Published
5 minutes ago

In attempting to describe Makala Prison - the scene of a deadly and failed breakout this week in the Democratic Republic of Congo - two people who have been inside used the exact same word: “hell”.

“Makala is a true hell,” Stanis Bujakera, a former inmate and journalist, told the BBC about DR Congo's largest jail.

Bujakera was sent to the notorious Makala Prison in September last year, after the authorities accused him of writing an article that alleged the military were involved in an opposition politician's death. He spent six months there.

“Makala is not a prison, but a detention centre resembling a concentration camp, where people are sent to die,” he said.

The prison, located in capital city Kinshasa, has a capacity of 1,500 prisoners but is estimated to hold around 10 times more.

This cramped population ranges from petty criminals to political prisoners to murderers.

Human rights groups have long complained of the dire conditions Makala inmates face, including overcrowding, unsubstantial food and poor access to clean water.

Following a disaster at the facility earlier this week, these conditions have been thrust into the spotlight once again.

After masses of inmates tried to break out of Makala in the early hours of Monday morning, 129 prisoners lost their lives, Interior Minister Jacquemain Shabani said.

Two dozen were shot dead as they tried to escape, Mr Shabani reported, but most were suffocated in a crush.

Four surviving inmates told the New York Times, external that prior to the escape attempt, prisoners had been held in stifling cells without running water or the electricity to power fans for more than a day-and-a-half.

Some prisoners had initially broken out to escape the heat, they said.

Bujakera said these conditions were far from unusual - taps "constantly" run dry at Makala, while "electricity is random, leaving the detainees without light for days on end".

“Inmates are literally abandoned to their fate, exposed to overcrowded and unsanitary conditions that foster contamination and the spread of disease,” he added.

Prisoners die "every day" as a result, Bujakera said.

Rostin Manketa, executive director of Congolese human rights group La Voix des Sans Voix, shares a similar account.

He has visited Makala several times and concluded that when a person has been sent to Makala Prison, "it seems like [they] have been sent to hell".

Stark videos filmed by Bujakera during his time in Makala show dozens of sleeping men, packed tightly together on the floor of an overflowing room.

Their limbs overlap, and in a delicate balancing act some men sleep atop the walls that divide shower stalls.

Conditions are better in Makala's VIP section, a separate pavilion that only the minority can afford - you get a bed and more space, for example.

Bujakera was asked the pay $3,000 (£2,280) to stay in VIP, but he managed to get this price slashed to $450 (£340) for his stay.

He told the BBC: "Economic inequalities between inmates create a hierarchy... the poorest are abandoned to their fate."

What is more, wardens at Makala have little presence. Law and order inside the prison is effectively delegated to the inmates themselves.

“Prisoners govern themselves," Fred Bauma, a human rights activist who was incarcerated in Makala from March 2015 to August 2016, told BBC's Focus on Africa podcast this week.

"It’s like you’ve changed countries and there’s a new government and you need to learn those rules."

This system of self-government is dysfunctional and leads to "harmful power dynamics, acts of violence and conflicts between inmates", Bujakera said.

But Makala is not alone with its abysmal conditions - prisons all over the country are chronically underfunded and overcrowded.

According to the World Prison Brief, external project, DR Congo's jails are the sixth-most overcrowded globally.

The authorities have acknowledged this problem on a number of occasions. Following Monday's jailbreak, Deputy Justice Minister Samuel Mbemba blamed magistrates for prison overcrowding, noting that "even mere suspects are sent to prison".

Many inmates have not actually been sentenced for a crime but are instead held in jail for months - or years - while waiting to be tried.

The food in DR Congo's prisons has also been criticised widely.

In Makala, inmates get only one meal per day - and this dish is often of limited nutritional value.

Pictures taken by Bujakera show a tub of maize meal - a staple carbohydrate in DR Congo - turned hard and dry, accompanied by a watery brown vegetable stew.

In order to avoid malnourishment, many prisoners rely on their relatives to bring food into them.

However, not everyone has these connections.

In 2017, a charity reported that at least 17 prisoners starved to death following food shortages in Makala.

Mr Manketa said it was "possible" that Makala's testing environment led to the tragic attempt to escape.

To avoid a repeat, the authorities should build new prisons and improve existing ones, he argues.

Bujakera, who is now based in the United States, said this change must happen swiftly.

It is a "sick" justice system, he lamented, and as Monday's disaster demonstrated, people are dying while waiting for a cure.

Additional reporting by the BBC's Emery Makumeno in Kinshasa.

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

Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, external, on Facebook at BBC Africa, external or on Instagram at bbcafrica, external

Published
13 minutes ago

Pope Francis, who has often appeared to revel in confounding and surprising others, is at it again.

Many times over the years, he has seemed to suggest he is slowing down, only to ramp up his activities again.

At nearly 88 years old, he has a knee ailment that impairs mobility, abdominal problems caused by diverticulitis and is vulnerable to respiratory issues owing to the removal of most of one of his lungs.

Last autumn, the Pope said his health problems meant that foreign travel had become difficult. Soon after, when he cancelled a trip to the UAE, it led to heightened speculation about the extent of his medical difficulties.

But that was then.

Now, he is in the middle of the longest foreign visit of his 11-and-a-half year papacy. It has been one packed with engagements, and as well as Timor-Leste it involves three countries – Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Singapore – in which Catholics are a minority.

So why is the Pope travelling so extensively and so far from home?

His supporters say his passion drives him.

“He obviously has an enormous amount of stamina and that is driven by his absolute passion for mission,” says Father Anthony Chantry, the UK director of the Pope’s mission charity Missio, who has just been appointed to the Vatican administration’s evangelisation department.

“He talks about all of us having a tireless mission to reach out to others, to set an example.”

Christian “mission” is something that has evolved over the centuries. It is still about spreading the gospel but now the stated aim is focused on social justice and charitable endeavours.

Throughout his trip Pope Francis will meet missionaries, including a group from Argentina now based in Papua New Guinea. But on numerous trips around Asia including this one, he also skirts close to China, a country with deep suspicions about the Church, its mission and its motives.

The Pope has frequently emphasised the importance of evangelisation for every Catholic. Yet in many parts of the world, it is still hard to separate ideas of “missionaries” and “evangelisation” from notions of European colonisation.

As the number of Catholics in Europe declines, is “mission” and “evangelising” in Asia and Africa now about Church expansion in those parts of the world?

“I think what he is preaching is the Gospel of love that will do no one any harm. He's not trying to drum up support for the Church, that's not what evangelisation is about,” says Father Anthony.

“It isn't to be equated with proselytising, that is not what we have done for a long time. That is not the agenda of the Holy Father and not the agenda of the Church. What we do is we share and we help people in any way we can, regardless of their faith or not having any faith.”

Father Anthony says being a Christian missionary in the modern day, for which Pope Francis is setting an example, is about doing good work and listening, but sometimes, “where necessary”, also challenging ideas.

“We believe God will do the rest, and if that leads to people accepting Jesus Christ, that's great. And if it helps people to appreciate their own spirituality – their own culture – more, then I think that is another success.”

Certainly the Pope has long talked of interfaith harmony and respect for other faiths. One of the most enduring images of his current trip will be his kissing the hand of the Grand Imam of the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta and holding it to his cheek.

He was warmly welcomed by people coming out to see him in the most populous Muslim-majority country in the world.

Pope and top Indonesian imam make joint call for peace

Pope Francis will end his marathon trip in Singapore, a country where around three-quarters of the population is ethnic Chinese, but also where the Catholic minority is heavily involved in missionary work in poorer areas.

For centuries now, Singapore has been something of a strategic regional hub for the Catholic Church, and what Pope Francis says and does there is likely to be closely watched in China, not least by the Catholics living there. It is hard to get a true picture of numbers, but estimates suggest around 12 million.

The lack of clarity over numbers is partly because China’s Catholics have been split between the official Catholic Church in China and an underground church loyal to the Vatican that evolved under communism.

In trying to unite the two groups, Pope Francis has been accused of appeasing Beijing and letting down Catholics in the underground movement who had not accepted the Chinese government’s interference, and who face the continued threat of persecution.

Deals struck between the Vatican and Beijing in recent years appear to have left a situation where the Chinese government appoints Catholic bishops, and the Pope gives in and recognises them. China says it’s a matter of sovereignty, while Pope Francis insists he has the final say – though that is not the way it has looked.

“He won't be pleasing everyone all the time, but I think what the Holy Father really wants to indicate is that the Church is not a threat to the state,” says Father Anthony Chantry. “He is treading a very careful path and it's fraught with difficulties, but I think what he's trying to do is just to build up a respectful relationship with the government in China.”

Rightly or wrongly, it is all in the name of bringing more people into the fold. Some of Pope Francis’ predecessors have been more uncompromising in many ways, seeming to be more accepting of a smaller, “purer” global Catholic community, rather than make concessions in either foreign relations or in the way the Church views, for example, divorce or homosexuality.

While some popes have also clearly been more comfortable in study and theology than travel and being surrounded by huge crowds, some have leaned into the politics of their position.

It is very clear when travelling with Pope Francis that while he can often look tired and subdued during diplomatic events, he is quickly rejuvenated by the masses who come out to see him, and energised by the non-dignitaries he meets, particularly young people.

This is certainly not a pope who shuns the limelight – it is being among people, some would say mission, that appears to be his lifeblood.

Father Anthony Chantry says this latest, longest papal trip is just a continued display of how the Pope feels the Church should engage with both Catholics and non-Catholics.

“The whole thrust is that we have got to reach out to others. We have to make everyone feel welcome. I think he (Pope Francis) does that really well, but I don't think he's trying to score any points there, it's just him.”

There is very little the Pope has done since his election in 2013 that has not rankled Catholic traditionalists, who often feel that his spirit of outreach is taken too far. His actions on this trip are unlikely to change that.

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Published
25 minutes ago

“If the old parties had done their jobs properly then the AfD would not exist,” Ingolf complains, echoing a common sense that the rest of Germany looks down on so-called “Ossis” in the east.

Far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) have already won the most votes in regional elections this month in the eastern state of Thuringia. Now Germany’s bracing for a further political shockwave, as polls suggest the AfD could also take the most votes in Brandenburg state's election in a few weeks time.

Tucked away near the Polish border, in the two tiny villages of Jämlitz and Klein Düben, support for the far right has soared.

A former conservative (CDU) voter, Ingolf is frustrated about how successive governments have handled education, saying standards were better when he was a boy growing up in the communist German Democratic Republic.

He voices anxiety about Germany’s flatlining economy as well as immigration, comparing the far-right riots in England this summer to “civil war-like conditions”.

Disorder that, while nothing like a civil war, has stoked narratives about the potential for violent clashes within multicultural communities.

“That’s not what we want here in Germany,” he says.

In Jämlitz, most notable for a large goose farm, the idea of civil strife couldn’t feel further away.

Nor could the war raging in Ukraine. But the AfD’s call to stop sending weapons to Kyiv is also resonating strongly.

“The money for Ukraine is an issue,” says Yvonne, who sees all war as “senseless” as we chat to her just down the road.

