A gold toilet that fetched $12.1m (£9.3m) at auction was bought by Ripley's Believe It or Not!, after its first casting was stolen from Blenheim Palace in 2019.

America, created by Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan, is a fully functional toilet, made from more than 15st 13lb (101.2kg) of solid 18-carat gold.

The first version of the work was initially installed in a public bathroom at the Guggenheim museum in New York in 2016 but hit the news again three years later when a gang of thieves stole it from the Oxfordshire palace.

The existence of a second golden toilet was later revealed, and went under the hammer at Sotheby's in New York City on Tuesday. The 101 kg toilet received just one bid.

The auction house said that in a world first, the starting bid would be determined by the exact price of its weight in gold, at about $10m (£7.6m).

While it only said it was bought by a famous American brand, Ripley's Believe It or Not! later revealed themselves as the mystery buyer in an Instagram post, writing "we're flush with excitement".

The entertainment company runs attractions including museums of oddities and aquariums around the world.

It made headlines in 2022 for allowing celebrity and entrepreneur Kim Kardashian to wear a dress owned by Marilyn Monroe to the Met Gala.

Now, their team say they are "exploring possibilities" as to whether guests will ever be permitted to "take the ultimate golden seat".

"Such an opportunity requires serious planning and someone brave enough to ensure everything keeps flowing in the right direction," Ripley's added.

The artwork achieved the second highest price for a Cattelan piece at auction. His sculpture of a kneeling Hitler sold for $17.2m (£11.9m) in 2016.

It is estimated more than 100,000 people used the first toilet while it was at the Guggenheim before it was moved and exhibited at Blenheim Palace.

It was there that in the early hours of 14 September 2019, five men smashed their way in, ripped out the £4.8m solid gold installation and fled in a stolen Volkswagen Golf.

The heist and the trial that followed made news across the world.

James Sheen, 40, from Oxford, pleaded guilty to burglary and transferring criminal property in 2024. Michael Jones, 39, from Oxford, was found guilty of burglary in March. Both were both jailed earlier this year.

Fred Doe, 36, from Windsor, was also convicted of conspiracy to transfer criminal property and given a suspended sentence.

Sotheby's revealed that Cattelan created three toilets in 2016, with the second version on display in a bathroom at New York's Breuer Building until it went under the hammer.

The auction house described it as a "cultural phenomenon" and an "incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value".

David Galperin, head of contemporary art at Sotheby's New York, called it Cattelan's "tour de force".

"Holding both a proverbial and literal mirror to the art world, the work confronts the most uncomfortable questions about art, and the belief systems held sacred to the institutions of the market and the museum," he said.

On the same evening a portrait by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt was sold for $236.4m (£179m), making it the second most expensive piece ever sold at auction.

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US President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he has signed a bill ordering the release of all files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The bill requires the justice department to release all the information from its Epstein investigation "in a searchable and downloadable format" within 30 days.

Trump previously opposed releasing the files, but he changed course last week after facing pushback from Epstein's victims and members of his own Republican party.

With his support, the legislation overwhelmingly cleared both chambers of Congress, the House of Representatives and Senate, on Tuesday.

In a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, the president accused Democrats of championing the issue to distract attention from the achievements of his administration.

"Perhaps the truth about these Democrats, and their associations with Jeffrey Epstein, will soon be revealed, because I HAVE JUST SIGNED THE BILL TO RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES!" he wrote.

Lawmakers in the House passed the legislation with a 427-1 vote. The Senate gave unanimous consent to pass it upon its arrival.

Some 20,000 pages of documents from Epstein's estate, including some that directly mention Trump, were released last week.

They include 2018 messages from Epstein in which he said of Trump: "I am the one able to take him down" and "I know how dirty donald is".

Trump was a friend of Epstein's for years, but the president has said they fell out in the early 2000s, two years before Epstein was first arrested. Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.

Speaking to reporters on Monday night, Trump said Republicans had "nothing to do with Epstein".

"It's really a Democrat problem," he said. "The Democrats were Epstein's friends, all of them."

Despite the president's signature, the release of the full Epstein files is not guaranteed. Based on the bill's text, portions could still be withheld if they are deemed to invade personal privacy or relate to an active investigation.

One of the bill's architects, Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, said he had concerns about some files being withheld.

"I'm concerned that [Trump is] opening a flurry of investigations, and I believe they may be trying to use those investigations as a predicate for not releasing the files. That's my concern," he said.

Taxes on electric vehicles may put drivers off buying them at a time when demand has "lost momentum", Ford's UK boss has warned.

It comes after the BBC reported Chancellor Rachel Reeves could be considering new levies on EVs in the upcoming Budget.

Ford UK's managing director Lisa Brankin told the BBC: "It's certainly not the right time to do it."

A Treasury spokesperson said: "Fuel duty covers petrol and diesel, but there's no equivalent for electric vehicles. We want a fairer system for all drivers."

The Chancellor has been reported to be considering a new pay-per-mile charge for electric vehicles from 2028.

Ms Brankin told the BBC's Big Boss Interview podcast: "That [policy], in the face of really fragile demand for electric vehicles, is just another brake."

The admin task of calculating their mileage would put potential EV owners off making the switch, she says.

"It's really easy to sell people things they want," she says. "It's hard to sell people things they don't want.

"Electric vehicles in some instances have gone from being a great thing to being something that we're trying to push people into."

Ford sells the UK's most popular vehicle, the Ford Puma, while its commercial van the Transit holds the second-most-sold ranking.

For years its Focus model was the UK's most-popular, but the US company axed the hatchback and the last Ford Focus rolled off factory lines in Germany last week.

It employs around 6,000 people in the UK, with an engine plant in Dagenham and a transmission factory in Halewood. It hasn't manufactured a vehicle here since 2013.

Ford like other car makers is under pressure to meet the UK's net zero plan, 80% of new car sales must be EVs by 2030 or face fines.

The government has reinstated a grant worth up to £3,750 to encourage drivers to buy electric vehicles.

Ford would not be able to reach that 80% target without government help, such as the grant, Ms Brankin said.

Sales figures from car industry body, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) show how far car makers have to go to reach the target.

Fully-electric vehicles made up around 22.4% of total new car sales, data for 2025 up to 31 October shows. This time last year it was 18.1%.

In September, the UK new car market experienced its best performance since 2020, driven by a surge in EV sales which hit a record high, according to SMMT figures.

However, Ms Brankin pointed to heavy discounting across car sales forecourts as well as a lower resale value in the second-hand EV market as indicators that the market was "distorted".

"When that [target] was set a number of years ago, the outlook for demand around electric vehicles was buoyant and there seemed to be momentum behind electric vehicles. What we're seeing now is that customer demand is not in line with that ambition," Ms Brankin said.

A large share of new EVs are sold to businesses for their employees and they benefit from lower rates of "company car tax" compared with diesel or petrol-fuelled options.

Ms Brankin has urged the Chancellor to retain this tax benefit of companies "greening" their vehicle fleets.

The shift to EVs could have consequences for the close-to 1,800 staff at the Ford diesel engine plant in Dagenham, which was the largest car factory in Europe when it was first built.

Ms Brankin said Ford was yet to make any decisions about the future of the plant, which will build diesel engines up until 2030.

"We're working really hard on and what the next life of Dagenham looks like, " she said but there was "nothing that we've settled on at the moment."

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It was the most momentous event in UK history since World War Two. As a new virus took hold, millions of us were told to stay at home and billions of pounds were spent propping up the country's economy.

The Covid inquiry will publish its second set of findings later today, looking in detail at the huge political choices made at the time - including how lockdowns were introduced, the closure of businesses and schools, and bringing in previously unthinkable social restrictions.

"Did the government serve the people well, or did it fail them?" asked the lead counsel at the start of this part of the inquiry in 2023. Since then more than 7,000 documents have been made public from the time, including WhatsApp chats and emails, private diaries and confidential files.

Here, BBC News has picked out some of the urgent messages and scribbled notes that shine a light on how critical decisions were taken in 2020.

