese car makers have focused their attention on foreign markets, and have used the transition to electric vehicles as a pathway to gaining market share. The likes of BYD, Chery and Geely are moving aggressively into Europe.

For European brands, all of this could not have happened at a worse time. The loss of the steady stream of profits from China, and the emergence of Chinese rivals on their home turf, has come after they invested heavily in producing electric vehicles (EVs). But EV sales have not increased as quickly as expected. Executives admit they have struggled to match the low production costs and development speed of the Chinese insurgents.

The result is that European manufacturers are now rushing to cut costs, while wondering what to do with expensive factories capable of producing millions more cars than they are able to sell.

Volkswagen has already announced plans to cut 100,000 jobs over the next few years. Whereas once closing plants in Germany would have been unthinkable, the company has now shuttered one in Dresden and may shut down four more. That includes a site in Zwickau, where VW spent over €1bn (£857m) converting production lines to build electric vehicles - a process that was completed just four years ago.

Industry estimates indicate that western European car plants have roughly 2.5 million vehicles worth of annual spare capacity.

Little wonder that car makers are jealously eyeing soaring defence budgets across Europe.

Sigrid de Vries says car makers are well placed to help Europe rearm.

"Many of the capabilities that defence needs are needed for and also delivered by the automotive sector," she says. "So automotive manufacturers and suppliers possess industrial assets, they possess manufacturing expertise, logistics capabilities, also advanced technologies. They have vast and also very integrated supply chains that may be relevant for Europe's broader defence preparedness objective."

But it is not that simple – security protocols, political and economic rivalries within Europe plus the fact that unless you're actually at war, the volumes will not replace the mass consumer market, all of which present challenges, she says.

"These are two very different worlds," she says. Governments want to invest in their defence capabilities and that is why it's now, more than ever, interesting for manufacturers and suppliers to see what's possible, but it will not be enough to address the underutilisation of manufacturing capacity we currently see."

Let the fox into the henhouse?

If defence can't plug the yawning gaps in UK and European car manufacturing production – is it time for the henhouse to rent a room to the fox?

In other words, let Chinese companies move into European production facilities?

To offset the immense fixed costs of running idle assembly lines, legacy European and UK automakers are opening their doors to Chinese rivals.

Stellantis – owners of the Vauxhall, Fiat, Peugeot and Citroen marques – has taken a 20% stake in Chinese EV maker Leapmotor and production of the Chinese brand started in Poland two years ago. (Leapmotor then moved production to Spain after Poland voted to impose steep tariffs on Chinese EVs while Spain abstained – an example of how trade politics can get complicated.)

Nissan and Chery International UK have signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding for the study of contract manufacturing for Nissan to manufacture Chery vehicles at its Sunderland plant.

VW CEO Oliver Blume said in April of this year that Volkswagen was considering sharing spare European factory capacity with Chinese joint-venture partners.

In one sense it could be a win-win. European factories would have extra work while Chinese manufacturers could avoid high tariffs when selling into the US and the EU by making and exporting the cars in and from those markets.

But building cars in Europe does not automatically mean creating or saving European supply chains.

Some plants may only perform final assembly while many of the components – especially batteries – may continue to come from China.

Car making is still seen as central to countries' sovereign manufacturing capability – in the old days the mantra was: "What's good for General Motors is good for America." You could say the same for Volkswagen, Mercedes and BMW for Germany and JLR for the UK.

Car plants are often the major employer in their area and support local supply chains, so job losses can hit particularly hard. That's why countries go to great lengths to protect and preserve them.

Australia is a case in point. When its final locally made car left the production line in 2017, it didn't just lose a car industry, it lost an engineering mindset and key skills, says Dave Roberts of Evtec.

"Over the next decade... ripple effects crept into all manufacturing," he says. "So they lost infrastructure capability. They lost advanced manufacturing capability.

"They're vulnerable. They're not resilient in those sectors anymore."

Ford UK's Lisa Brankin acknowledges 9,000 engines over five to seven years is a far cry from the 90,000 per year the plant used to produce – but she insists every little helps.

"It is a drop in the ocean but every single opportunity is worth having, isn't it?"

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence says it wants UK industry to play a "central role" in delivering thousands of modern light mobility vehicles. The spokesperson adds: "We are backing British businesses and supporting our defence industrial base with 85% of our defence spending currently staying in the UK, driving reindustrialisation and making defence an engine for growth."