“And this is our tax money that is sent abroad. We have enough things to fix in our own country.”

However, Yvonne is leaning towards another anti-establishment party launched only this year that also opposes supplying arms to Ukraine and which is a surging force in German politics: the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW).

Ms Wagenknecht’s personal brand of “left-wing conservatism” has already propelled her party this month into the potential role of kingmaker in Saxony and Thuringia.

However, for her critics, she has simply fashioned another unwelcome populist, pro-Putin movement that’s actively undermining central pillars of German foreign policy.

I challenge Yvonne about the idea of ending arms supplies to Ukraine, which could help Russia win a war it began, by invading its neighbour.

“I can understand both sides,” she says after a little hesitation.

This is the part of Germany where the older generation, from the GDR years, grew up learning Russian language and culture.

It’s also a country, scarred by two World Wars, that retains a strong pacifist streak fed by fears the existing conflict could escalate.

“Poland is not big,” Yvonne says, as she points out the Polish border is only a few miles away. “And we are then the first ones to go when the tanks come across.”

In these two villages, that have a population of under 500 people, 57.5% of voters backed the far-right party in a recent local council election, external, the largest proportion in Brandenburg.

Across the wider district, that number was 43.7%, also unusually high.

It comes ahead of a larger, state-parliament level vote on 22 September, where the AfD is leading the polls – after they already won the most votes in Thuringia and came a close second in Saxony on 1 September.

In Thuringia, the AfD attracted 36% of the under-30s vote, say election researchers.

Their relative strength in the east is despite the fact the party is viewed by many – and officially classed in three states – as right-wing extremist, a charge its supporters avidly reject.

Not far away, I visit one of the beautiful lakes that have been transformed from their original purpose as open cast coal mines.

As I wander around asking people if they want to talk about German politics, most, perhaps unsurprisingly, are not all that tempted.

A woman called Katrin does agree to speak, although she doesn’t want her picture taken.

Ushering us away from a small crowd sunbathing on the grass and a little beach, she lights a cigarette and is watchful as we wait to hear what she has to say.

It feels like it’s going to be really controversial.

She doesn’t like the AfD – something that can feel like a rogue opinion around here.

“Half the people here didn’t vote for the AfD,” she reminds us, adding she is “devastated” by local levels of support for a far-right party.

But why are they so popular, I ask?

“That’s a good question,” says Katrin. “That’s what I ask myself all the time.”

“There is an old saying,” she recalls. “If a donkey is too comfortable it goes on black ice.”

Katrin is saying that she believes life, actually, is relatively good for people in the community, leading to a misguided “grass-is-greener” syndrome - whether that’s with an eye on the past or present.

Average wage levels and household wealth are lower in the east when compared to the west, although inequalities have narrowed through the years.

Overall, Katrin doesn’t understand it. “I’m still thinking myself, why, why, why?”

You get the feeling that mainstream parties, including those in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government, are similarly unable to quite comprehend, or respond, to the success of either the AfD or BSW, parties polling nationally at about 18% and 8% respectively.

The traditional parties of power are casting a nervous eye to the east and the Germany’s reputation for relatively calm, consensus politics is under strain.

Published
37 minutes ago

Warning: This article contains details some readers may find disturbing

Outside the house where Rebecca Cheptegei lived, flowers have been placed on grass that was charred as the runner rolled on the ground to try to put out flames engulfing her.

The 33-year-old Olympic runner died on Thursday from injuries sustained when her former partner allegedly doused her with petrol and set her ablaze days earlier while at home with her two daughters.

“I was in the house and heard people screaming, 'fire'. When I came out, I saw Rebecca running towards my house on fire, shouting 'help me," Agnes Barabara, Ms Cheptegei’s immediate neighbour, tearfully told the BBC.

“As I went to look for water and started calling out for help, her assailant appeared again and doused more petrol on her, but then he too got burned and he ran off towards the garden to try to put it out. We then went to help Rebecca.”

“I have never seen anyone burn alive in my life. I didn’t eat for days after that incident.”

“She was a very good neighbour and just recently she shared with me maize she’d harvested.”

Police are treating the death as a murder, with her ex-partner named by police as the main suspect. Local administrators said the two had been in conflict about the small piece of land where Ms Cheptegei lived, with the case awaiting resolution.

He will be arraigned in court on charges once he is out of hospital, where he continues to recover from injuries he sustained during the incident.

“We have opened a file, investigations are at an advanced stage,” divisional criminal investigations officer Kennedy Apindi told the BBC.

Ms Cheptegei's mother Agnes said her daughter "was always obedient as a child, and very kind and jovial all through her life".

Emmanual Kimutai, a friend and neighbour who attended school with Ms Cheptegei, described her as a "very exciting" and "determined" person.

“Even in primary school she was already doing very well in athletics, she was our champion," Mr Kimutai said.

The Olympian was born on the Kenyan side of the Kenya-Uganda border, but chose to cross over and represent Uganda to chase her athletics dream when she did not get a breakthrough in Kenya.

When she started getting into athletics, she joined the Uganda People’s Defence Forces in 2008 and had risen to sergeant rank. Her career included competing in the Olympics in Paris this year. Although she placed 44th in the marathon, people in her home area called her "champion".

She lived in Chepkum, a village in Kenya about 25km (15 miles) from the border with Uganda, in a rural area whose main economic activity is farming. Residents also tend to cattle and it is common to see cows, goats, and sheep grazing outside homes. The wider area, called Trans-Nzoia county, is well known as Kenya’s biggest producer of maize, which is the main ingredient for the country’s staple food.

Locals at a shopping centre near her house spoke fondly about a woman they sometimes waved at as she trained along the road whenever she was not in competition or training in Uganda. Kind and humble were the words often mentioned by people there.

While celebrated as an athlete, her personal life was in turmoil. Her former classmate said her performance at the Olympics was because she did not "have peace" owing to the conflict with her ex-partner that began last year.

“They used to live together but began falling out last year because of money," her brother Jacob recalled. "He asked my sister, 'what do you do with all the money you make?"

Police told the BBC that the two had previously reported domestic disputes in different stations - which they withdrew.

As Ms Cheptegei’s family waits for justice, they continue to prepare her final journey. She will be laid to rest on 14 September at their ancestral home in Bukwo, Uganda.

The Ugandan is the third athlete to be killed in Kenya in the last three years, where intimate partners are named as the main suspects by police. Athlete-led gender-based violence activist group, Tirop’s Angels, said the trend must end.

“What is heart-breaking is her children witnessed their mother’s attack," Joan Chelimo, a co-founder of Tirop’s Angels said, as she fought back tears.

“This violence against athletes must stop.”

Published
1 minute ago

Chinese car giant Chery is weighing up the possibility of building cars in the UK, according to a senior executive.

Its UK head Victor Zhang told the BBC it was a "matter of time" before the company made a final decision.

He said Chery, which is already preparing to build cars in Spain, was determined to take a "localised" approach to the European market.

Mr Zhang denied the company’s exports had benefitted from unfair subsidies.

Chery, which was set up in 1997, is one of China’s largest car companies. It is already the country’s biggest exporter of vehicles, but has ambitious plans to expand further.

To help take that plan forward, it has set up two new brands focused entirely on the international market, Omoda and Jaecoo.

Last month, Omoda was officially launched in the UK. It has begun selling a mainstream SUV, the Omoda 5, in both electric and petrol-powered versions.

It has built a network of 60 dealerships, and hopes to have more than 100 here by the end of the year.

But it is far from the only Chinese manufacturer to see the British market as potentially lucrative.

BYD, which has been vying with Tesla for the title of the world's biggest manufacturer of electric cars, has also opened dozens of dealerships here.

SAIC is already well-established in the UK, selling cars under the classic British MG marque.

Cars for sale in Europe are currently built at Chery’s manufacturing HQ in Wuhu, in Eastern China. But that situation is expected to change.

The company already has a deal with the Spanish firm EV Motors, which will allow Omoda and Jaecoo models to be built at a former Nissan factory in Barcelona. But it wants to establish other bases as well.

Earlier this year, the company said the UK could also be a candidate for an assembly plant. That option remains on the table.

“Barcelona, this is something we are already commited to”, explained Mr Zhang

“For the UK, we are also evaluating. To be honest, we are open for all options and opportunities.

“So I think it’s just a matter of time. If everything is ready, we will do it”.

The UK is not the only country on Chery’s list. It has also been talking to the Italian government about setting up production in Italy, for example.

Mr Zhang denied the decision would come down to whichever country was able to offer the best incentives.

“For such a big investment project, it’s a combination of factors”, he said.

“It’s not just government policy or incentives. You also need to look at the market itself; education, because you need good talented people such as engineers and factory workers; there’s also supply chain, logistics.

"So there will be many factors involved in our final decision”.

The pressure to set up manufacturing bases in Europe has increased since July, when the EU imposed steep tariffs, or taxes, on imports of electric vehicles from China.

This was done, Brussels said, because carmakers in China were benefitting from "unfair subsidies" which allowed their cars to be sold abroad very cheaply, undermining local manufacturers. China accused the EU of protectionism.

By building its products in Europe, Chery would avoid paying those tariffs. But Mr Zhang insisted his company was always committed to local production.

“We are not trying to use any unfair methods”, he insisted.

“We want to be adaptable to the local market, and provide the best products, using the best dealerships. To be localised is the only strategy for the long term," he said.

The UK has yet say whether it will take a similar approach with tariffs of its own.

China's domestic car market is vast, with more than 30 million vehicles sold each year.

Its stake in the global market is also already significant, with roughly 5 million cars exported last year. That was a 64% increase on the year before.

In the UK, Chinese brands still account for a relatively small proportion of cars sold, around 5%.

But established carmakers are concerned that figure could grow quickly, with the prices offered by Chinese brands expected to play a key role.

Published
1 hour ago

Surrounded by food trucks, Ferris wheels and funnel cake stands on a hot August afternoon, Stephanie Soucek has one goal in mind.

The 42-year-old chair of the Republican Party in Door County, a bellwether district in the battleground state of Wisconsin, is at the county fair to urge undecided voters to cast a ballot for Donald Trump.

Upon meeting Tammy Conway, a Democrat who is considering voting Republican for the first time in decades, Ms Soucek begins talking about her own family’s two expensive car payments, an economic message that seems to resonate.

Ms Conway is concerned about “sky-high” housing interest rates and said Trump might make the economy “a lot less complicated”.

But as Ms Soucek lays out her case for the Republican presidential candidate, she avoids mentioning the latest spate of controversial remarks Trump has made, including personal attacks on Democratic challenger Kamala Harris.

“I try to tell people to focus on the policies and ignore the candidates,” she said, knowing that Trump’s brash personality has deterred women previously.

Republican officials in a handful of swing states – where the election is likely to be decided – are adopting Ms Soucek’s strategy of promoting policy over personality with white suburban female voters. It's a pivotal voting bloc Trump narrowly won in his first presidential race but has struggled to appeal to since.

Local Republicans say they wish Trump would adopt a similar approach against Vice-President Harris, whose campaign has been powered by female voters since she replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket in July.