On 2 January 2020 an update appears on ProMed, a service used by health workers to warn of emerging diseases.

"World Health Organization in touch with Beijing after mystery viral pneumonia outbreak," it says.

"Twenty-seven people - most of them stallholders at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market - treated in hospital."

The next day England's deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van Tam, sends the bulletin on to Peter Horby, a professor at Oxford University and chair of Nervtag, a group that advises the government on new viral threats.

By the end of January, it's clear the health authorities in Wuhan have a major problem on their hands.

The deputy ambassador to China, Christina Scott, sends a cable back to London marked DIPTEL BEJING (Sensitive) comparing the situation to the outbreak of another virus - SARS - in 2003.

"Hubei province on lockdown; multiple cities have transport restrictions. Memory of SARS cover-up ensures residual distrust of government response," it says.

"They will do everything they can to quickly control this outbreak. But the challenge of doing so is substantial."

The virus spreads to Hong Kong and South Korea and then to Iran and northern Italy.

At lunchtime on Saturday 7 March the UK's then prime minister, Boris Johnson, is chatting on WhatsApp to his health secretary Matt Hancock ahead of the England vs Wales game at Twickenham.

Days later, the Cheltenham horse racing festival goes ahead and Atletico Madrid fans are allowed to fly from Spain to Liverpool to watch their team play in the Champions League.

The government's strategy, backed by its scientific advisers, is to try to contain early outbreaks by isolating those with the virus and tracing any contacts.

The plan is then to move to a "delay phase" as full community transmission is established – using policies like home isolation advice for those with symptoms to "flatten the curve" of the pandemic so that hospitals do not become overwhelmed.

But the virus is spreading much faster than expected and it‘s quickly becoming clear to many scientists that far stronger action will be needed.

On Friday 13 March, two senior No 10 officials are sitting in a key meeting of scientific advisers in Whitehall.

"WE ARE NOT READY," one writes in capital letters in his notepad. The other leans over and crosses out "NOT READY", replacing it with an expletive.

That weekend, the prime minister's chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, is locked in a series of meetings with the PM and a handful of select staff as a new strategy takes shape.

Grainy smartphone images show whiteboards in No 10 full of hand-drawn charts and scrawled bullet points.

One graph suggests that, if the virus was allowed to run its course without any restrictions in place, then more than 100,000 people would die "in [hospital] corridors" in the coming wave.

On Sunday 15 March, Cummings sends a WhatsApp to Johnson:

"FYI – [Patrick] Vallance [the chief scientific adviser] is on board with what will NEVER be discussed as Plan B."

"[In a] nutshell: we move through the gears to [do] whatever we need to stop NHS collapse and buy time to increase capacity."

Over the following week, Covid rules across the UK are tightened.

People are advised, but not legally required, to avoid all non-essential contact and work from home where possible. Then schools are closed, followed by pubs, restaurants, gyms and cinemas.

But still there are concerns that even those measures are not strong enough. On Sunday 22 March, London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, writes a private letter to Johnson.

The next evening, in a televised address watched by 27 million people, the prime minister tells the public they must stay at home as he announces the first national lockdown.

It will now be up to the inquiry to decide if making that call earlier could have saved lives and ultimately reduced the total time that people had to stay locked indoors.

Controlling Covid and protecting the economy

Over the next month some hospitals do come under severe pressure with intensive care units spilling into corridors and side rooms. Pre-planned or elective care is put on hold but at no point does the NHS have to turn away emergency patients.

Covid infections, hospitalisations and deaths start to fall.

But the cost of lockdown restrictions is huge: education is disrupted, loneliness and mental health problems get worse, and jobs and businesses are impacted.

On 22 May, Johnson sends a handwritten note to his officials asking for a plan to "start operation BOUNCEBACK".

That month some restrictions begin to be lifted – soon groups of six are able to meet outdoors and schools start a phased re-opening.

In the summer, then-chancellor Rishi Sunak tries to boost the economy with his Eat Out to Help Out scheme - 50% off food and drinks for three days a week in August.

The idea is well received by the hospitality industry but there are concerns about the health impact.

On WhatsApp (with spelling mistakes), Hancock warns Simon Case, then the most senior civil servant in Downing Street, that it's causing problems in intervention areas - that’s those local authorities with the highest infection rates.

In his evidence to the inquiry, Sunak plays down a link between his scheme and the spread of the virus saying a second wave "happened in every other country in Europe".

But that tension – between controlling Covid and protecting the economy – becomes even more intense through the autumn.

Many scientists advising the government want to see tighter rules. They campaign for a short "circuit breaker" lockdown to try to drive down infections.

At times the documents suggest the prime minister supports tougher restrictions, at others he appears determined to avoid another strict national lockdown at all costs.

On WhatsApp Johnson's closest aides complain about his decision-making – using an emoji of a broken trolly as he appears to swerve from one policy position to another.

"This government doesn't have the credibility needed to be imposing stuff within only days of deciding not to," writes Case, who is now the new cabinet secretary, to Cummings and Lee Cain, No 10 director of communications, on 14 October.

"We look like a terrible, tragic joke. If we were going hard, that decision was needed weeks ago. I cannot cope with this."

In his testimony to the inquiry, Case later says he regrets expressing his "at-the-moment frustrations" with Johnson, whom he "barely knew" at the time.

In his evidence, Johnson defends his own leadership style, saying his views changed with the scientific evidence, and he often adopted certain positions because he wanted to hear the counter arguments.

Second national lockdown

As the nights draw in that autumn, it becomes clear that existing restrictions in England - including a 10pm curfew and the so-called tiered system of local controls - are not going to be enough to control the virus.

By the end of October, the prime minister's frustration is obvious in the long note he scrawls at the end of a Covid briefing document marked OFFICIAL/SENSITIVE.

In tightly-spaced handwriting, Johnson pens 22 detailed points over two A4 pages of the document.

He approves of strengthening some local restrictions but bemoans the "terrible cost" and wonders "for HOW LONG?"

"Is NHS T&T [test and trace] actually achieving ANYTHING?" he asks at one point.

A week later, on 5 November 2020, England does enter its second national lockdown, this time lasting four weeks, although most schools remain open.

By this point many decisions are being taken independently by the four nations of the UK. Both Wales and Northern Ireland put in place versions of a circuit breaker lockdown, while in Scotland stricter rules are imposed in the central belt.

The plan is still to allow families and friends to meet up at Christmas.

But by mid-December a new, more infectious variant of the virus is spreading and millions living in the south-east of England are told at short notice that Christmas mixing will be cancelled.

In January 2021, a third and final full national lockdown follows across the UK, as the winter wave peaks and the NHS starts rolling out millions of doses of the first Covid vaccines.

Lessons learnt

Five years on from those dramatic 12 months, the inquiry's findings are long-awaited, particularly by the 235,000 families who lost loved ones in the pandemic.

The messages and documents highlighted here are just a snapshot - the report due later will run to around 800 pages.

It will examine some of the key questions in much more detail: the timing of lockdowns, the impact of restrictions on the most vulnerable, and public confidence in the rules amid reports of partying in Downing Street and other alleged rule breaches.

Groups representing thousands of bereaved families want individuals working in government at the time to be held to account for any pandemic failings.

But - above all - they want the state to learn lessons from any mistakes and be better prepared if and when the next unknown virus arrives on our shores.

Some documents in this article have been recreated. All contain the original texts including spelling mistakes and typographical errors.

Additional reporting: Pilar Tomas and Ely Justiniani, BBC Visual Journalism Unit.

Top image credit: Getty/BBC

In July this year a 17-year-old travelled 500 miles from his home in eastern Ukraine to collect a bomb and a phone hidden in a park in the western city of Rivne.

He says he was promised $2,000 (£1,520) to plant the bomb in a van used by Ukraine's military conscription service.

"When I was connecting the wires, I thought it could explode then. I thought I might die," he told the BBC.