It's understandable why a declining European car industry wants to gatecrash the spending splurge in the defence sector. But even if they can, right now it is hard to see how they'll ever be able to wield the muscle that they once did.

Correction 25 September: A graph that incorrectly implied there was a target for European defence spending to rise to €800bn by 2030 has been removed from this piece. It has been replaced by a line chart showing EU defence spending, both actual and projected, from 2018 to 2029.

Could changing the pension triple lock pay for Burnham's big social care plan?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c63reg9dnex9o, 5 days ago

In his Labour conference speech, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said he would "adjust" the triple lock on the state pension to help pay for a new "national care service" in England from 2030.

While his proposed reform is likely to reduce public spending on pensions, analysts say it would be unlikely to save enough money between 2030 and 2040 to pay for comprehensive social care reform.

BBC Verify has looked at the key figures.

What is the planned triple lock reform?

Since it was introduced by the coalition government in 2011, the triple lock has guaranteed that the UK state pension rises each year in line with whichever is the highest of inflation, average wages, or 2.5%.

Burnham said that from April 2030, instead, it would only rise in line with the highest of inflation or 2.5%.

The prime minister added that "it will hold its value relative to earnings over time".

We are still awaiting full details from the government, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) think tank says the new proposed system would ensure that the state pension rises by whichever is highest of:

* inflation

* 2.5%

* average earnings over time rather than every year

The IFS says the key change is that the state pension will not automatically jump up with average wage increases every year, but only broadly track them over a longer period of time.

That is important because in some years the triple lock has meant the state pension has risen faster than earnings.

"The removal of this permanent ratchet is to be welcomed and marks a substantial step towards a more sustainable and predictable state pension system," the IFS says.

It estimates that the present triple lock will increase annual state pension expenditure by £16bn a year by 2026–27, compared with if it had risen in line with average earnings growth since 2011.

It says that if the new lock had been in place instead, spending would be £9bn a year lower than it currently is.

There is considerable uncertainty about future savings though because the cost of the triple lock is linked to the future volatility of people's earnings and inflation, which are impossible to confidently forecast.

Moreover, analysts think it could take more than a decade for the reform to deliver major savings.

Earlier this year, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) - the government's official forecaster - analysed how much shifting to just an earnings-linked state pension in 2030 would cost relative to keeping the triple lock.

This is similar to what Burnham is proposing.

The OBR did not identify any significant savings for the government from such a shift until 2034.

By 2040, the annual saving was estimated by the OBR to be 0.2% of GDP, equivalent to £6bn a year in today's money.

Downing Street has said the prime minister's planned change will save £15bn a year by the end of the 2030s, equivalent to £11bn a year in today's money, but it did not provide detail on how it reached this figure.

The IFS estimates that the reform will save around £4bn a year, in today's money, by 2035.

But it cautions that future savings are "very uncertain" and says the change "could easily save nothing at all if earnings growth is strong".

How much would social care reform cost?

Different social care reforms come with different price tags.

The Health Foundation think tank has estimated that imposing a lifetime cap on an individual's care costs of around £86,000 in England, as proposed by the official report for the coalition government by Andrew Dilnot in 2011, would cost the government around £4bn a year.

The think tank estimates that introducing a Scotland-style system of "free personal care" - which does not include accommodation, food and everyday living costs - would amount to around £7.5bn a year.

And the cost of creating a universal and comprehensive social care system in England would be around £18.5bn a year extra by 2036.

The government has not set out the full details of how the "national care system" will work, but has clarified that while an individual's direct care costs would be covered, their accommodation costs in a residential or nursing home would not be.

Nevertheless, if it implemented a universal and comprehensive social care system then the expected revenues from the proposed reform could fall short.

Jonathan Cribb of the IFS said the pension reform "will not be the answer to funding universal social care".

This could put pressure on a future government to raise revenues from other sources - either from tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere - to pay for a comprehensive social care service in England.

This article was updated on 30 September to include new IFS analysis of future savings from the change to the state pension lock.

Why are hundreds of prisoners being released early?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3rxlyz6w3o, 4 days ago

Around 700 prisoners in England and Wales are due to be released under the first tranche of the government's early release scheme.

Under the scheme, eligible prisoners will be released after serving a third of their total custodial sentence rather than after 40% or 50% of their term.