The concern brings into focus the widening gender gap that has come to define the election. Trump is courting young – especially black and Hispanic – men while Democrats are working to attract female voters motivated by the overturning of Roe v Wade, a landmark Supreme Court ruling that had enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion.

An ABC News/Ipsos released in September suggested the vice-president led the former president 54% to 41% among women - a seven-point jump since the Democratic National Convention late last month.

It has some Republicans worried about whether Trump can reverse the trend, Ms Soucek said.

Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Ms Harris’s has "implemented dangerously liberal policies that have left women worse off financially and far less safe than we were four years ago under President Trump”.

But some who spoke to the BBC said his campaign has remained fixated on men - not women.

Republican pollster Christine Matthews said Trump’s team is “doubling down on a strategy of motivating the Maga base and hoping to motivate men - particularly non-college-educated men including those who are Hispanic in addition to white - in a way that will overpower the gender gap”.

The Trump campaign has leaned into “bro culture”, emphasising masculinity and a contrast of “weak versus tough”, said Chuck Coughlin, a political strategist who works with Republicans in the battleground state of Arizona.

“That appeals to a lot of men,” he said. “It doesn’t appeal to unaffiliated voters.”

Trump’s choice of JD Vance as his running mate reinforced how the campaign is prioritising outreach to men. They may not have expected his addition to the ticket to have been so damaging with women voters, however.

The Ohio senator has faced a backlash over previous comments about women, in particular a 2021 clip in which he calls several Democrats, including Ms Harris, “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives”.

These types of comments do not help attract swing women voters, according to Betsy Fischer Martin, executive director of the nonpartisan Women & Politics Institute.

“There are plenty of childless cat ladies voting in the suburbs,” she said.

But the former president’s campaign rhetoric does not bother some ardent female supporters like Dixie, a 59-year-old Republican from Door County.

“He’s not going to tell you what you want to hear. He’s going to tell you the truth,” said Dixie, who declined to share her last name for privacy reasons.

Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, who served as his 2016 campaign manager, told the BBC that voters could not have his policies without his “strong and resolute and tough” personality.

“People, and particularly women, tend to kvetch and converse and complain about what offends them, and then they vote according to what affects them,” she said.

Local Republicans in battleground states are hoping to stop the erosion of female support by steering the conversation back to issues that affect families on a daily basis, like crime and the economy, where polls suggest the party is more popular.

The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic make it difficult to compare how the US economy performed under the Trump and Biden administrations. While both enjoyed notable economic growth, inflation has been a persistent problem in the last three years as wages have struggled to keep up with rising prices.

And a recent KFF poll indicated inflation was the top issue in this race for 40% of suburban women voters.

For Lyla Juntunen, 88, a former stay-at-home mom from the suburbs of Green Bay, Wisconsin, the price increases under Mr Biden have been hard to ignore.

“Look at these groceries that you get and how much you pay,” she told the BBC, gesturing toward a full shopping cart in a grocery store car park.

Strategists say Trump would do well to focus more on these specific economic policy points to win over voters like Ms Juntenen.

"If he dials down the attacks and his brand of fiery kind of politics, then he can pick up...female voters in particular," said Ariel Hill-Davis, co-founder of Republican Women for Progress, which advocates for female representation in the party.

"If your top three issues are the economy, inflation, public safety, I think he could easily sway those voters."

Republicans in swing states have struggled with another issue that has animated women across the country: reproductive rights.

Democrats have seized on abortion rights as a way to galvanise voters after the fall of Roe v Wade in 2022, while Ms Harris has become the White House’s leading voice on the issue.

Voters in several states - including Republican strongholds - have passed referendums protecting the right to abortion. The issue is on the ballot in at least eight states in November, including in the battleground territories of Nevada and Arizona.

Republicans have struggled to reach a unified message on reproductive rights. Trump has repeatedly said policy should be left up to the states, declining to endorse a national abortion ban that many Republican lawmakers support.

He was roundly criticised by anti-abortion conservatives in recent weeks after giving contradictory remarks on whether he would support a referendum in Florida to protect abortion rights - he later clarified he would vote against it.

The same week, he told a Michigan crowd that if he were re-elected, his administration would cover the costs of IVF, a fertility treatment that Democrats have claimed Republicans are trying to take away through restrictive state abortion laws.

Tom Eddy, the chair of the Erie County Republican Party, a swing district in the must-win state of Pennsylvania, said he’s found the best approach is to avoid the issue altogether.

“I tell my candidates, ‘Stay the hell away from it,’” he said. “I can tell no matter what policy you promote with regard to abortion, you’re going to be wrong, because half the people are going to think the other way.”

Though the KFF poll indicated abortion to be lower on the list of priorities for female suburban voters - behind immigration, border security and the economy - it remains a motivating issue for a growing share.

A survey from the New York Times and Siena College last month suggested it had become the most important issue for female voters under the age of 45.

With polls suggesting the majority of suburban women support access to abortions, Ms Soucek said the Republican Party needs to find a unified message.

“It’s just a matter of making sure that we’re sending the right message to women that we care about women, while also caring about unborn babies,” she said.

Mr Trump’s former senior adviser, Kellyanne Conway, said that while Democrats are focused on “the waist down”, the Republican Party is concentrating on the “waist up”.

“We women, from the waist up, are where our brains, ears, eyes, hearts and mouths are, so we can figure out all the issues: the kitchen table economics, entrepreneurship, taxes, regulation, energy independence,” she said.

But that language isn’t landing with all women voters in Wisconsin.

Holly Rupnow, a 56-year-old former Republican from Green Bay, said one of the reasons she planned to vote for Ms Harris was because of reproductive rights.

“I like the things that she’s going to try to do for us - get us back women’s rights,” she said.

Experts say the political landscape has changed dramatically since Donald Trump first ran for president.

Some female voters in 2016 brushed aside their worries about Trump, believing he would act differently once he was in the White House, according to Ms Fischer Martin.

But the 2016 “Let Trump be Trump” rallying cry would not work now, she said.

During the 2018 midterm elections, suburban and college-educated women largely rejected Trump and Republicans and helped power the so-called blue wave that elected more than 100 women to the US House.

In 2022, reproductive rights played a central role in helping Democrats perform better than expected, raising fears among Republicans it could do so again.

Trump could make strides with female suburban voters by directly addressing their concerns about his personality, according to political experts.

“If he were to say something like: ‘You may not like me personally, you may not like my rhetoric, but if you want to worry less about grocery bills .. I'm your guy,’” Ms Fischer Martin said.

“I don't know if he's quite capable of getting there.”

Kellyanne Conway knows Trump better than most. She believes his core message - are voters better off now then when he was in office? - is the same for all Americans, regardless of gender.

“As I told him recently,” she added, “He beat a woman before. He can beat a woman again.”

Published
5 minutes ago

The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to London on Monday for a two-day visit during which he will meet Foreign Secretary David Lammy.

The US state department says Mr Blinken will open a so-called “US-UK strategic dialogue” - understood to be a series of meetings between senior officials which Washington describes as “reaffirming” the “special relationship” between the two countries.

Mr Blinken will “discuss a range of critical issues, including the Indo-Pacific, AUKUS partnership, the Middle East, and our collective efforts to support Ukraine,” the state department said.

It is understood Mr Blinken is also likely to meet Prime Minister Keir Starmer while he is in the UK.

The foreign secretary and Mr Blinken met on the Keir Starmer's first visit to Washington as prime minister back in July for the Nato summit.

Following that meeting, the state department said that Mr Blinken and Mr Lammy "re-affirmed the importance of ensuring Ukraine has the economic, security, and humanitarian assistance it needs to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity".

The pair also "discussed the need to reach a ceasefire in Gaza that secures the release of hostages and lays the groundwork for durable peace".

Mr Blinken has been a frequent visitor to Israel,, external having been 10 times since the Hamas attacks on 7 October last year.

Following his most recent meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, Mr Blinken said the Israeli prime minister had accepted Washington's so-called "bridging proposal" aimed at trying to solve sticking points and bring Israel and Hamas closer to a deal.

Pressure has been growing on Mr Netanyahu to close out a deal, amid widespread protests in Israel last week.

On Friday, the White House announced that the UK prime minister will also travel to Washington for his second bilateral meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House on Friday 13 September.

The PM said his first face-to face talks with President Biden in July were an opportunity to "recommit" to Nato and the "special relationship" between the UK and US.

Speaking ahead of next week's meeting, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Mr Starmer and Mr Biden will have "an in-depth discussion on a range of global issues of mutual interest".

The White House added "robust support to Ukraine in its defence against Russian aggression" will also be discussed, as well as securing a hostage release and ceasefire deal to end the war in Gaza.

"President Biden will underscore the importance of continuing to strengthen the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom," the White House also said.

Published
1 hour ago

In a tucked-away corner of paradise, overlooking the clear waters of the South Pacific, a cyclone of controversy was about to descend on Fiji’s Pearl Resort & Spa.

Standing on stage clutching a bouquet of flowers, 24-year-old MBA student Manshika Prasad had just been crowned Miss Fiji.

But soon after, according to one of the judges, things at the beauty pageant “turned really ugly”.

Ugly is potentially an understatement: what unfolded over the next few days would see beauty queens crowned and unseated, wild allegations thrown around and eventually the emergence of a shadowy figure with a very personal connection to one of the contestants.

Ms Prasad first found out something was wrong two days after her win, when Miss Universe Fiji (MUF) issued a press release. It said a “serious breach of principles” had occurred, and “revised results” would be made public shortly.

A couple of hours later, Ms Prasad was told she wouldn’t be travelling to Mexico to compete for the Miss Universe title in November.

Instead, runner-up Nadine Roberts, a 30-year-old model and property developer from Sydney, whose mother is Fijian, would take her place.

The press release alleged the "correct procedures" had not been followed, and that Ms Prasad had been chosen in a rigged vote which favoured a “Fiji Indian” contestant to win because it would bring financial benefits to the event's manager.

A distraught Ms Prasad issued a statement saying she would be taking a break from social media, but warned that there was “so much the public did not know about”.

The new queen, meanwhile, offered a message of support. “We are all impacted by this,” Ms Roberts wrote on Instagram, before thanking Miss Universe Fiji for its “swift action”.

But those who took part in the contest were not satisfied: there were too many things that didn’t add up.

“Everything had been running so smoothly,” says Melissa White, one of seven judges on the panel.

A marine biologist by trade, she had been flown in from New Zealand to weigh in on the charity and environmental aspects of the contest.

“It was such a great night, such a successful show. So many people were saying they’d never seen pageant girls get along so well,” Ms White tells the BBC.

As the competition drew to a climax on Friday night, the judges were asked to write down the name of who they thought ought to be the next Miss Fiji.

“By this stage, Manshika [Prasad] was the clear winner,” says Jennifer Chan, another judge, who’s a US-based TV host and style and beauty expert.

“Not only based on what she presented on stage but also how she interacted with the other girls, how she photographed, how she modelled."

Ms Chan says she was “100% confident” that Ms Prasad was the strongest candidate to represent Fiji.