Vlad is one of hundreds of children and older teenagers who the Ukrainian government alleges have been recruited online by Russia, and offered payment to carry out sabotage and other attacks against their own country. His name has been changed to protect his anonymity.

He says he was told to set up the phone to live-stream the scene to his handler so they could remotely detonate the device when somebody entered the vehicle.

However, Ukraine's SBU security service had been watching and foiled the attack. Vlad - now 18 - is awaiting trial on terrorism charges that potentially carry a 12-year prison sentence.

Sitting in Rivne's heavily guarded detention centre with his lawyer beside him, he acknowledges that he could have helped kill somebody.

"I did think about it. But nobody likes conscription officers," he says. "I thought: Well, I'll be like everyone else."

The SBU says that over the last two years more than 800 Ukrainians have been identified as having been recruited by Russia - 240 of them minors, some as young as 11.

However, cyber security expert Anastasiia Apetyk, who teaches courses about internet safety in Ukraine, is aware of even younger cases. "They tried to recruit children aged nine or 10," she says.

Andriy Nebytov, Deputy Head of Ukraine's National Police, says there is a deliberate strategy to seek out the vulnerable who can be manipulated.

"Children do not always fully realise the consequences of their actions," he says.

"The enemy is not ashamed of using minors for making explosives out of household chemicals, planting them in various locations such as army recruitment offices or police stations."

The SBU says recruitment primarily takes place on the Telegram app, but also on TikTok, and even on video game platforms. Officials says those who are recruited are almost always motivated by money rather than pro-Russian sympathies.

Vlad says he does not support Russia and had no previous involvement with crime.

He had joined two Telegram channels and posted that he was looking for remote work. Within half an hour, a man calling himself Roman replied. When they later talked on the phone, Vlad says Roman spoke Russian with a street accent.

Vlad says he was initially reluctant but was persuaded to take on a series of increasingly dangerous tasks. First, he was told to collect a grenade but when he reached the designated location it wasn't there. He was paid $30 anyway.

A few days later came another job - to set fire to a van belonging to a conscription centre, film it and run.

For that attack, Vlad says he received about $100 in cryptocurrency - much less than the $1,500 he'd been promised. Roman told him he would get the rest if he planted the bomb in Rivne.

Cash for chaos

The Telegram channels the BBC has seen where recruitment takes place are not explicitly pro-Russian, but they amplify anger felt by some Ukrainians towards the conscription service, which has been dogged by allegations of brutality and corruption.

Using a burner phone and an alias we joined several we were tipped off about.

The channels contained clips of fires and explosions which they claimed were carried out on their orders. But the BBC has not been able to verify the circumstances surrounding those videos.

One account we contacted immediately offered payment, either in cryptocurrency or via bank transfer, to carry out arson. We were told to contact a second account for more details and then received a message with a price list detailing how much they offered to pay for different targets.

The payments ranged from $1,500 for setting fire to a post office to $3,000 for a bank. Banks were worth more, they explained, because security glass made them harder to attack.

"You either need to pour petrol inside or throw a few Molotov cocktails inside," the account advised.

But even ordinary Ukrainians looking for employment can find themselves offered money to carry out sabotage.

We found adverts offering high pay for unspecified part time work posted in a variety of unrelated Ukrainian Telegram groups, including some geared at refugees and even beauty tips. When we followed one up, a recruiter again offered thousands of dollars for arson attacks and asked us to send videos as proof.

"I need all the arson I can get," they messaged. "Finding a reliable person is far more difficult than parting with money. That's why I pay exactly what I say and I do it very quickly, usually within a couple of hours after receiving the video."

The BBC reported a number of these channels, accounts, chats and bots to Telegram, which removed a few but not most of them. One of the channels that is still active has grown by over 750 subscribers since we started monitoring it, meanwhile an account that we told Telegram had directly offered us payment for an arson attack is still live.

In a statement, Telegram said: "Calls to violence or destruction of property are explicitly forbidden on Telegram and are immediately removed whenever discovered."

Ukrainian officials have publicly named members of Russia's intelligence agencies they suspect of acting as handlers to saboteurs.

The BBC has not been able to independently verify that the Russian state itself is responsible.

However, several European governments have said that they have evidence of Russian agents recruiting young men to carry out acts of vandalism, arson, or even surveillance in their countries. In the UK, six men were jailed for their part in a Russian-ordered arson attack on a London warehouse providing aid to Ukraine.

In Ukraine, hundreds of alleged saboteurs are awaiting trial, but for some the consequences can be deadly. Several suspects have been killed by explosives they were carrying.

The SBU claims Russian handlers have deliberately detonated devices remotely, knowing their agents would be killed.

In March, a 17-year-old died and a 15-year-old was badly injured when a bomb they were believed to be taking to a rail station in Ivano-Frankivsk exploded.

The BBC put the SBU's allegations to the Russian Embassy in London. In a statement it accused Ukraine of a similar sabotage campaign using Russian citizens.

"The practices that you mention have become a trademark of the Ukrainian special services. In particular: recruitment of civilians, including children, to carry out arson, sabotage or bombings against people, buildings or vehicles."

There have been reports attributing acts of sabotage inside Russia to Ukrainian recruitment on Telegram. But again, it is notoriously difficult to verify who exactly is behind these attacks.

Meanwhile Vlad has a message for others tempted by the recruiters.

"It's not worth it. They will either cheat you, and then you will end up in prison just like me, or you can take a bomb in your hands and it will simply blow you up."

The vote count at the Caerphilly by-election looked like many others. Tables were arranged in the middle of a sports hall, black ballot boxes started to arrive and the counting began.

But camped out at the hall in this ex-coal mining town, known for its cheese, was a throng of journalists and photographers from London – a rare sight for an election to the Welsh Parliament.

Something bigger was afoot: that by-election last month was as much about who was going to lose as it was about who was going to win.

The losers were Labour. They trailed in third place behind Plaid Cymru and Reform UK, winning just 11% of the vote. It marked Labour's first major electoral defeat in Caerphilly for 100 years.

If a similar result is replicated across the whole of Wales at the Senedd election next May - which will switch to a new proportional representation voting system - then the party could face an existential threat.

Labour insiders have already warned that the key elections in May 2026 (which will take place in Scotland and some English councils too) could be a "tipping point" for the prime minister.

It creates yet another headache for the prime minister Sir Keir Starmer who has been dealing not only with speculation about challenges to his leadership, but also questions about the chancellor's tax plans ahead of next week's Budget.

When it comes to the question of Wales specifically, the political commentator Richard Wyn Jones has described the potential for Labour losing power next May as "seismic".

It has been the biggest party in Wales at every UK parliamentary election since 1922, and the largest in the Senedd at every election since 1999. This would be the sort of change that the vast majority of people will not have seen – or possibly expected – in their lifetimes.

And the ramifications for the party and the prime minister are clear. Not only has he had to deal with a crisis-made-in-Downing Street about his own leadership, but there are also potential threats to his future next May.

As one source told me: "Keir Starmer would be the first Labour leader to lose Wales.

"It will not matter after that who blames who for what - history will remember we lost Wales."

'Internecine warfare' within Welsh Labour

In Cardiff Bay, Labour has been in power since the Senedd was established 26 years ago.

As next May's election looms, there are serious questions about its record, not least on the NHS, which accounts for 55% of the Welsh government's £27bn budget.

Cutting waiting times is First Minister Eluned Morgan's number one priority and, over the last year, the trend for overall waiting lists is just about downwards. But lists are still high, despite £50m of additional funding last autumn and £120m in June.

The Welsh government's current target is to eliminate waiting times of more than two years by next March, and for the overall waiting list to be cut by 200,000 between April 2025 and March 2026.

Latest figures show that more than 8,000 patients are still waiting more than two years, compared with just 168 in England. The overall list is still hovering near where it was in April at just under 800,000.

Opposition parties may be hoping that voters have already made up their minds on the Labour record, however.

The Welsh party was in the headlines for the wrong reasons last year, during Vaughan Gething's brief reign as first minister, following a row over donations to his leadership campaign.