People sentenced for manslaughter, rape, serious child sex and grooming offences will be excluded.

This is not the first time a government - Conservative or Labour - has had to release prisoners early to make space in England and Wales' overcrowded prisons.

BBC Verify has looked at the reasons why ministers say this latest scheme is necessary.

More prisoners than prison space

The prison population in England and Wales on 28 September was 87,499 which was 98% of useable capacity.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has previously warned the prison population will overtake capacity as soon as this November.

In the long-term the MoJ has projected that the capacity of all prisons will rise to around 99,000 by 2032 as a result of more prisons being built by this government.

But it also projected that the prisoner population would rise to about 104,000 by 2032 if the Sentencing Act 2026 - which provides for earlier release - did not come into force.

That is why Justice Secretary Alex Norris says there is a "prison capacity crisis" which means the government has to implement the latest early release scheme.

In total 4,500 prisoners are due to be released early by June 2027.

The MoJ has projected that the Sentencing Act will mean the prisoner population remains below the capacity of the prison system, rising only to around 96,000 by 2032.

More people are being sent to prison for longer

The England and Wales prison population has risen significantly in recent decades with a significant uptick starting in the 1990s before reaching a record high in 2024.

The Institute for Government (IFG) think tank says this is partly the result of longer sentences.

In 2023, the average prison sentence at Crown Courts in England and Wales - which deal with more serious offences - was more than 25% longer than those handed down in 2012.

For some crimes, the increase was greater. Sentences for robbery in 2023 were 13 months longer on average than in 2012 - an increase of 36%.

Longer sentences mean more people being held in prison at any one time.

Former Conservative Justice Secretary David Gauke, who led an independent sentencing review for Sir Keir Starmer's government, argues this is the result of a "bidding war" by political parties since the 1990s over who can imprison people for longer.

Gauke also points out that the prison population has been rising at a time when overall crime in England and Wales has been falling, according to the official Crime Survey.

So despite the fall in crime more people are being sent to prison - and for longer.

Another reason for upward pressure on the prison population is that more people than before are being returned to prison for breaching the conditions of their release.

There were 51,419 licence recalls in England and Wales in the year ending March 2026, up from 40,259 in the previous year - a 28% increase.

Cassia Rowland from the IFG said most recalls are for breaches of licence conditions, such as missed appointments, rather than offenders committing further offences or posing a serious risk to the public.

"The probation service is overwhelmed, with high caseloads and lots of vacancies putting often inexperienced staff under huge pressure," she said.

Slow pace of prison building

Successive governments have pledged to increase the number of prison places - but delivery has often fallen short of those promises.

Between 2010 and 2024, when the Conservatives were in power, around 13,000 new prison places were created.

But around 12,500 places - notably those built during the Victorian era - were closed after falling into disrepair.

That means an estimated net total of only around 500 new prison places were added over 14 years.

In a 2024 report, the National Audit Office (NAO) cited the MOJ's "unrealistic timelines", and government bodies not working together to prioritise delivery, as reasons for the slow pace of prison building.

The MOJ say around 6,500 net prison places were created between 2022 and 2025, once closures are taken into consideration. These include places created in three new prisons.

However, further expansion to existing prisons has been delayed by a major supplier going into administration, according to the Prison Reform Trust.

Pia Sinha of the Prison Reform Trust told BBC Verify: "Successive governments have found it difficult to increase prison capacity because new prisons take years to plan and build, often facing planning hurdles and local opposition."

The Labour government has pledged to build 14,000 new prison places by 2031.

Analysts argue that without a major change in thinking about the appropriateness of prison as punishment, or a significant long-term increase in prison building, the system in England and Wales will remain close to capacity.

And that means governments will continue to be under pressure to implement early release schemes to avert a capacity crisis.

Additional reporting by Tom Edgington

Is Burnham right to blame Russia for spreading online disinformation?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckd79wldjzl4o, 12 days ago

After Prime Minister Andy Burnham put Russia-linked disinformation campaigns under the spotlight, BBC Verify has been examining how these attempts to influence people's opinions work.

We have tracked – and debunked – numerous online disinformation campaigns produced by Russia-linked groups that have attempted to shift public opinion on issues like the war with Ukraine, influence elections in the US and Germany, damage social cohesion and undermine trust in authorities or institutions.

What kind of disinformation is being spread?

In his UN speech, Burnham said there was an "insidious campaign" being carried out by the Russian government to target people in the UK.