Enough of her fellow judges agreed and Ms Prasad was declared the winner - receiving four of the seven votes.

But as the newly-crowned Miss Universe Fiji stood on stage, beaming in her sparkling tiara, the judges sensed something was wrong.

To her right, Nadine Roberts - wearing her runners-up sash - was "seething", alleges Ms Chan.

“I remember going to bed thinking, how could someone feel so entitled to win?

“You win some, you lose some. She’s a seasoned beauty pageant contestant - surely she knew that?”

The next day, Ms Prasad took a celebratory boat trip with the judges.

“She was just in awe, saying: my life will be changed now,” says Ms Chan.

“She’s the embodiment of that good-hearted person who deserves it - it just affirmed to me that I’d picked the right girl."

But there had still been no official confirmation of Ms Prasad’s victory.

Not only this - one of the judges was conspicuously absent from the trip: Riri Febriani, who was representing Lux Projects, the company that bought the licence to hold Miss Universe in Fiji.

“I remember thinking that was odd,” says Ms White, who shared a room with Ms Febriani. “But she just said she had lots of work to do and she needed to talk to her boss.”

Ms Febriani says she didn’t go on the boat trip as she needed to rest - and there's no way the others would know who she was messaging on her phone.

But Ms White says she worked out her roommate was fielding calls and texts from a man called “Jamie”.

Miss Universe is a multi-million-dollar business which operates like a franchise - you need to buy a licence which enables you to use the brand and sell tickets for the event.

Those licences are expensive and in small countries it’s hard to find anyone willing to fund a national pageant - which is why Fiji hasn’t entered a contestant since 1981.

But this year, one organisation was willing to buy the licence: property development firm Lux Projects.

Ms Febriani was its representative on the judging panel, but also looked after media communications.

“I’d got on so well with her, she seemed a very sweet person,” says Ms White.

“But that day when she didn’t come on the boat, her demeanour kind of changed. She just kept saying she was super busy with work, always on the phone with this ‘Jamie’ guy."

It turned out that, despite having Ms Febriani on the panel, Lux Projects was not happy with the outcome of the vote.

Its press release on Sunday said the licensee itself should also get a vote - one which the contracted organiser, Grant Dwyer, had “failed to count”.

Lux Projects would have voted for Ms Roberts, bringing the results to a 4-4 tie.

What’s more, it said, the licensee also had the “determining vote” - making Ms Roberts the winner.

“Never at any point were we told about an eighth judge or any kind of absentee judge,” says Ms Chan.

“It wasn’t on the website, it wasn’t anywhere. Besides, how can you vote on a contest if you’re not even there?”

Ms White was also suspicious.

“I did some digging and it turns out that Lux Projects was closely associated with an Australian businessman called Jamie McIntyre,” says Ms White.

“And Jamie McIntyre,” she told the BBC, “is married to Nadine Roberts.”

Mr McIntyre describes himself as an entrepreneur, investor and "world-leading educator", who has - according to information available online - been married to Ms Roberts since 2022.

He was also banned from doing business in Australia for a decade in 2016 due to his involvement in a property investment scheme that lost investors more than A$7m ($4.7m; £3.6m). The judge in the case said there was “no evidence to suggest that successful reform is likely”., external

A senator who questioned him as part of a parliamentary committee hearing later described him as “the most evasive witness I have had to deal with - and that's saying something", according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

But what was he doing here?

“[Mr McIntyre] isn't a director or shareholder of the MUF licensee company, but has acted as an adviser, as he is a shareholder in associated companies,” Jamie McIntyre’s representatives told the BBC.

However, the company's Instagram page does feature a video of Mr McIntyre giving property investment advice, as well as a link to 21st Century University, a Bali-based property company owned by Mr McIntyre.

The BBC also understands that a "Jamie" was on the line during phone calls between Ms Roberts and the event organiser, Grant Dwyer.

Mr McIntyre’s representatives insist that allegations that he was involved in the judging controversy are a “conspiracy theory” - although they did concede that he had “provided advice to the licence holder”.

Additionally, the press release’s allegation that Mr Dwyer had pressured the panel to choose Ms Prasad because of her race is undermined by the fact that Mr Dwyer is understood to have voted for Ms Roberts.

“It’s just gross to even bring up race,” says Ms Chan. “It was never, ever once uttered amongst any of the judges,” she adds.

The BBC has sought comment from both Ms Roberts and Ms Prasad, but neither has responded.

Several of those involved - including some judges and contestants - have been sent “cease and desist” emails by Lux Projects, the BBC understands, which have been taken as tantamount to gagging orders by the recipients.

This scandal in Fiji is by no means the first to hit the world of beauty pageants, which historically has seen its fair share of controversies.

“Pageants are full of drama, of controversies, of people saying the contest was a fix,” says Prof Hilary Levey Friedman, author of ‘Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America.’

“But I will say that in more recent years, these issues have become much more pronounced thanks to social media,” she adds.

Apart from a voting scandal at the Miss America contest in 2022, recent controversies have tended to be in less developed parts of the world.

This is probably because they tend to be non-profit affairs in many Western countries, according to Prof Friedman, while pageants elsewhere have become more popular and more lucrative than ever.

“Historically, beauty pageants have been an amazing tool for social mobility for women,” says Prof Friedman.

“Apart from the prestige and the glory, it gives you a platform to attract followers and sponsorships. When there’s money involved, the stakes are higher.”

For Ms Prasad though, it turns out there is a happy ending.

On Friday, she posted on one of her social media accounts that she had indeed been re-crowned as Miss Fiji 2024.

“What an incredible journey this has been,” she wrote on Instagram.

Miss Universe Organization (MUO) has not responded to a request for comment, but the BBC understands it is extremely unhappy with the events in Fiji and, after having established the facts, worked hard to reinstate Ms Prasad as the island’s queen.

For Ms Prasad there is elation. For the judges, relief.

As for Ms Roberts, she is calling herself the “real Miss Universe Fiji 2024” on Instagram.

Judge Ms White says she’s “so proud of how Manshika [Prasad] has conducted herself throughout this journey. She’s a brilliant, compassionate, and beautiful young woman, who didn’t deserve this.

“We just wanted the truth to come out and now it has.”

Published
7 minutes ago

Venezuelan security forces have surrounded the Argentine embassy in the capital Caracas, which is sheltering several Venezuelan political figures opposed to President Nicolás Maduro.

Members of the Venezuelan opposition posted images and videos of officers from the country’s intelligence service forming a perimeter around the embassy complex.

Opposition figures inside the building said they were under "siege" by Mr Maduro's regime.

The embassy, as well as Argentine interests in Venezuela, have been represented by Brazil since diplomatic relations between Argentina and Venezuela broke down over the summer due to the outcome of Venezuela's presidential election.

On Saturday, the Venezuelan government revoked Brazil's custody of the embassy, it said, in an apparent attempt to remove its diplomatic protection.

Argentina is among several countries to have disputed the official results of the presidential election, which gave Mr Maduro a third term.

Others have called on the Venezuelan government to publish voting data, while allies of Mr Maduro - including Russia and China - have recognised his victory.

Voting tallies published by the Venezuelan opposition indicate its candidate, Edmundo González, won - but western nations have stopped short of recognising him as the president-elect.

The latest actions by the Venezuelan government come after two opposition figures joined four who were already staying in the embassy on Friday.

It also comes hours after the Argentine foreign ministry said it would ask the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Mr Maduro and other senior officials.

Pedro Urruchurtu Noselli, an adviser to opposition leader María Corina Machado, who has been at the embassy since March, wrote on X that as of Saturday morning, there was "an increasing presence of hooded officials.

"They have closed off vehicular traffic on the street. We are still without electricity."

Meanwhile Omar Gonzalez Moreno, another opposition official, said that the embassy had been without electricity since Friday evening.

"The siege and threat of attack on the Argentine diplomatic headquarters in Caracas, represented by Brazil, by security agents of the Maduro regime continues," he added.

The Venezuelan government said it had been forced to take action after it supposedly uncovered "evidence of the use of the facilities... for the planning of terrorist activities and assassination attempts" against Mr Maduro and his deputy.

Brazil said in a subsequent statement that it would continue to represent Argentina's interests in Venezuela until another government was selected to fulfil the role.

It emphasised "the inviolability of the facilities of the Argentine diplomatic mission".

Argentine Security Minister Patricia Bullrich said: "We Argentines are determined not to allow our embassy to be taken away or interfered with."

Published
2 hours ago

Murder charges brought against the father of a US school shooter have laid down a new marker on the issue of parental responsibility.

Colin Gray bought his son Colt an AR-style rifle for Christmas last year, even though the boy had been questioned by police just seven months earlier about online threats to commit a school shooting.

Investigators suspect the 14-year-old may have used that same weapon on Wednesday when he shot dead four people and wounded nine others at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.

The teen has since been charged with murder and - in an unprecedented move - so too has his dad.

Mr Gray, 54, faces two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children.

Together, the charges carry a maximum penalty of 180 years in prison.

The murder counts against Mr Gray stem from him "knowingly allowing his son to possess a weapon", according to Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

The pair of charges apply to the two teenagers killed in Wednesday's rampage: Christian Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn, both 14.

Two Apalachee teachers - Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53 - also died in the attack.

The charges Mr Gray faces are second-degree and that may be due to specific wording in Georgia law.

According to the state's criminal code, a person commits second-degree murder "when, in the commission of cruelty to children in the second degree, he or she causes the death of another human being irrespective of malice".

With prosecutors bringing these charges barely more than 24 hours after the shooting, experts caution the facts are still emerging, and it remains unclear what legal arguments will be directed at Mr Gray.

"There's a connection between the deaths and 'the commission of cruelty to children,'" said Evan Bernick, an associate law professor at Northern Illinois University.

"But is the cruelty directly arising from the shooting, or is it cruelty to his son that may have led [the boy] to commit the shooting? We just don't know yet."

The son will be tried as an adult, meaning that the criminal justice system will treat his homicide prosecution as that of somebody fully responsible for their own actions.

But that does not mean his father will escape punishment, Prof Bernick told the BBC.

The crux of the argument will be not that Colin Gray wanted the shooting to happen, but that he "failed to intervene, and his failure to intervene was negligent in ways that justify treating him as part of the homicide".

Across the US, there are laws on the books to punish parents or guardians for everything from academic truancy and underage driving to shoplifting and vandalism.

But prosecutors in the state of Michigan expanded the reach of such statutes earlier this year when they secured dual convictions against the parents of another teen gunman.

James and Jennifer Crumbley were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for how their criminal negligence as parents contributed to their son Ethan, 14, killing four of his classmates in 2018.

Thursday's decision to charge the father with murder - a far more severe charge - could again test the legal bounds of parental responsibility.

Eve Brank, a psychology professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, researches how the law intervenes and sometimes interferes with family decision-making.

In her view, the emerging concept of punishing parents after school shootings reflects broader frustration around US gun violence and, in the absence of regulatory reform, the inability to curb the country's unrelenting series of firearm incidents.

"It's not like we've created a bunch of new laws to address these issues. They're just being used, somewhat creatively, to address the issue," she said.