He maintained that all current rules were followed and said he regretted the "anxieties" caused by the donations.

It was an ugly period for the Labour group in the Senedd, which split acrimoniously over the matter.

According to Cathy Owens, a political consultant and former Labour special adviser, the "internecine warfare" kick-started the party's drop in the polls in Wales.

Embracing the 'hanging baskets' theory

Welsh Labour has not been immune to the party's decline in popularity across the rest of the country either.

At the start of the year, Labour, the Conservatives and Reform UK were all averaging about 25% across Britain. In May that all changed: for more than five months, Reform's average polling has hovered around 30%, while the two other parties have now fallen below 20%.

Cathy Owens believes the party needs to embrace the "hanging baskets" theory of politics - the idea that voter attitudes can be boosted by highly visible changes (hence flower-filled baskets).

"Voters want to see the good stuff immediately, and they're not," she says. "All people see are negative headlines and there is no exclusivity for Wales about this. Welsh voters are reading and responding in the same way as [others]."

Then there is the question of whether Labour governments in Westminster and the Senedd are working well for Wales.

There have been benefits, such as £1.7bn of extra funding announced by Rachel Reeves in last year's Budget, along with funding for coal tip safety and investment in Wales's railways. But the UK party has not delivered on a long list of Welsh Labour demands.

For example, Welsh Labour wants the Barnett formula reformed (the system that awards Treasury cash to devolved nations), plus they want devolution of the Crown Estate so that profits from Crown-held lands inside Wales go to the Welsh government, as well as a loosening of restrictions on the Welsh government's ability to borrow.

One Welsh Labour source argues that Eluned Morgan needs to be firmer on these demands. "We all hate it when the first minister says she is going to pester Keir Starmer and ask him for something.

"It's as if she is asking a friend to lend her a tenner to buy a round [in the pub]."

But others have more sympathy given the context.

"If anyone thought that a UK Labour government could make up for 14 years of austerity on things like transport in such a short space of time," says Ms Owens, "then that was not going to happen."

'Cheesed off' voters turn to Plaid

As Labour struggles, two alternatives have emerged. Plaid Cymru has been trying to portray itself more as a government-in-waiting - and achieved success in the Caerphilly by-election.

They promise to build more surgical hubs than Labour to help bring down NHS waiting lists; to pilot a scheme to give extra money to Wales's poorest parents; to invest £800m to expand Wales's childcare options; and to introduce favourable business rates for small Welsh retailers.

Its ultimate goal remains independence but its current leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, has taken a fresh approach, acknowledging that the idea of Wales going it alone frightens some voters.

At its conference last month, the party promised its plan for independence would not come until the second term of a Plaid-led Welsh government.

One Welsh Labour source has their own take on this. "No one in Wales thinks Wales will actually become independent," the source says.

"People are voting for Plaid Cymru because they're cheesed off with Labour and they now have an alternative."

Reform UK, meanwhile, is a more curious case from a Welsh perspective: it came second under the winner takes it all first-past-the-post vote in the Caerphilly by-election, getting 36% of the vote.

Yet it does not have a Welsh leader, nor a specific set of Welsh policies.

The party has, however, called for the Welsh government to scrap its Nation of Sanctuary programme, which is designed to help asylum seekers and refugees. (The programme has cost £55m since 2019, less than 0.5% of Welsh government spending, with £45m of the funding allocated to Ukrainians.)

The party also says it would scrap the two-child benefit cap, which affects about 21,000 families in Wales, according to government statistics published last year.

As for the Welsh Conservatives, they concede in both public and private that next May will be tough, with the party's economy and rural affairs spokesperson, Samuel Kurtz, telling the BBC in October that the Tories were still "paying a penance" for their time in national government.

Wales's 'presidential-style' operation

In the early hours after the Caerphilly defeat, the former first minister, Lord Carwyn Jones, urged the party not to descend into a "war of words" between Westminster and Cardiff Bay.

The plea is not being completely heeded. Some accuse the national party of complacency.

"Labour people in Wales have been trying to send a message up the M4," argues one senior Labour source. "The UK government needs to move faster and further on its commitments [to Wales] and take on board how big a risk next May is."

One source described the prime minister as a "top-down ivory tower leader" – a common refrain from some Labour politicians who think Sir Keir lacks a proper grasp.

Others argue the local campaign was chaotic and lacked focus – especially on social media – until Westminster figures got involved.

"Welsh Labour has not got the capacity, not got the right people in there," says one Westminster source. "Caerphilly was absolute carnage."

Labour says that next May's campaign will be led by Eluned Morgan. "Anything else will fail," one Member of the Senedd (MS) warned.

Some assembly members have been concerned about too much of a "London" influence creeping into the campaign ahead of next year's election.

The deputy First Minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, told me that the campaign would be "led by Eluned Morgan and Welsh Labour", but added, "We will definitely draw in all the talents in order to help as well."

The Treasury Minister and Swansea West MP Torsten Bell will act as a link between Cardiff and Westminster.

One source said next May would be a "presidential-style" operation.

'Baked-in defeat' vs turning the tide

So can Labour avoid defeat in the Senedd?

Plenty of Labour politicians have said in public that the party can turn things around - although the national party may well find itself distracted by its own leadership speculation.

Last week, allies of the prime minister briefed journalists about an imminent leadership threat from the English Health Secretary Wes Streeting.

Streeting dismissed the claims as "nonsense". Yet the turmoil certainly won't have helped to focus minds in London on the party's problem in Wales.

Many in Welsh Labour are hoping for big investment announcements from their colleagues at Westminster, such as the new nuclear power station on Anglesey announced recently.

The question is, will it be enough?

Alun Davies, who is assembly member for Blaenau Gwent, published a letter he sent to local party members, recalling his experiences recently on the doorstep.

"It can't get any worse," he said voters had told him. "And you lot need a kick."

Another source said that their biggest concern was a "baked-in defeat" and "not enough time to turn it round".

"If we could make really significant inroads in waiting times, and get significant funding in the Budget, it might at least help us build a narrative that two Labour governments working together is better for Wales," the source added.

But the one word slogan that propelled Labour to a landslide win at last year's general election could come back to haunt the party in Wales: change.

Labour's opponents in Wales sense that voters may just be ready for it after more than a century.

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Younger Australian teenagers on Instagram, Facebook and Threads are being told their accounts will be shut down ahead of the country's social media ban for under-16s.

Meta, which owns the three brands, said it had begun notifying users it believes to be between 13 and 15 years old by text, email and in-app messages that their accounts would start being deactivated from 4 December.

The ban in Australia comes into force on 10 December. It affects a number of platforms which also include TikTok, YouTube, X and Reddit.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the "world-leading" ban was aimed at "letting kids be kids". Meta and other firms oppose the measure but said they would comply.

Australia's internet regulator has estimated there are 150,000 Facebook users and 350,000 teens on Instagram in the 13-15 age bracket.

From 4 December, children aged below 16 will not be able to create accounts on Meta's social media platforms.

The company said it was asking young users to update their contact details so they could be notified when they became eligible to open an account.

They can download and save their posts, videos and messages before their accounts are shut down.

Meta said that teens who said they were old enough to use Instagram, Facebook and Threads could challenge the restriction by taking a "video selfie" to be used in facial age scans.

They could also provide a driver's licence or other government issued-ID.

All these verification methods were tested by the UK-based Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS) earlier this year, in a report commissioned by the Australian state.

While the ACCS said that all methods had their merits, it added: "We did not find a single ubiquitous solution that would suit all use cases, nor did we find solutions that were guaranteed to be effective in all deployments."

Social media platforms which fail to take "reasonable steps" to block under-16s face fines of up to A$50m (£25m).

"While we are working hard to remove all users who we understand to be under the age of 16 by 10 December, compliance with the law will be an ongoing and multi-layered process," Antigone Davis, vice-president and global head of safety at Meta, told Reuters Financial.

Meta wants to see a law where under-16s have to get parental approval before they download a social media app.