Last year, a series of fake videos featuring British public sector workers appeared online.

Among them was a 999 call operator in Preston named Aaron, who told BBC Verify he was shocked to find out his voice had been cloned with AI to create a fake video of him talking about the 2025 Polish presidential election.

Those videos are part of a major Russian-linked disinformation campaign known as Matryoshka, which BBC Verify and other research groups have been tracking.

AI is used to create fake videos - sometimes dozens a day - which impersonate journalists and major news organisations like the BBC to push disinformation about Ukraine and Western countries onto people's social media feeds. But Aaron's case indicates ordinary British citizens could also be a target.

In the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election, BBC Verify reported how there was a shift in focus from Ukraine to post fabricated videos about the US election. We are once again seeing early evidence of similar misleading videos ahead of November's US midterm elections.

BBC Verify has previously exposed a large-scale disinformation campaign run by a former US police officer now based in Russia. With the help of AI, the operation created hundreds of fake local news websites in the UK, US, France and other Western countries with the aim of spreading completely made-up stories.

One of these was a fake news website called the London Crier which falsely claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had bought a mansion owned by King Charles at a bargain price.

It was seen by hundreds of thousands of users on X and shared by an official Russian embassy account.

We also found that a fake AI-narrated video on YouTube was the source of the bogus story. The platform removed it after we reported it.

And in 2023, BBC Verify found a major propaganda operation involving bogus accounts on TikTok, which posted misleading videos in multiple languages - including English - generating millions of views, with the aim of influencing the views of users in several European countries about the war in Ukraine.

TikTok removed more than 12,000 fake accounts involved in the operation, saying its investigation indicated that the accounts originated from Russia.

Another campaign was discovered during the 2019 UK general election campaign when a trove of confidential documents about a possible trade deal between the UK and US was posted by an anonymous user on the platform Reddit and later used by the Labour Party in its campaign.

While the documents appeared to be genuine, Reddit later confirmed in a statement the leak "was part of a campaign that has been reported as originating from Russia".

But there are questions about how widespread or effective some of these disinformation campaigns are in reality.

While many of them appear to be extensive and organised, it is hard to determine how widely they have spread or how significant a role they have played in actually influencing people.

Do other countries sponsor disinformation campaigns?

Russia is also not alone in using industrial-scale disinformation campaigns which spread false information to further its own geopolitical aims, as other authoritarian governments like China, North Korea and Iran are also major players in online disinformation.

BBC Verify has previously reported on a number of X accounts posting in support of Scottish independence, but whose location information indicated they originated from Iran.

And, at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, the BBC discovered a network of more than 1,200 faked or hijacked accounts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that posted pro-Chinese government and anti-US messages.

There is evidence to suggest Western governments also engage in disinformation campaigns, although the scale of their operations are not always clear.

An investigation by Reuters in 2024 revealed that during the Covid pandemic, the US military ran a covert anti-vaccine influence operation to discredit China's Sinovac jab.

And Meta has previously removed an influence campaign originating from France that targeted a number of countries in Africa.

AI has also exacerbated the spread of disinformation, as images can now be more easily faked and videos misleadingly edited using text prompts.

Text generation has also improved and can create plausible, authoritative and coherent sounding fake news reports.

BBC Verify saw evidence of this during US-Israel war with Iran. While in the early weeks of the Russia-Ukraine conflict most of the disinformation published online consisted of old or misleading videos and inaccurate claims, we have seen a deluge of AI-generated images and videos since the Iran war began back in February of this year.

Carl Miller, an author and founder of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, told BBC Verify that state-run influence operations "amplify and exploit existing grievances and fissures - making it really hard to work out exactly what sort of effect they might have".

"Influence operations are quite fragile things, usually, and we need to find ways of making them much more likely to fail if they target us," he added.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

Andy Burnham wants to fix social care - what are the options?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4k54g0ldjo, 7 days ago

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said he wants major reform of social care in England to create "a system that works on NHS principles" and where "everyone contributes, everyone is covered".

"There is free personal care elsewhere in the UK. I don't think it's right that people in England don't get the same", he told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg.

The prime minister has asked Baroness Casey to conduct a review on the "best way of doing it" and she has been asked to report by April 2027.

Casey will also look at how to pay for any reforms.

BBC Verify has looked at four options for approaching social care reform and how much they could cost.