"In terms of what the research shows, most people would agree there are a lot of influences on how children behave, not just their parents."

But she noted that prosecutors in Georgia may be privy to information from the investigation not yet publicly available and may believe they can successfully argue that, like the Crumbleys before him, Colin Gray's actions were particularly egregious.

Tim Carey, a law and policy adviser at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, argues that charging parents is also a reflection on weak gun safety policies.

Georgia has been "very apprehensive to gun violence prevention policies", he said, and prosecutors in such states may "feel confined to trying to bring a sense of justice or retribution after the fact, in part because they couldn't prevent" such a tragedy.

Some legal scholars worry that expanding the toolkit prosecutors can use after a shooting could have unintended consequences.

"We know we have a problem of violence and guns in our society," said Ekow Yankah, a law and philosophy professor at the University of Michigan.

"And instead of tackling it with systemic and regulatory powers, we soothe ourselves with these kind of extraordinary prosecutions."

But, Prof Yankah warns, prosecutors are now armed with "a hammer" they can bring down on others, including poor families from minority groups and single parents.

"School shootings are highly visible... but I'm worried about the cases that won't make the news," he said.

And while parents are now at greater risk of being penalised for their children's violent actions, less progress has been made on the widespread access to firearms or on the availability of mental health resources for struggling kids.

"Our default response to very deep social problems in the United States is to bring in the apparatus of criminal law," said Prof Bernick.

Published
46 minutes ago

US health officials have confirmed a human case of bird flu in a patient that had no immediately known animal exposure.

The patient, in the state of Missouri, was treated in hospital and has since recovered, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.

It is the 14th human case of bird flu in the US in 2024 and the first without a known occupational exposure to infected animals, according to the CDC.

The agency said that, based on their current data, the risk to the general public remains low.

Bird flu is a viral disease that primarily affects birds and other animals. Human infections are rare.

Previous US cases have been traced back to exposure to infected poultry or cattle, but the Missouri patient marks "the first case of H5 without a known occupational exposure to sick or infected animals," the CDC said in a statement on Friday.

The Missouri case was detected through routine flu season surveillance. The patient had underlying medical conditions, and received flu antiviral medications.

Bird flu has been on the rise among cows in the US this year. An outbreak was first reported in March, and cattle in 14 states had been affected as of 3 September, according to the CDC.

While outbreaks of bird flu have not been reported in Missouri's cattle, it has been reported in poultry this year and in wild birds in the past, health officials said.

US health officials discovered a human case of bird flu in March 2024, which was identified after an exposure to dairy cows that were potentially infected.

Bird flu was first detected in China in the 1990s, and has since spread across every continent including Antarctica. World health officials believe the current risk to humans is low, but have actively monitored the disease for years.

It has disease has affected wildlife worldwide, infecting species as varied as sea lions, seals and bears.

Published
1 hour ago

Police in Kenya have been ordered to investigate the circumstances that led to a deadly fire at a boarding school, which killed at least 18 pupils with an average age of nine.

Investigators should "assess whether or not the tragedy may have resulted from negligence and/or recklessness", the chief prosecutor said in a statement.

The cause of the fire in the boys' dormitory at Hillside Endarasha Academy is still unknown, and 50 pupils are unaccounted for.

Identification of the bodies is expected to take place on Monday.

Director of Public Prosecutions Renson Ingonga said the tragedy "evokes bad memories of other similar school fire incidents" that many times pointed to negligence and failure to comply with safety standards.

Any person found culpable would be quickly taken through the due process of criminal trial, he added in a statement on X, external.

Kenya's national gender and equality commission said in a statement, external that initial reports indicating the dormitory was overcrowded were "deeply concerning".

The fire broke out in the dormitory housing 156 boys in the remote area in Nyeri county around 23:00 local time on Thursday. Firefighters were delayed by bad roads, but people living nearby rushed to rescue the boys.

It "is a catastrophe beyond our imagination", government spokesman Isaac Mwaura said at the school on Saturday. "It is truly devastating for the nation to lose such a number of young and promising Kenyans. Our hearts are heavy."

Around 50 children are unaccounted for - some thought to have escaped into the local community or been picked up by their parents without the school's knowledge.

Mr Mwaura said on Saturday that more than 20 children had now been accounted for, after 70 were initially reported missing on Friday. He urged the media to not "rush to make conclusions about the numbers" as DNA testing would take days.

On Saturday, criminal investigators and government pathologists had sealed off the site for analysis. Identification of the bodies would not take place until Monday at a hospital, another official told journalists.

"Some of the bodies were burnt beyond repair," the official said.

That means parents, desperate for news, could have to wait two more days before knowing the fate of their children.

President William Ruto has declared a three-day national mourning period to start on Monday.

School fires are relatively common in Kenyan boarding schools, where concerns have been raised about safety standards.

In 2022, a dormitory in western Kenya burnt down, with several students later arrested on suspicion of arson.

In 2017, 10 students died in an arson attack at Moi Girls High School in the capital Nairobi.

At least 67 students died in Machakos County, south-east of Nairobi, in the deadliest Kenyan school arson that took place more than 20 years ago.

A report released four years ago warned that many secondary schools in Kenya were not well prepared to respond to fires and didn’t adhere to government safety standards.

The report by the country’s auditor general revealed that many schools lacked proper equipment to handle fire outbreaks and were not constructed in accordance with required safety standards.

Published
1 hour ago

Protests are taking place across France over the nomination of right-wing Michel Barnier as the new prime minister, after an inconclusive election in which the left won the largest number of seats.

More than 100 protests are expected to take place on Saturday, with people already on the streets in cities including Bordeaux, Nice and Le Mans.

The demonstrations were called by trade unions and left-wing political parties, whose own candidate for prime minister was rejected by President Emmanuel Macron.

Mr Barnier, the EU's former Brexit negotiator, said he is open to forming a government with politicians across the political spectrum, including the left.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a veteran firebrand from the radical France Unbowed party, called for the "most powerful mobilisation possible" in national marches.

Around 130 protests are being held, with the biggest setting out from central Paris this afternoon. Other cities staging protests include Marseille and Lyon.

The demonstrators are using slogans such as "denial of democracy" and "stolen election".

Parties on the left are angry that their own candidate for prime minister, Lucie Castets, was rejected by Mr Macron, who said she had no chance of surviving a vote of confidence in the National Assembly.

Mr Barnier may be able to survive a confidence vote because the far right, which also won a large number of seats, has said it won't automatically vote against him.

However, that has led to criticism that his government will be dependent on the far right.

Ms Castets said she - like millions of French voters - felt betrayed and that the president had in effect ended up governing with the far right.

"We have a prime minister completely dependent on National Rally," she added.

Meanwhile, against the backdrop of the protests, Mr Barnier is focussed on forming a new government.

After talks with the leaders of the right-wing Republicans and the president's centrist Ensemble group, he said discussions were going very well and were "full of energy".

Some on the left have blamed themselves for ending up with Mr Barnier as prime minister.

Socialist Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo pointed out that the president had considered former Socialist prime minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, for the job but that he had been turned down by his own party.

Another Socialist Mayor, Karim Bouamrane, blamed intransigence from other parts of the left alliance: "The path they chose was 100% or nothing - and here we are with nothing."

Published
21 minutes ago

The international world order is “under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the Cold War”, the heads of the UK and US foreign intelligence services have warned.

The chiefs of MI6 and the CIA also said both countries stand together in "resisting an assertive Russia and Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine".

In a first-ever joint article, Sir Richard Moore and William Burns wrote in the Financial Times, external that they saw the war in Ukraine coming "and were able to warn the international community", in part by declassifying secrets to help Kyiv.

And they said there was work being done to "disrupt the reckless campaign of sabotage" across Europe by Russia, push for de-escalation in the Israel-Gaza war, and counterterrorism to thwart the resurgent Islamic State (IS).

The pair also made their first public speaking appearance together at a security summit in London on Saturday.

In the FT op-ed, they wrote: “There is no question that the international world order – the balanced system that has led to relative peace and stability and delivered rising living standards, opportunities and prosperity – is under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the Cold War.”

“Successfully combating this risk” is at the foundation of the special relationship between the UK and US, they added.

One of the “unprecedented array of threats” faced by both countries is the war in Ukraine, which is in its third year after Russia's invasion in February 2022.

Sir Richard and Mr Burns said "staying the course is more vital than ever" when it comes to supporting Ukraine, adding Russian President Vladimir Putin “will not succeed”.

They continued: “Beyond Ukraine, we continue to work together to disrupt the reckless campaign of sabotage across Europe being waged by Russian intelligence, and its cynical use of technology to spread lies and disinformation designed to drive wedges between us.”

Both foreign intelligence services see the rise of China as the main intelligence and geopolitical challenge of the century. They have reorganised their services “to reflect that priority”, they added.

The pair also said they have pushed “hard” for restraint and de-escalation in the Middle East, and have been working “ceaselessly” to secure a ceasefire and hostage deal.

It is 11 months since Hamas attacked southern Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage.

More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then in Israel's ongoing military campaign, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry.

Published
1 hour ago

Super Typhoon Yagi, the most powerful storm in Asia this year, has made landfall in northern Vietnam.

The storm hit Hai Phong and Quang Ninh provinces with winds of up to 203 km/h (126 mph) on Saturday morning, the Indo-Pacific Tropical Cyclone Warning Center said.

In Hai Phong, news agency AFP reports metal roof sheets and commercial sign boards were seen flying across the city.

On Friday, Yagi hit the island of Hainan - a popular tourist destination dubbed China's Hawaii. At least three people have died in China due to the storm, and nearly 100 injured.

The city of Hai Phong on the coast of northern Vietnam has a population of two million and has faced the brunt of the storm.

Power outages hit parts of the city, home to multinational factories, on Saturday while four of the north's airports have suspended operations for much of the day.

Nearly 50,000 people have been evacuated from coastal towns in Vietnam with authorities issuing a stay indoors warning.

Schools have been closed in 12 northern provinces, including in the capital Hanoi.

On Friday, China evacuated some 400,000 people in Hainan island ahead of Yagi's arrival. Trains, boats and flights were suspended, while schools were shut.

Local media there reported widespread power outages, with about 830,000 households affected. Valuable crops have also been wiped out.

Videos on Chinese social media show windows being ripped out from tower blocks on Hainan.

A super typhoon is equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane.

Yagi is the second strongest typhoon so far this year and has doubled in strength since it hit northern Philippines early this week.

Floods and landslides brought by Yagi killed at least 13 people in northern Philippines, with thousands of people forced to evacuate to safer ground.

Scientists say typhoons and hurricanes are becoming stronger and more frequent with climate change. Warmer ocean waters mean storms pick up more energy, which leads to higher wind speeds.

A warmer atmosphere also holds more moisture, which can lead to more intense rainfall.

Published
48 minutes ago

Former US Vice-President and lifelong Republican Dick Cheney has confirmed he will vote for the Democrats' Kamala Harris in November's presidential election.

Mr Cheney, seen as an influential figure during the presidency of George W Bush, issued a statement saying there had "never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump", the current Republican candidate.