The firm told Australia's Seven News: "Teens are resourceful, and may attempt to circumvent age assurance measures to access restricted services."

But it said: "We're committed to meeting our compliance obligations and are taking the necessary steps to comply with the law."

Australia's e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said the ban was aimed at proctecting teens "from pressures and risks they can be exposed to while logged in to social media accounts".

In a move seemingly to avoid being included in the ban, gaming platform Roblox this week announced that children under 16 would be unable to chat to adult strangers.

Mandatory age checks will be introduced for accounts using chat features, starting in December for Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, then the rest of the globe from January.

• Roblox blocks children from chatting to adult strangers
• Enforcing Australia's social media ban is possible but contains risks, report says

Which firms does Australia's social media ban apply to?

The e-safety commissioner has published a list of which social media platforms will be impacted by the age ban.

They are:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Kick
• Reddit
• Snapchat
• Threads
• TikTok
• X (formerly Twitter)
• YouTube

Platforms not included are:

• Discord
• GitHub
• Google Classroom
• LEGO Play
• Messenger
• Roblox
• Steam and Steam Chat
• WhatsApp
• YouTube Kids

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Perfectionism has a great reputation. It's one of the most common answers used in a job interview to spin the dreaded "What's your weakness?" into a humblebrag.

For many, it's about striving for excellence or working tirelessly to reach the highest standard.

But what happens when these high (and sometimes unrelenting) expectations of yourself are exactly what's holding you back?

"I know perfectionism is an illusion, but I am always trying to chase it," admits 25-year-old Aswan.

Even in the workplace, she feels the pressure, "I know that I can make a mistake and I won't lose my job, yet I constantly feel like I'm one strike away from being fired".

It's an anxiety shared by many perfectionists, says health psychologist Dr Sula Windgassen. Speaking on the BBC Sounds podcast Complex, she explains: "Poor self-esteem tends to go hand in hand with perfectionism because there is this fear of failing".

That fear often fuels procrastination. Aswan remembers taking her driving theory test: "I got so pent up about passing it first time that when I failed by a couple of points I've never tried to get it back." That was almost four years ago.

Perfectionism can be rooted in personality, but childhood experiences, school environments, and parental expectations can also shape what we grow up believing is "good enough".

Breaking the cycle

While perfectionism isn't a clinical diagnosis, its effects are very real - from anxiety and tiredness to stress-related physical symptoms such as a weakened immune system.

Still, experts say the cycle can be broken. Dr Windgassen suggests beginning what's known in psychology as a behavioural experiment.

It starts by asking yourself what you think will happen if the outcome isn't perfect - writing down your predictions, and then testing them in real time.

Was the outcome as bad as you expected? And what positive things came from this new approach? It might be that you manage to go to sleep at 10pm rather than 1am, leaving you feeling more refreshed.

For 26-year-old Dayna, who describes herself as a "former perfectionist", it's a trait she is relieved to have left behind. She once sacrificed her wellbeing in pursuit of flawless results and it's something she never wants to repeat.

"I kept a journal to gain more self-awareness about my tendencies and read self-help books," says Dayna.

"I had to learn the hard way how to develop coping mechanisms and strategies to not sacrifice everything and that being a perfectionist is not a noble quality as I used to think it might be."

At times, her harsh inner critic took over and eventually the path to perfectionism led to burnout.

Looking back, Dayna remembers feeling chronically anxious and stressed.

"Right now I have become content with just trying my best and accepting that I can't always get the outcome I want but the outcome I get will be more than good enough and I am at peace with that now."

Not all perfectionism is necessarily harmful. One form, known as perfectionistic striving, focuses on setting more ambitious personal goals. When these goals can be adapted in response to changing circumstances, they tend to cause less stress and lead to more positive outcomes. For example, an athlete setting tough goals, but cutting back on training when they're injured.

But it still has its limitations. A research paper published in July 2025 by the British Psychological Society found that aiming for excessively high goals often leads to long working hours, with only marginal gains in performance.

Working through these perfectionistic tendencies can be uncomfortable, says Dr Windgassen - but that discomfort is part of the process.

"That's not a sign that you shouldn't do it - it's a sign that you should," she says.

To Russia, the Yantar is a oceanic research vessel - to others, including the UK, it's a spy ship, and a worry for Britain's defence chiefs.

The vessel has long been suspected of secretly mapping out Britain's undersea cables, where more than 90% of our data, including billions of dollars of financial transactions, are transferred.

But now, a new escalation, with revelations the Yantar's sailors targeted Royal Air Force pilots in patrol planes with lasers.

Shining lasers into a pilot's eyes is provocative, and to use the Defence Secretary John Healey's words, "deeply dangerous". It's illegal in the UK and can lead to a prison sentence.

Healey's direct message to Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin was stark: "We see you. We know what you're doing. And if the Yantar travels south this week, we are ready."

By that, he is implying should the Yantar cross inside Britain's 12-mile maritime boundary there would be a military response.

This isn't the first time the Yantar has popped up near Britain's shores - at the start of the year a Royal Navy submarine made the highly unusual move to surface right in front of the ship as a sort of deterrent measure.

The concern is that this is part of an ongoing operation by the Kremlin to locate and map all the vital undersea cables and pipelines that connect the UK to the rest of the world.

It is also part of a wider pattern of Russian activity, as it tests Nato's reactions, resolve and defences. We've seen similar moves with the recent drone incursions across Europe, and Russian warplanes flying into Nato airspace.

When three Russian fighter jets entered Estonian skies without permission in September, Italy, Finland and Sweden scrambled jets under Nato's mission to bolster its eastern flank.

This is all interesting intel for Russia.

As an island nation, Britain is heavily reliant on its network of undersea cables that carry data. There are also vital oil and gas pipelines connecting Britain to North Sea neighbours such as Norway.

These cables and pipes are largely undefended and apparently of great interest to Russia's research vessels.

Nato has identified deep-sea cables as part of the world's critical infrastructure. But they are also strategic pressure points, it says, warning that adversaries could exploit them through sabotage or hybrid warfare, threatening both civilian and military communications.

Retired Royal Navy Commander Tom Sharpe made clear what the spy ship could be doing: "The most obvious one is they sit above our cables and our critical undersea infrastructure and they nose around in the cables that transfer up to $7tn worth of financial transactions every day between us and America alone".

The Yantar may be described by Moscow as a research vessel, but it is part of Russia's secretive Main Directorate for Deep Sea Research, or GUGI, which reports directly to the defence ministry.

And while the ship bristles with hi-tech communications equipment, it's what we can't see that is of most concern.

It can operate remotely-piloted miniature submarines that can dive down to sea beds many thousands of metres below the surface. These are capable of mapping the locations of cables, cutting them or planting sabotage devices that could, potentially, be activated in a time of war.

The Royal Navy is experimenting with various means of combating the threat, such as a new vessel called Proteus, but critics fear much of the damage to Britain's coastal security may already have been done.

Any foreign vessel operating in British waters must comply with UK national laws and international maritime conventions.

The cornerstone of these complex rules is the UN Convention on the Law of The Sea (UNCLOS). This allows foreign ships to navigate through coastal waters provided that their passage is "innocent" - meaning it doesn't threaten the peace or security of a coastal nation like Britain.

President Putin was at an AI conference in Moscow on Wednesday, and gave no immediate reaction on the situation unfolding north of Scotland.

Russia's Embassy in London says it's not undermining UK security and it has condemned UK Defence Secretary Healey's statement as provocative.

But all this is happening while war rages in Ukraine, a conflict Putin blames on the West and which seemingly he has no intention of stopping soon.

Additional reporting by Tiffany Wertheimer and Stuart Hughes

Wintry weather is set to continue across the UK on Thursday - with temperatures forecast to fall below zero overnight, and snow and ice affecting some areas.

Met Office yellow warnings are in place for Northern Ireland, northern and central Scotland, and coastal areas in south-west Wales, and south-west, east and north-east England.