1. Cap on lifetime care costs

Some people face extremely high costs for care at the end of their life.

It has been estimated that around one in seven people aged 65 and over face lifetime care costs of more than £100,000.

One proposal is to cap these costs with the government picking up the bill above a certain cash threshold.

In 2011 a commission headed by the economist Andrew Dilnot proposed a lifetime cap of £35,000.

Dilnot estimated his proposed reforms would cost between £1.3bn and £2.2bn a year. The cost today would be higher due to inflation and the ageing population.

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, led by David Cameron, accepted Dilnot's recommendations.

But after the 2015 general election, which delivered a Conservative majority, Cameron delayed the implementation of the cap to 2020 over what he said were pressures on the public finances.

In 2017, when Theresa May was in No 10, the Conservatives' general election manifesto proposed a different way to reform social care.

This would have included the value of an individual's home in the means test used to decide what state funding they could get for care in their own homes.

It did not, initially, include any cap on lifetime care costs, with the manifesto saying this was more "equitable" than the Dilnot plan.

The May plan was branded a "dementia tax" by opponents and eventually dropped.

2. A more generous means test

In England people can currently qualify for local authority financial support in a residential care home if all their assets - including their home - are worth less than £23,250.

This is known as a means test - where the level of financial support a person gets is based on the value of their assets and savings.

Some have suggested this threshold should be raised significantly so that many more people would qualify for means-tested support.

Boris Johnson's Conservative government in 2021 planned to raise the means test threshold to £100,000.

The annual cost of Johnson's reforms would have been £1.8bn a year over three years - although this was expected to rise over time as more people qualified.

The Johnson government planned a new Health and Social Care levy to pay for the package, but this was eventually scrapped by his Conservative successors as prime minister, because they wanted to keep taxes down.

3. Free personal care

An alternative approach is to ensure that everyone who is eligible, based on their needs, should get state-funded personal care that is free at the point of use.

This would be provided free regardless of an individual's means and whether it was received by an elderly person in their own house or a residential care home.

Scotland has implemented such a system.

However, it's important to note that personal care takes in things like helping frail elderly people wash and dress and go to the toilet.

But it does not include accommodation, food and everyday living costs which are subject to means testing.

The Health Foundation think tank estimates that implementing a Scottish-style system in England would cost £7.5bn a year by 2036.

Like Scotland, Japan and Germany have systems which base entitlement to personal social care mainly on people's care needs rather than their ability to pay.

Japan and Germany though have a mandatory long-term care insurance system which is funded through contributions from workers and employers.

Both countries also do not usually cover the full cost of personal care so individuals are responsible for some of the expenses.

4. National care service

Some have suggested that the government should set up a national care service in England, similar in ambition to the NHS.

This would mean all personal care would be free at the point of use while establishing national standards and care entitlement criteria.

The Health Foundation has estimated the cost of creating a universal and comprehensive social care system in England would be around £19bn a year extra by 2036.

When Andy Burnham was health secretary in Gordon Brown's Labour government in 2010 he produced a plan for a national care service.

It was suggested this would be paid for through a compulsory contribution from people's estates after they'd died.

But the idea was branded a "death tax" by Labour's opponents. The party lost the 2010 general election and its proposals went no further.

In the 2024 general election Labour again proposed a "national care service" without providing details or how it would be funded.

And after the election then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer effectively kicked the issue into the long grass by commissioning Louise Casey to investigate social care reform and report back in 2028.

It's worth bearing in mind that the four approaches above are not mutually exclusive.

Previous reform proposals have often combined more than one of them - such as a cap on lifetime costs and a more generous means test.

How could it be paid for?

Burnham told the BBC that any changes would have to be "done carefully, without putting extra strain on the public purse".

One option - suggested by former Labour Treasury minister Darren Jones - is to get rid of the triple lock on the state pension. This guarantees that the pension rises every year by whichever is the highest of inflation, average earnings growth or 2.5%, to pay for a new system of social care.

But the long-term revenues from such a move are uncertain, because the cost of the triple lock depends on the future volatility of the growth of earnings and prices.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has estimated that keeping it in place could cost "anywhere between £5bn and £40bn per year."

The Resolution Foundation think tank has estimated that scrapping the triple lock now and replacing it with a simple earnings link would save the government only around £650m a year by the end of the Parliament.

That would be well below the estimated annual cost of most social care reform options.