His daughter, former Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney, had told an audience in Texas earlier that her father planned to back the Democratic nominee.

“He [Trump] tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him," said Mr Cheney. "He can never be trusted with power again."

“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our constitution," he added. "That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris.”

Mr Cheney's remarks were welcomed by the Harris camp.

“The vice-president is proud to have the support of Vice-President Cheney, and deeply respects his courage to put country over party,” said campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon.

Mr Cheney joins a growing list of Republicans who have expressed concern about the candidacy of Donald Trump.

His daughter, Liz Cheney, has already given her backing to Vice-President Harris.

She served on the House select committee investigating the 6 January Capitol riots, and was one of 10 Republicans to vote to impeach former President Trump after the incident.

Ms Cheney lost her seat in Congress in 2022 to a Trump-backed candidate.

Taking to social media following Mr Cheney's statement, Trump called the former vice-president an "irrelevant RINO" - an acronym which stands for "Republican in name only".

He also described Mr Cheney as the "King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars" - alluding to his role in the Iraq War.

Published
50 minutes ago

The United Nations has called for a "full investigation" into the killing of a US-Turkish woman in the occupied West Bank during a protest on Friday.

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was killed after Israeli forces opened fire.

The 26-year-old was taking part in a weekly protest against Jewish settlement expansion in the town of Beita near Nablus.

According to local media reports, Ms Eygi was shot by Israeli troops. Israel's military said it was "looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area".

An eyewitness told the BBC World Service's Newshour programme he had heard two shots fired at the protest.

Reacting to the killing, Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesman for the UN secretary general, said: "We would want to see a full investigation of the circumstances and that people should be held accountable."

Civilians, he added, "must be protected at all times".

The US also called for an investigation into the incident. Sean Savett, spokesman for the White House's National Security Council, said Washington was "deeply disturbed by the tragic death of an American citizen".

"We have reached out to the government of Israel to ask for more information and request an investigation into the incident," Mr Savett said.

Footage from the scene shortly after the shooting shows medics rushing Ms Eygi into an ambulance.

Jewish-Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak, who was at the protest, told BBC World Service's Newshour programme he had seen "soldiers on the rooftop aiming".

He said he had heard two separate shots, "with like a second or two distance between them".

"I heard someone calling my name, saying in English, 'Help us. We need help. We need help." I ran towards them," he said.

He said he had then seen Ms Eygi "lying on the ground underneath an olive tree, bleeding to death from her head".

"I put my hand behind her back to try and stop the bleeding," he said. "I looked up, there was a clear line of sight between the soldiers and where we were. I took her pulse, and it was very, very weak."

He added that Friday's demonstration had been Ms Eygi's first time attending a protest with the International Solidarity Movement, a pro-Palestinian group.

The dual-national was rushed to a hospital in Nablus and later pronounced dead.

Dr Fouad Nafaa, head of Rafidia Hospital where Ms Eygi was admitted, confirmed that a US citizen in her mid-20s had died from a "gunshot in the head".

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken deplored the "tragic loss", while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan branded the Israeli action "barbaric".

Turkey's foreign ministry said Ms Eygi had been "killed by Israeli occupation soldiers in the city of Nablus".

Before travelling to the Middle East, Ms Eygi had recently graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle.

The school's president, Ana Mari Cauce, described news of her death as "awful" while adding that Ms Eygi had had a "positive influence" on other students.

Ms Eygi was born in Antalya, as reported by Turkish media.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said: "During Israeli security forces activity adjacent to the area of Beita, the forces responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them.

"The IDF is looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area. The details of the incident and the circumstances in which she was hit are under review."

In his interview with the BBC, Jonathan Pollak was asked about the IDF's statement, where the Israeli military said security forces had responded to stone-throwing.

Mr Pollak said there had been clashes but he felt that soldiers had been "under no threat".

There had been "no stone throwing" where she had been, he said.

Israeli forces withdrew from Jenin city and its refugee camp in the occupied West Bank on Friday, following a major nine-day operation there.

The Palestinian health ministry says at least 36 Palestinians were killed - 21 from Jenin governorate - in that time. Most of the dead have been claimed by armed groups as members, but the ministry says children are also among those killed.

In the past 50 years, Israel has built settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where more than 700,000 Jews now live.

Settlements are held to be illegal under international law - that is the position of the UN Security Council and the UK government, among others - although Israel rejects this.

Published
38 minutes ago

“Think of it as cricket cake, like fish cake,” the chef said as he urged the man in the buffet line to try the steaming, spicy laksa – a coconut noodle broth – full of “textured cricket protein”.

Next to it was a plate of chilli crickets, the bug version of a beloved Singaporean dish - stir-fried mud crabs doused in a rich, sweet chilli sauce.

It looked like any other buffet, except for the main ingredient in every dish: crickets.

The line included a woman who gingerly scooped stir-fried Korean glass noodles topped with minced crickets onto her plate, and a man who wouldn't stop grilling the young chef.

You would have expected the diners to snap up the feast. After all, they were among more than 600 scientists, entrepreneurs and environmentalists from around the world who had descended on Singapore as part of a mission to make insects delicious. The name of the conference said it all – Insects to Feed the World.

And yet more of them were drawn to the buffet next to the insect-laden spread. It was the usual fare, some would have argued: wild-caught barramundi infused with lemongrass and lime, grilled sirloin steak with onion marmalade, a coconut vegetable curry.

Some two billion people, about a quarter of the world’s population, already eat insects as part of their everyday diet, according to the United Nations.

More people should join them, according to a growing tribe of bug advocates who champion insects as a healthy and green choice. But is the prospect of saving the planet enough to get people to sample their top creepy crawlies?

“We have to focus on making them delicious,” said New York-based chef Joseph Yoon, who designed the cricket-laced menu for the conference, along with Singaporean chef Nicholas Low. The event had permission to use only crickets.

“The idea that insects are sustainable, dense with nutrients, can address food security, and so on,” is not enough to make them palatable, let alone appetising, he added.

Studies have found that just six crickets met a person’s daily protein needs. And rearing them required less amount of water and land, compared with livestock.

Some countries have given insect diets a nudge, if not a push. Singapore recently approved 16 types of bugs, including crickets, silkworms, grasshoppers and honey bees, as food.

It is among a handful of countries, inlcuding the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Thailand, that are regulating what is still an incipient edible insects industry. Estimates vary from $400m to $1.4bn (£303m to £1.06bn).

Enter chefs like Nicholas Low who have had to find ways to “break down” insects to cook with them because people are not always up for trying them "in their original form”.

For the conference, Mr Low reinvented the popular laksa when he replaced the usual fishcake with patties made of minced cricket.

He said it also took some work to mask the earthy smell of the insects. Dishes with "strong flavours", like laksa, were ideal because the delights of the original recipe distracted people from the crushed bugs.

Mr Low said crickets left little room for him to experiment. Usually deep-fried for a satisfying crunch, or ground to a fine powder, they were unlike meats, which made for versatile cooking, from braises to barbecue.

He could not imagine cooking with crickets every day: "I'm more likely to cook it as a special dish that is part of a larger menu."

Since Singapore approved cooking with bugs, some restaurants have been trying their hand at it. A seafood spot has taken to sprinkling crickets on their satays and squid ink pastas, or serving them on the side of a fish head curry.

Of course there are others who have been more committed to the challenge. Tokyo-based Takeo Cafe has been serving customers insects for the past 10 years.

The menu includes a salad with twin Madagascar hissing cockroaches nestling on a bed of leaves and cherry tomatoes, a generous scoop of ice cream with three tiny grasshoppers perched on it and even a cocktail with spirits made from silkworm poo.

"What’s most important is [the customer’s] curiosity," said Saeki Shinjiro, Takeo's chief sustainability officer.

What about the environment? "Customers are not concerned so much," he said.

Just to be on the safe side, Takeo also has a bug-free menu. “When designing the menu, we keep in mind not to discriminate against people who do not eat insects... Some customers are merely here to accompany their friends,” Mr Shinjiro said.

"We do not want such people to feel uncomfortable. There is no need to eat insects forcibly."

It hasn’t always been this way, though. For centuries, insects have been a valued food source in different parts of the world.

In Japan grasshoppers, silkworms, and wasps were traditionally eaten in land-locked areas where meat and fish were scarce. The practice resurfaced during food shortages in World War Two, Takeo’s manager Michiko Miura said.

Today, crickets and silkworms are commonly sold as snacks at night markets in Thailand, while diners in Mexico City pay hundreds of dollars for ant larvae, a dish once considered a delicacy by the Aztecs, who ruled the region in the 15th and 16th Centuries.

But bug experts worry that these culinary traditions have been unravelling with globalisation, as people who eat insects now associate the diet with poverty.

There is a “growing sense of shame” in places with a long history of insect consumption, like Asia, Africa and South America, said Joseph Yoon, the New York-based chef.

“They now get glimpses of foreign cultures over the internet and they are embarrassed about eating insects because that is not the practice elsewhere.”

In her book Edible Insects and Human Evolution, anthropologist Julie Lesnik argued that colonialism deepened the stigma of eating insects. She wrote that Christopher Columbus and members of his expedition described the native Americans’ consumption of insects as “bestiality… greater than that of any beast upon the face of the earth”.

Of course, people’s attitudes could change. After all, gourmet treats such as sushi and lobster were once an alien concept to most people.

Sushi started out as a working-class dish found in street stalls. And lobsters, known as the “poor man’s chicken”, were once fed to prisoners and slaves in north-eastern America because of their abundance, said food researcher Keri Matiwck from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

But as transport networks made travel easier and food storage improved, more and more people were introduced to the crustacean. As demand increased, so did its price and status.

Foods once seen as “exotic”, or not even regarded as food, can gradually become mainstream, Dr Matwick said. “[But] cultural beliefs take time to change. It will take a while to change the perceptions of insects as disgusting and dirty.”

Some experts encourage people to raise their children to be more tolerant of unusual food, including insects, because future generations will face the full consequences of the climate crisis.

Insects may well become the “superfoods” of the future, as coveted as quinoa and berries. They may be grudginly eaten, rather than sought out for the joy that a buttery steak or a hearty bowl of ramen brings.

For now, Singapore chef Nicholas Low believes there is nothing pushing people to change their diets, especially in wealthy places where almost anything you want is a few clicks away.

Younger consumers may be willing to taste them out of curiosity, but the novelty will wear off, he said.

“We are spoilt for choice. We like our meat as meat, and our fish as fish.”

Published
Just now

Like many charming, clever people, Emmanuel Macron is used to getting his own way.

Still only 46 years old, France’s suave leader can already point back to a glittering career path strewn with obstacles avoided or overcome.

A meteoric rise, the transformation of France’s political landscape, the formation of his own triumphant party, securing the presidency twice, subduing the gilets jaunes (yellow-jacket) protests, pension reform, and this summer’s glorious Paris Olympics.

“He’s incredibly smart, a very hard worker, dynamic and creative,” conceded a former minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, in a recent French newspaper interview, despite falling out with the president.