A more severe amber warning is due to come into force later in the North York Moors, where as much as 15-25cm (6-10ins) of snow could fall on higher ground.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has also issued cold-health alerts for England until Saturday, saying there could be "significant" impacts to the elderly and people with health conditions.

Areas from London to Shetland saw snow on Wednesday.

There were dozens of school closures in north-east Scotland and the Highlands and road closures on the Woodhead Pass between Hollingworth and Flouch in Derbyshire and the B4391 between Rhyd y Sarn and Pen y Bryn in north-west Wales.

Temperatures on Wednesday night could fall to as low as -5C (23F) in Scotland and northern England, and -3C (26.6F) in other parts of England and east Wales.

With a frost expected, areas where showers or rain and sleet have left the ground damp are at risk of ice becoming a hazard on roads and pavements. Forecasters warn that buses and trains may be cancelled or delayed.

But the conditions are unlikely to resemble the snowy and icy spell this time last year which closed hundreds of schools and saw 12cm of snow in Nottingham.

Over recent decades the Met Office have observed a decrease in the frequency, duration, and intensity of cold spells, clearly linked to climate change. According to the latest State of the Climate Report, external, air and ground frosts have reduced by around a quarter since the 1980s.

Yellow warnings

• There are yellow warnings for snow and ice on Thursday in:

• Cornwall and parts of Devon, and Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Swansea until 23:59 GMT

• North East England, SW Scotland and Lothian Borders, Yorks & Humber until 23:59 GMT

• Central and northern Scotland until 21:00 GMT

• Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire until 11:00 GMT

• Northern Ireland until 12:00 GMT

'Thundersnow' forecast

Thursday's amber warning for North Yorkshire is in place from 03:00 to 2100 GMT. Forecasters say snow is expected throughout the day, mostly on hills above 100m elevation and could lead to "substantial disruption".

They say it is possible some areas, including the North York Moors and the Highlands of Scotland, could see what is known as thundersnow.

It is is a phenomenon which happens when thunderstorms form in wintry weather and give rise to heavy falls of snow rather than rain.

Meanwhile, in Wales, the snow warning is linked to what forecasters dub the "Pembrokeshire Dangler". This is a line of showers that develop over the warmer waters of the Irish Sea and are pushed southwards over the county of Pembrokeshire in south-west Wales.

Daytime temperatures in most areas of the UK on Thursday will reach between 4C and 6C.

Temperatures are expected to become milder by the weekend, rising to average levels by Saturday.

Amber cold-health alerts have been issued in England by the UKHSA until 08:00 GMT on Saturday for the North West, North East, and Yorkshire and Humber, with all other areas under less-severe yellow alerts.

The alerts are mainly for health and social care services, warning of "significant" impacts to more vulnerable members of the community.

Extra demands may be put on services to deal with colder weather.

Albania's prime minister accused Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood of "ethnic stereotyping" after she singled out Albanian families in a speech about abuses of the asylum system.

Edi Rama criticised Mahmood for telling MPs around 700 Albanian families were "living in taxpayer-funded accommodation having failed their asylum claims" as she announced major reforms on Monday.

Rama called the number a "statistical drop in the ocean of post-Brexit Britain's challenges".

Official data show the UK has deported more than 13,000 people to Albania since a returns deal was signed in 2022. Rama called the deal one of "Europe's most successful partnerships on illegal migration."

Mahmood's comments came as she announced major changes to the UK's "out of control and unfair" asylum system.

Speaking in the House of Commons, Mahmood said: "If we fail to deal with this crisis, we will draw more people down a path that starts with anger and ends in hatred."

The reforms will make refugee status temporary, extend the wait for permanent settlement from five years to 20, and allow the removal of families with children who have no right to remain.

Alongside tightening access to refugee status, the UK would create new legal routes to the UK, with an annual cap on numbers.

As part of her speech, Mahmood told MPs "we must remove those who have failed asylum claims, regardless of who they are".

"There are, for instance, around 700 Albanian families living in taxpayer-funded accommodation having failed their asylum claims - despite an existing returns agreement, and Albania being a signatory to the European convention on human rights," she added.

Posting on social media, Rama said: "How can a Labour Home Secretary so poorly echo the rhetoric of the populist far-right – and single out 700 Albanian families, a statistical drop in the ocean of post-Brexit Britain's challenges – precisely at a moment when the UK and Albania have built one of Europe's most successful partnerships on illegal migration?"

"Let us also be clear: Albanians are net contributors to the British economy, and the number of Albanians receiving UK benefits is very low relative to other communities.

"To single them out again and again is not policy - it is a troubling and indecent exercise in demagoguery.

"Official policy should never be driven by ethnic stereotyping. That is the very least humanity expects from the great Great Britain."

Rama has repeatedly clashed with British politicians over their descriptions of Albanian nationals.

In May, Sir Keir Starmer travelled to the Albanian capital Tirana only to be told by Rama he would not host UK "return hubs" for failed asylum seekers from other countries.

During the same press conference, Rama accused the previous Conservative government of "stigmatising" Albanians and warning that "cursing the Albanians was not a good idea, because the curse went back and they are now out of the parliament".

A combative figure on social media, Rama has also previously invited Reform UK leader Nigel Farage to come to Albania to debate his claim one in 50 Albanians in Britain were in prison.

Rama dismissed the figure as "bonkers" and accused Farage of peddling "post-truth Brexit playbook" politics.

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Chip giant Nvidia beat Wall Street's expectations for revenue and upcoming sales, easing investor concerns about heavy artificial intelligence (AI) spending that have unsettled markets.

In its quarterly earnings report on Wednesday, the firm said revenue for the three months to October jumped 62% to $57bn, driven by demand for its chips used in AI data centres. Sales from that division rose 66% to more than $51bn.

Fourth-quarter sales forecasts in the range of $65bn also topped estimates, sending shares in Nvidia more than 3% higher in after-hours trading.

Nvidia, the world's most valuable company, is seen as a bellwether for the AI boom. The chip-maker's results could inform market sentiment.

Chief executive Jensen Huang said in a statement that sales of its AI Blackwell systems were "off the charts" and that "cloud GPUs [graphics processing units] are sold out".

The chip-maker's quarterly report garnered even more attention than usual on Wall Street amid mounting concern that AI stocks are overvalued.

Those fears had fueled four consecutive daily drops in the S&P 500 index leading up to Wednesday, as questions swirl about returns on AI investments.

Senior Pentagon officials have arrived in Ukraine to "discuss efforts to end the war" with Russia, the US military has said.

The team, led by US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, is expected to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Thursday when he returns from a trip to Turkey.

Reports began surfacing on Wednesday that the US and Russia had prepared a new peace plan, containing major concessions from Ukraine. Neither Washington nor Moscow has officially confirmed the plan.

Earlier in the day, at least 25 people were killed in a Russian missile and drone attack on Ukraine's western city of Ternopil, officials there said. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In Kyiv, Driscoll is joined by the US Army's chief of staff Gen Randy George, top US army commander in Europe Gen Chris Donahue, and Srg Maj of the Army Michael Weimer.

"Secretary Driscoll and team arrived this morning in Kyiv on behalf of the administration on a factfinding mission to meet Ukrainian officials and discuss efforts to end the war," Army spokesman Col David Butler said in a statement.

Driscoll was pictured meeting Ukrainian Defence Minister Denys Shmyhal on Wednesday.

Driscoll and Gen George are the most senior US military officials to hold talks in the Ukrainian capital since President Donald Trump took office in January.

The Ukrainian authorities have not publicly commented on what issues are being discussed with the Americans.

However, one Ukrainian official told CBS, the BBC's US media partner, that the focus would be on the military situation on the ground - in addition to plans for a possible ceasefire.

The official - who was not named - said: "Presidents Zelensky and Trump have already agreed to stop the conflict along the existing lines of engagement, and there are agreements on granting security guarantees".

It comes as a number of outlets are reporting that the US and Russia have privately drawn up proposals on how to end the war.

Citing people familiar with the matter, Axios, the Financial Times and Reuters reported that the plans call for Kyiv to give up some territories and weapons, as well as to significantly cut Ukraine's Armed Forces.

Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian leader Vladimir Putin's envoy Kirill Dmitriev are believed to have been involved in working on the 28-point peace plan.

The BBC has asked the White House and a representative for Witkoff to comment.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov appeared to downplay the reports.

"In this case, we have no additional innovations to what we call 'the spirit of Anchorage'," he told Russia's state-run media on Wednesday - referring to the August summit between Putin and Trump in the US state of Alaska.

Any agreements reached during the one-day meeting have not been made public.

President Zelensky has repeatedly ruled out any territorial concessions to Russia.

Kyiv and its Western allies, including the US, have been calling for an immediate ceasefire along the vast front line, but Moscow has ruled that out, repeating demands that Ukraine says amount to its de facto capitulation.

Earlier this month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow's pre-conditions for a peace deal - including ceding territory, tough curbs on the size of Ukraine's military and the country's neutrality - had not changed since Putin laid them out two months before the full-scale invasion.

The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has hinted that she is thinking of changing how policing in England and Wales is organised.

She told a conference of police leaders "the structure of our police forces, if is, if we are honest, irrational".

Mahmood said "disparities in performance" meant that policing in England and Wales was a "postcode lottery".

Some police chiefs want the number of forces to be reduced. Currently, there are 43 in England and Wales.

The government is expected to publish a White Paper on the future of policing next month.

The home secretary was talking at a conference of police leaders organised by the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC).

Last week the Home Office announced that the role of Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) would be abolished. Mahmood told delegates on Wednesday the position "had not worked".

She told the conference "I was a reformer at the Ministry of Justice. I will be a reformer at the Home Office too."

Mahmood told the delegates - mostly senior officers and Police and Crime Commissioners: "The structure of our police forces is, if we are honest, irrational.

"We have loaded critical functions like the national police air service and vetting onto local forces, drawing attention away from neighbourhood policing.

"We have 43 forces tackling criminal gangs who cross borders, and the disparities in performance in forces across the country have grown far too wide, giving truth to the old store that policing in this country is a postcode lottery."

She said the government's plans would be laid out in a White Paper due in December, saying she wanted to see "that national policing is world class without distracting local forces from neighbourhood policing".

"The detail will follow," she said. She did not stay behind to answer questions.

Some police chiefs favour a reduction in the number of forces. In July, Gavin Stephens, NPCC chair, said: "A smaller number of police forces, supported by a national policing organisation, would enable us to make decisions far quicker and maximise funding to invest in technology and our workforce."

But some local PCCs have opposed the idea of force mergers. Last week the Policing Minister Sarah Jones said the role would be abolished.

PCCs are elected officials, but elections have often had a limited turnout. The role was created by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2012.

The home secretary said in her speech on Wednesday: "I believe the position of a Police and Crime Commissioner, unfortunately, has not worked.

"Without necessary investment in creating a public profile, too many voters were unaware of the existence of the position, or its occupant."

Police forces are also waiting for the latest funding settlement which is due in early December.

Paul Sanford, Chief Constable of Norfolk Constabulary and Chair of the NPCC Finance Coordination Committee, said: "Policing is in a state of financial distress.

"We are seeing declining financial resilience across all forces."

At least 25 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip, the Hamas-run health ministry has said.

Ten people, including a woman and a young girl, were killed when a ministry of religious endowments building in the eastern Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City was hit, according to rescuers.

The Israeli military said it had struck "Hamas terrorist targets" after it said gunmen had opened fire towards an area where its soldiers were operating in the southern city of Khan Younis, in violation of the five-week-old ceasefire agreement.

There was no immediate comment from Hamas.

The flare-up of violence comes after the UN Security Council passed a resolution that endorsed US President Donald Trump's Gaza peace plan to end two years of devastating war.

Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for Gaza's Hamas-run Civil Defence agency, told the BBC that Israeli air, drone and artillery strikes hit several locations in Gaza City and Khan Younis shortly after sunset on Wednesday.

The attacks marked a sharp escalation after several days of relative calm, he said.

The Civil Defence reported that the strike in Zeitoun caused severe damage to the religious endowments ministry's building and surrounding structures, and posted a video showing its rescue workers appearing to find two people buried under rubble.

Photos published by the Anadolu news agency meanwhile showed the bodies of three young children reportedly recovered from the scene.

In a separate incident in Gaza City, one person was killed and several others were wounded when a drone struck a group of people at Shejaiya junction on Salah al-Din Street, Gaza's main north-south road, according to Mr Bassal.

He said another person was killed when a tank shell struck a house belonging to the Balboul family in Shejaiya's Mushtaha Street, which is also in eastern Gaza City.

In Khan Younis, three people were killed and a number were wounded in a strike on a group inside a sports club run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), he added.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that "several terrorists opened fire toward the area where IDF soldiers are operating in Khan Younis" earlier on Wednesday.

"This action constitutes a violation of the ceasefire agreement. No IDF injuries were reported," it added. "In response, the IDF began striking Hamas terrorist targets across the Gaza Strip."

Israeli public broadcaster Kan cited a security source as saying the targets of the strikes were the commander of the Zeitoun Battalion of Hamas's military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and the commander of its naval force.

On Monday, the UN Security Council passed a resolution that sought to shore up the fragile ceasefire, which took effect on 10 October.

Member states authorised the creation of a transitional governance body called the Board of Peace, which will be chaired by President Trump, and a temporary International Stabilisation Force (ISF), which will be tasked with ensuring "the process of demilitarizing the Gaza Strip".

Trump hailed the resolution as "a moment of true historic proportion".

A Hamas statement reiterated that the group would not give up its weapons without a Palestinian state, arguing its fight against Israel was legitimate "resistance".

Israel's ambassador to the UN stressed the importance of disarmament, saying that his country would "not stop or let up" until Hamas no longer presented "a threat".

The Israeli military launched an offensive in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 69,500 people have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, including 280 during the ceasefire, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry.

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The stories of people facing court proceedings to repossess their homes have been shared with the BBC as mortgage repossessions reach a five-year high.

BBC journalists in the East of England and London attended various county courts as mortgage-holders and renters appeared in front of judges.

They included a couple now £13,000 in arrears on a home they bought, and a woman who faced the repossession of a house she left following a marriage breakdown 15 years earlier.

The BBC also heard landlords were grappling with financial pressures - while the body representing lenders said seeking to repossess a home was "always a last resort".

Mortgage repossessions highest in five years

Data obtained by the BBC's investigations team showed mortgage repossession orders in England and Wales reached 10,853 in 2024-5 - the highest number in five years.

Andrew Goodwin, senior economist at Oxford Economics, said rising unemployment and interest rates had been contributing factors in recent years.

Reporters were sent to courts in Northampton, Peterborough and Norwich in the East, as well as Stratford, Wandsworth and Croydon courts in London to hear cases and the pressures facing mortgage-holders and tenants.

The courts heard matters concerning both mortgage and rental repossessions.

In Croydon, a former management consultant said he and his wife both lost their jobs in 2024, leaving them in mortgage arrears.

The prospect of his son losing his childhood home had hit hard, adding it was "the perfect place for us". They now have until March to pay the arrears.

In Stratford, a tearful woman who had not lived in her property for 15 years after her marriage broke down had the home with £87,000 in mortgage arrears repossessed.

Other stories heard throughout the day included:

• Three homes repossessed in less than an hour at Stratford Magistrates' Court, including one with arrears of £87,672
• A Wandsworth case where a tenant of 30 years faced losing his rental property because the landlord needed to put the rent up
• A 75-year-old man in Peterborough, living in social housing, ended up in nearly £3,000 worth of arrears, telling the court he had been a victim of a scam
• A single mother at Norwich County Court who owed her landlady £5,200 in unpaid rent

Case workers 'overrun'

It was not just those facing the loss of their homes sharing their challenges.

Case workers and solicitors across the courts revealed they were being "overrun" with requests for help.