So how do you persuade a man like Emmanuel Macron to accept that he may, at last, have messed up badly?

The short answer, judging from the past few weeks, appears to be that you cannot.

Ever since Macron took what is widely considered to have been a rash, poorly timed, and profoundly counter-productive decision to dissolve France’s parliament and call early elections in June, France’s president has been struggling to find a way to frame the outcome as anything but a humiliating personal defeat.

It’s true that France’s National Assembly, jolted by the rise of the far-right National Rally (RN) party and by the arrival of Macron’s own disruptive political project, was already straying towards swamp-like territory after many decades switching comfortably between centre-left and centre-right parties.

But the sudden summer elections, meant to provide greater “clarification,” instead left the seats in the chamber’s famous semi-circle split evenly between three blocs, all furiously at odds with each other: the left and hard left, a newly muddled centre, and the populist right.

“It’s a crappy situation,” the constitutional expert Benjamin Morel told the BBC, at a loss for a more erudite phrase to sum things up.

“It’s a mess. Macron has lost his touch. He’s not in sync with the country as he once was,” agreed journalist Isabelle Lasserre, author of a recent book about the president.

Ever since the elections, he has sought to present the new parliamentary arithmetic as an almost deliberate, almost welcome message from the French electorate to politicians of all stripes, encouraging them to compromise and to embrace the sort of coalition-building so commonplace in other European countries.

But many French voters and politicians are unconvinced.

They see the president's framing as arrogant spin – an attempt to avoid blame for a mess of his own making and to continue with business as usual.

Which helps explain why, this weekend, parties on the left are planning street demonstrations across France. It could be the start of a long autumn of discontent.

The left, which came together to form a new NFP alliance against the far right for these elections, is beyond furious that Macron has ignored the fact that their bloc won the largest share of seats in parliament.

Instead, the president has veered to the centre right, by picking Michel Barnier as his new prime minister.

Will that be enough to steady the ship? Macron aides are indicating that Mr Barnier will have total freedom – with no red lines – to direct domestic policy and to seek enough support in parliament to avoid a no-confidence vote.

“Picking Barnier was a cunning move. The best choice,” said Lasserre, arguing that the former EU commissioner was an experienced hand, who might buy Mr Macron some time.

But how much time, and to what end?

The president has recently sought to present himself as an aloof, almost regal figure, merely interested in safeguarding national stability.

But he continues to wade into parliamentary politics, insisting, high-handedly, that neither the far left nor far right can have any role or influence whatsoever in government.

Emmanuel Macron still has two and a half more years in office.

Will he be forced out before then by street protests? Will he see his hard-won pension reforms overturned?

Will another “clarifying” parliamentary election be required next year? Could the Fifth Republic’s constitution require amending, or even replacing altogether?

Or might France’s leader, a former banker with an appetite for the high-wire act, find a way, once again, to outsmart his rivals and to win back the support of an increasingly sceptical public?

“I doubt it. He may steady things, but no more than that,” concluded Isabelle Lasserre.

Significantly, the main beneficiary of this current crisis is, almost certainly, the one person President Macron has sought most to thwart.

He has spent years trying to ensure that Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right, anti-immigrant National Rally, now the country’s largest single party, never gets close to real power.

“For now, she is the biggest winner from this crisis. She lost the elections, but she increased the size of her (parliamentary) group by 1.5 times. She has more money. She has everything to set up the next generation of her party,” concluded Benjamin Morel.

He predicted, if Emmanuel Macron’s true legacy proved to be a future electoral victory for National Rally, that chaos would follow.

“We can find temporary solutions (today)… But if the RN wins an absolute majority, we will enter into a conflict that will no longer be in parliament, but on the streets."

Published
7 minutes ago

The killing of a 15-year-old boy by a classmate last month has fuelled religious tensions in an Indian city, leaving one family grieving and the other shattered by the crime.

On 16 August, Heena* learned her teenage son Zakir*, 15, had been accused of stabbing a classmate at their school in Udaipur, Rajasthan.

Zakir allegedly pulled a knife from his backpack and attacked Devraj, a Hindu boy, who died in the hospital three days later.

The incident sparked a stream of grief and anger as well as a conversation on how to deal with violence in classrooms.

The state police denied any religious angle to the incident. "The students had an argument over notebooks which turned ugly," investigating officer Chhagan Purohit told the BBC.

But the incident set off a wave of religious violence.

False rumours that Zakir, a Muslim, planned the killing went viral on WhatsApp, sparking protests in Udaipur with right-wing Hindu groups torching vehicles and chanting anti-Muslim slogans, leading to a curfew and internet shutdown.

Zakir was taken into custody and sent to a juvenile home, while his father was arrested on the charges of abetment to murder, Mr Purohit said.

The next day, following a familiar pattern in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled (BJP-ruled) states, bulldozers demolished Heena's rented home, leaving her and her four daughters homeless.

"My son deserves punishment and I hope he learns to be a better human being," Heena said. "Why did they have to punish his entire family?"

Though the violence has subsided, Udaipur residents are shaken by how a simple fight escalated. Many now fear their once-integrated Hindu-Muslim neighbourhoods are being torn apart along religious lines.

"Things are getting worse and we can feel it," one of Heena's neighbours said on condition of anonymity.

For Devraj's family, everything else pales in comparison to the pain of losing their son.

"This is the news every parent dreads," his father Pappu Lal told the BBC.

A cobbler in Kuwait, he found out about the incident while he was thousands of miles away from home. By the time he got home, his son was unconscious. He died without getting a chance to see or speak to his father.

The trauma, Mr Lal said, catapulted his wife and him into debilitating sadness and sparked fury inside him.

"Their house was demolished but we lost our son," Mr Lal said. "The house can be built again but our child? He will never come back."

The incident has become a political sore point for the BJP, which governs India and Rajasthan, after some opposition leaders accused the party of fuelling religious tensions for political gains.

Authorities claim that the house where Heena lived was demolished because it was illegally built on forest land. A notice was sent to Heena a day before the action.

But her brother Mukhtar Alam*, who owns the house, questioned how the demolition could take place when only the tenants were alerted. "It was my house and I built it with a lot of hard work. How can they just come and raze it without even telling me?"

He also asked why the other houses in the area were still standing if they were all built on forest land.

Mukesh Saini, an official in Udaipur's forest department, told the BBC that action would be taken against those structures "at an appropriate time".

"Right now the atmosphere is not right for that," he said.

Critics have questioned the timing of the act and say that punishing someone for an alleged crime using laws meant for another makes no sense.

In BJP-governed states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Assam, bulldozers often swiftly demolish the homes of crime suspects, with officials touting this as evidence of their tough stance on law and order. While victims include Hindu families, opposition leaders and activists argue that these demolitions disproportionately target Muslims, especially following religious violence or protests.

"There is no logic to it except the communal logic of collective punishment and the authority acting as the populist dispenser of tough vigilante justice," said Asim Ali, a political scientist.

India’s Supreme Court recently criticised the demolition of properties linked to people accused of crimes and said it would issue guidelines around this.

Manna Lal Rawat, the BJP's Udaipur MP, told BBC Hindi that the demolition was not connected to the stabbing. He also alleged that the stabbing occurred because the accused student "was influenced by extremists" and said he had urged the police to ensure the killing was not a part of a "larger pattern".

An uneasy calm has prevailed in Udaipur since 2022, when two Muslim men beheaded a Hindu man, filmed the assault and posted it online. They said the act was in response to his support for a politician's divisive remarks about the Prophet Muhammad.

The killing had sparked massive protests and violence in the city for days.

"The memories of that murder are still alive in the minds of people," a senior Rajasthan police official, who wanted to stay anonymous, told the BBC. "That's why a fight between two children turned into riots. Due to politics, the peace of the city has been damaged."

But Mr Lal cannot understand what prompted the fight in the first place.

He says his son was a good boy - as mischievous as a 15-year-old could be, but also sweet and innocent.

"He never fought with anyone in school. He wanted to become a policeman when he grew up, become the voice of justice," he said, his eyes on Devraj's picture in the corner of the living room.

Since Devraj's death, hundreds of people have been visiting the family's small house, located in a bustling neighbourhood where Hindus and Muslims have lived peacefully together for years.

But for Mr Lal and his grieving wife, all condolences feel meaningless.

He refuses to talk about the violence or what may have caused it, saying that's for the administration to answer. "I just want justice for my son".

Questions have also been raised about the school’s handling of the case.

Mr Lal alleges that no teacher accompanied Devraj to the hospital and that he was taken there on a motorbike by two of his classmates.

The school's principal, Isha Dharmawat, who has since been suspended for negligence of duty, denied the allegation.

She said she had asked the students to take Devraj on her motorbike to avoid any delay in treatment and that she and four other teachers had also gone to the hospital immediately.

As the city limps back to normalcy, the effects of the incident are most starkly visible at the school where the children studied.

After the stabbing, the school closed for a week and reopened with only one student attending.

The two students who accompanied Devraj to the hospital were questioned by police and soon left the city, citing safety concerns. Parents still sending their children to school are worried about their safety.

"Children should be kept out of politics till they are ready to face the world. This has shaken us all up," a parent who wanted to remain unnamed said.

Meanwhile, Heena is desperately trying to piece her life back together.

"Half of my belongings are still buried [under the debris of the demolished house]. After the demolition, no one wants to rent me a house," she said.

Even now, she wonders how her son got the knife or why he allegedly used it on his friend. Was it collapsing mental health, a childish rivalry or something else? She does not know.

But she does know that she will forever be seen as an enabler of the violence and its resulting hatred, and as a terrible parent.

"Everything of mine has been taken away. Now if people want to hang my child, then hang him, what else can I say?"

*Names of the accused and his family have been changed as Indian laws don't allow juvenile offenders to be identified

Published
1 hour ago

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

Published
24 minutes ago

For many people in the UK this week, school has started again.

But for women and girls in Afghanistan, there is still a ban from secondary school classrooms, and much of public life, by the Taliban.

Mah, 22, fled from the country in August 2021 when the group swept into the capital Kabul.

She is now getting an education in the UK, starting a GCSE in English this week and she tells BBC Newsbeat: "I am happy for myself. I am safe. I have freedom. I am free."

"But at the same time, my friends in Afghanistan can’t do anything," she adds.

In the three years since the Taliban took control, restrictions on women’s lives have increased.

Women and girls over 12 are banned from schools, and prevented from sitting most university entrance exams. There are also restrictions in the work they can do, with beauty salons being closed, as well as being not being able to go to parks, gyms and sport clubs.

"I don’t put my picture on [Whatsapp or Instagram] stories when I’m happy, when I go out with friends or when I’m in college," Mah says.

"Because I don’t want my friends [back home] to feel like: 'Oh she’s in the UK now - she has freedom'."

Mah, who is in Cardiff, hopes a GCSE in English is the start to eventually becoming a midwife in Wales.

"It’s hard for me because I can go to college here and I can go to work.

"But at the same time, back home, my friends who are the same age, can't leave the house."

The Taliban has said its ban is down to religious issues.

They have repeatedly promised women would be readmitted once the issues were sorted - including making sure the curriculum was "Islamic".

But, there has since been no movement on the ban, and Afghanistan is the only country with such restrictions.

Mah’s journey to education in Cardiff was far from easy.

During the Taliban takeover, she says she fled from Helmand Province to Kandahar and then to Kabul. She woke up in the middle of the night, three days after arriving in the capital city, to find the Taliban on her street.

"If I stayed in Afghanistan, maybe they would kill me, maybe they would marry me.

"I called my mum and said 'Mum, I’m going.' She said, 'where are you going?'

"I said, 'I don’t know'."

Mah eventually arrived in the UK, along with other refugees who were being welcomed into the country.

"We came without anything. I didn’t say [a proper] goodbye to my mum. I didn’t even hug her. I will never forget this.

"It’s not safe now, but Afghanistan is the place I grew up and, went to school. I can’t forget the country, and I miss everything about it."

Mah received support from one of the largest youth organisations, the Urdd, who were providing help in the Welsh capital.

Its chief executive, Sian Lewis, says some people who fled to Wales and received an education are bilingual in Welsh now.

"They were educated here in the Urdd to start off with and a number went to live in different parts of Wales.

"It’s opened so many doors for them," she says.

When Mah came to the UK, she wasn't able to speak English.

"It was so hard. I didn’t know anybody. Everything was new."

But three years on, Mah has spoken to BBC Newsbeat in an English interview which lasted over 20 minutes, and is also learning Welsh.

"People here should say 'thank God' everyday.

"Women have rights. People here have whatever they want open to them, and they are safe. They should be happy. They are so lucky."

Another person who has left Afghanistan is 17-year-old Aqdas.

She's now in the US with a fully funded scholarship to a college in New Mexico, more than 12,000 miles away from her home.

She recalls the day the Taliban took Kabul.

"I remember that I did not know what to do any more.

"Will they take my rights away? Will I experience violence just like my mother did 20 years ago?

"I noticed that my mum was crying and she placed her hand on my shoulder, telling me that, she couldn't continue her education because of the Taliban."

But she told Aqdas that she shouldn't "let the Taliban or your limitations write the scripts for your life".

After that, Aqdas continued education online, in secret, with the help of the Herat online school.

"I never gave up on my studying. Whether it was online or finding another way to continue."

It was a long, and often chaotic, journey for her as well. When she got her scholarship to the USA, she had to get a visa but the embassy was shut in Afghanistan.

She says she then went to Pakistan with her father, using a medical visa because as a female, she did not have permission to leave the country.

Aqdas has now started classes but says there are other things that are often overlooked in Afghanistan.

"Lots of people think the only problem in Afghanistan is just the girls' education. There are other issues like mental health.

"Girls in Afghanistan are going through depression and anxiety every day and there is no help."

The UK Government has told BBC Newsbeat that it strongly condemns the ban on women heading to the classroom and university, and that it urgently calls on the Taliban to "reverse these decisions and to protect Afghan girls’ rights".

Newsbeat has approached the Taliban to comment on concerns that women and girls are banned from education - but have received nothing back.

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

Published
33 minutes ago

Israeli forces have been laying tarmac on a key road in Gaza along its southern border - in what some commentators see as a signal that they're not prepared to fully withdraw from the territory any time soon.

The road has become a major sticking point in the negotiations for a new ceasefire and hostage release deal.

BBC Verify has analysed satellite imagery, photos and video that show the surfacing of a road along the narrow but strategically important strip of land running the length of Gaza's border with Egypt, long known by its Israeli military codename: the Philadelphi Corridor.

Between 26 August and 5 September, satellite imagery captured at regular intervals shows fresh paving along a section of road extending 6.4km inland from the coast along the border fence.

A video posted online, external on 4 September which shows construction work, reportedly that evening, along a stretch of the border fence.

Heavy machinery can be seen laying fresh tarmac wide enough for two large vehicles to pass.

We’ve also compared two images below which show the laying of tarmac before and after. BBC Verify has confirmed the location and that they show the same stretch along the border fence.

The corridor includes the Rafah crossing with Egypt - which has been Gaza’s only crossing not directly controlled by Israel and key for aid deliveries.

At 12.6 km (7.8 miles) long, it runs adjacent to the Egyptian border from the Kerem Shalom crossing to the Mediterranean Sea.

While the Israeli military calls it the Philadelphi Route or Axis, Palestinians often refer to it as the Salah al-Din Axis.

"It's not a specific, demarcated area,” says Dr Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London. “It's a conceptual line. It's understood as land adjacent to the border.”

Israel previously pulled out of the area in 2005, when it withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza.

But it re-entered the Philadelphi Corridor on 7 May this year with tanks and armoured personnel carriers (APCs) - months before starting to pave the road.

Troops seized control of the Rafah crossing and then began advancing north-west both along the corridor and into the nearby southern city of Rafah.

In the past four months, the IDF has destroyed hundreds of buildings near the corridor with air and artillery strikes, as well through controlled demolitions with explosives and bulldozers.

One village - Al Qarya as Suwaydiya - at the Mediterranean end of the border - has been flattened and now appears to be operating as an Israeli base.

“Paving the road puts pressure on negotiators and mediators. The Israelis are trying to create a fait accompli,” says Dr Krieg.

“It also suggests that Israel is not going to withdraw entirely from the Gaza strip any time soon,” he says.

He cites a road built earlier this year by Israeli forces across northern Gaza - known as the Netzarim Corridor.

"If you look at the investments made in the Netzarim Corridor, it's clear they have no intention of withdrawing anytime soon, they've got concrete barriers, forward operating bases with towers and walls - you don't build those if you're planning on withdrawing.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described the Philadelphi Corridor as a "lifeline" for Hamas, and is adamant that Israel maintains a military presence there as a condition of any agreement.

At a press conference on Wednesday, he added: "You want to destroy Hamas' military and governance capabilities, you can't let Hamas rearm. So you have to control the corridor."

The IDF’s chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, said on 14 August that “the Philadelphi Corridor is important because it deals with strengthening our position. We are preparing for all scenarios that the political level may decide.”

Retired Egyptian Major General Dr Samir Faraj, now a commentator on military strategy, said Israel’s aim was “psychological warfare… paving the road is a media war, a war in which Israel sends a message to different parties that they will not leave.“

We have asked the Israeli military why it is surfacing the road now but have not received a response.

Mr Netanyahu says Hamas has used tunnels underneath the corridor to smuggle weapons and people via Egypt before the 7 October attack on Israel, which triggered the war in Gaza.

He believes Israeli forces deployed there will prevent the group rearming and ensure it never again poses a threat.

In a visit to the corridor last month, Mr Gallant was quoted as saying, external: “We have destroyed 150 tunnels on the Philadelphi Corridor, stretching across the Gaza-Egypt border.”

BBC Verify has located detonations in videos, shared by the IDF, to the Philadelphi Corridor - including one, external which it says shows “destruction of underground infrastructure” - but we are unable to confirm what is being destroyed.

We have also seen photos and video - again, shared by the IDF - of one substantial tunnel in the corridor.

All of these locations, as well as others along the border, show signs of major disturbances of the surface soil on satellite imagery.

Additional reporting by Lamees Altalebi and Joshua Cheetham

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In American politics it’s customary to suggest that most voters don’t start paying attention to the presidential election until after the Labor Day holiday weekend.

Well, that occasion - seen here as the unofficial end of summer - has now been and gone. And as a noticeable chill is felt in the air, many more voters will start to take note of politics. That includes the crucial swing voters in a handful of closely contested states who will ultimately decide the race for the White House.

Right on cue, as these eyes start to focus on the election, we have a presidential debate that will see Donald Trump and Kamala Harris go head-to-head for the first time. In fact, it will be the first time the two candidates have ever met in person. The high-stakes event in Philadelphia on Tuesday night is expected to draw in tens of millions of viewers.

Many of these viewers will be getting a first look at Ms Harris beyond the comfort of a rally stage. Before she dramatically replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in July, Ms Harris’s national profile was unusually low despite her serving as vice-president for almost four years.

And make no mistake, her explosion on to the big stage so late in the election cycle is highly, highly unusual.

The normal rhythms of American politics allow candidates to introduce themselves to the country as they campaign for their party’s presidential nomination in primary contests held much earlier in the year. This process weeds out those who, while popular in their home states, are not ready or equipped to take the leap on to the national stage (see Ron DeSantis) and gives participants vital experience at campaigning and debating.

Ms Harris did none of that this year. When she ran for the Democratic nomination in 2019, she pulled out before a single primary vote was cast after a campaign dogged by poor messaging, in which she struggled to sell her own vision.

Yet, this time around, it appears that Ms Harris’s unusual anonymity may in fact be a secret superpower.

She has been able to present herself to America on her own terms, highlighting her relatively humble background, her record as a prosecutor and her promise to uphold what she sees as fundamental rights such as access to abortion.

Ms Harris has also positioned herself as the candidate of change - a fresh face for the future - even though she has been part of the current administration for almost four years.

Trump is attacking her as a dangerously radical liberal. But to do so he is relying on statements she made and policies she promoted when she was competing in Democratic primaries in 2019. That’s because, to win the Democratic nomination, candidates have to appeal to more liberal members of the party before then trying to move to the centre in the general election.

In this election, Ms Harris did not have to compete against members of her own party to win the nomination and so had no reason to adopt more liberal policy positions as she did in the past.

Just look at her failed bid in 2019, when she advocated for a ban on fracking and offshore drilling as well as universal free healthcare. Both ideas have been rapidly dropped this time around.

Of course, we don’t know what promises Ms Harris would have made in a 2024 primary process, but to win the support of progressives she may well have taken similar positions to the above that Trump would now be using to attack her. No primary contest means less ammunition for the former president. And relying on statements his opponent made five years ago, and policy positions she has since dropped, is blunting his attacks.

This week, Ms Harris announced tax proposals that differentiate her platform from what President Biden was promising. She is calling for a lower tax hike than Mr Biden proposed on the investment earnings of Americans making more than $1 million a year. That is not the sort of idea that would have won her support in any Democratic primary vote.

There are arguably downsides to entering the race at such a late stage, however. Competing for the nomination would have given Ms Harris more experience with unscripted appearances - press conferences, interviews and TV debates.

So far, she has done only one broadcast interview since President Biden stepped aside and that was a joint appearance with her running mate Tim Walz. That encounter on CNN wasn’t exactly a tough interrogation, and she still struggled to answer what she would do on day one of the job if elected.

At her vast rallies and during her well-received speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, Ms Harris relied on a teleprompter and familiar lines. The 90-minute debate on Tuesday will be her longest unscripted appearance in this campaign.

Trump, who is far more experienced on the presidential debate stage, will try to knock her off her prepared talking points and do what has yet to happen in the race: press Ms Harris aggressively on policy and her changing positions.

And Ms Harris knows better than anyone that the last time Trump took to the debate stage his opponent ended up leaving the race. For America’s surprise presidential candidate, who has completely avoided the challenges and scrutiny of a Democratic primary, this debate represents a sterner test than anything she has faced so far in this pain-free campaign.

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