"When I began my career, up until a few years ago, I would think to myself 'that person won't actually end up homeless'," said Angus King, a housing solicitor from Southwark Law Centre.

"I knew we would find some way to keep them from it, but now that simply isn't the case."

Billy Harding, a Southwark Law Centre housing case worker assisting at Wandsworth County Court on Wednesday, said people were turning up "at crisis point".

Renter loses home as judge rejects 'last chance': BBC reports from repossession courts in England

The BBC found that across England the number of people asking their council for help to prevent becoming homeless was increasing.

Figures from 244 councils that responded to Freedom of Information requests showed three-quarters of them reported a rise.

For 2024/25, Broxbourne in Hertfordshire had the highest rate, where 95 out of 100,000 people were seeking help.

Similarly bailiff repossessions were rising again after a dip during the Covid-19 pandemic.

'I have never done this before,' says landlord

One landlord attending Norwich County Court also told of how anxious she was about coming to court to try to collect £2,200 in unpaid rent.

She told the judge the tenant, a carpenter, had offered to repair the windows of the property in lieu of rent.

"That was OK, but he never got back to me about that," she said.

Speaking on behalf of landlords in a separate court, one solicitor said the landlords also had bills to pay or financial issues themselves and couldn't be expected to subsidise their tenants.

Karina Hutchins, of UK Finance - which represents the banking industry - said seeking to repossess a home is "always a last resort" for lenders.

With additional reporting by Charlotte Rose, Gabriela Pomeroy, Stephen Menon, Jon Ironmonger, Phil Shepka, Matt Precey and Jessica Ure

If you have been affected by this story or would like support then you can find organisations which offer help and information at the BBC Action Line.

Younger Australian teenagers on Instagram, Facebook and Threads are being told their accounts will be shut down ahead of the country's social media ban for under-16s.

Meta, which owns the three brands, said it had begun notifying users it believes to be between 13 and 15 years old by text, email and in-app messages that their accounts would start being deactivated from 4 December.

The ban in Australia comes into force on 10 December. It affects a number of platforms which also include TikTok, YouTube, X and Reddit.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the "world-leading" ban was aimed at "letting kids be kids". Meta and other firms oppose the measure but said they would comply.

Australia's internet regulator has estimated there are 150,000 Facebook users and 350,000 teens on Instagram in the 13-15 age bracket.

From 4 December, children aged below 16 will not be able to create accounts on Meta's social media platforms.

The company said it was asking young users to update their contact details so they could be notified when they became eligible to open an account.

They can download and save their posts, videos and messages before their accounts are shut down.

Meta said that teens who said they were old enough to use Instagram, Facebook and Threads could challenge the restriction by taking a "video selfie" to be used in facial age scans.

They could also provide a driver's licence or other government issued-ID.

All these verification methods were tested by the UK-based Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS) earlier this year, in a report commissioned by the Australian state.

While the ACCS said that all methods had their merits, it added: "We did not find a single ubiquitous solution that would suit all use cases, nor did we find solutions that were guaranteed to be effective in all deployments."

Social media platforms which fail to take "reasonable steps" to block under-16s face fines of up to A$50m (£25m).

"While we are working hard to remove all users who we understand to be under the age of 16 by 10 December, compliance with the law will be an ongoing and multi-layered process," Antigone Davis, vice-president and global head of safety at Meta, told Reuters Financial.

Meta wants to see a law where under-16s have to get parental approval before they download a social media app.

The firm told Australia's Seven News: "Teens are resourceful, and may attempt to circumvent age assurance measures to access restricted services."

But it said: "We're committed to meeting our compliance obligations and are taking the necessary steps to comply with the law."

Australia's e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said the ban was aimed at proctecting teens "from pressures and risks they can be exposed to while logged in to social media accounts".

In a move seemingly to avoid being included in the ban, gaming platform Roblox this week announced that children under 16 would be unable to chat to adult strangers.

Mandatory age checks will be introduced for accounts using chat features, starting in December for Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, then the rest of the globe from January.

• Roblox blocks children from chatting to adult strangers
• Enforcing Australia's social media ban is possible but contains risks, report says

Which firms does Australia's social media ban apply to?

The e-safety commissioner has published a list of which social media platforms will be impacted by the age ban.

They are:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Kick
• Reddit
• Snapchat
• Threads
• TikTok
• X (formerly Twitter)
• YouTube

Platforms not included are:

• Discord
• GitHub
• Google Classroom
• LEGO Play
• Messenger
• Roblox
• Steam and Steam Chat
• WhatsApp
• YouTube Kids

The Labour MP Clive Lewis has offered to give up his seat to allow Andy Burnham to challenge Sir Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership.

There has been ongoing speculation that Greater Manchester Mayor Burnham wants to take on Sir Keir for the top job, but he would need to be an MP to do so.

Lewis told the BBC's Politics Live that he was willing to step down from his Norwich South seat to allow Burnham to return to the Commons and put "country before party, party before personal ambition".

Burnham was contacted for comment. Number 10 declined to comment.

Lewis, who has been an MP for 10 years, said he had spoken to Burnham, and when asked if he would give up his seat for him, he said it was "a question I've asked myself".

He added: "Do you know what? If I'm going to sit here and say country before party, party before personal ambition, then yes, I have to say yes, don't I."

Last week, he said Sir Keir's position as Prime Minister was "untenable" and told Channel 4 News that Burnham should be given the chance to "step up".

Lewis first won his seat in 2015, and last year he increased his majority to more than 13,000.

But if he were to step down, any would-be successor would first need to win a selection contest before a by-election was held.

In September, Burnham said he had "no intention of abandoning Manchester" but did not rule out challenging Sir Keir.

Follow Norfolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.

Google's ultra-private CEO Sundar Pichai is showing me around Googleplex, its California headquarters. A walkway runs along the length of it, passing by a giant dinosaur skeleton, a beach volleyball pitch and dozens of Googlers lunching under the hazy November sun.

But it's a laboratory, hidden away at the back of the campus behind some trees, that he is most excited to show me.

This is where the invention that Google believes is its secret weapon is being developed.

Known as a Tensor Processing Unit (or TPU), it looks like an unassuming little chip but, says Mr Pichai, it will one day power every AI query that goes through Google. This makes it potentially one of the most important objects in the world economy right now.

"AI is the most profound technology humanity [has ever worked] on," he insists. "It has potential for extraordinary benefits - we will have to work through societal disruptions."

But the confusing question lingering over the AI hype is whether it is a bubble at risk of bursting - as, if so, it may well be a spectacular burst akin to the dotcom crash at the start of the century, with consequences for us all.

The Bank of England has already warned of a "sudden correction" in global financial markets, saying "market valuations appear stretched" for tech AI firms. Meanwhile. OpenAI boss Sam Altman has speculated that "there are many parts of AI that I think are kind of bubbly right now".

Asked whether Google would be immune from a potential bubble burst, Mr Pichai said it could weather that potential storm - but for all his starry-eyed excitement around the possibilities of AI, he also issued a warning: "I think no company is going to be immune, including us."

So why, then, is Google investing more than $90bn a year in the AI build-out, a three-fold increase in just four years, at the very moment these suggestions are being discussed?

The big AI surge - and the big risk

The AI surge - of which Google is just one part - is, in cash terms, the biggest market boom the world has seen.

Its numbers are extraordinary - there is $15 trillion of market value at Google and four other tech giants whose headquarters are all within a short drive of one another.

Chipmaker turned AI systems pioneer Nvidia in Santa Clara is now worth more than $5 trillion. A 10-minute drive south, in Cupertino, is Apple HQ, hovering around $4 trillion; while 15 minutes west is $1.9 trillion Meta (previously Facebook). And in the centre of San Francisco, OpenAI was recently valued at $500bn.

The purely financial consequences of this trend are significant enough.

The value of the shares in these companies (and a few others outside Silicon Valley, such as Microsoft in Seattle) have helped cushion the US economy from the impact of trade wars, and kept retirement plans and investments buoyant - and not just in the US.

Yet it comes with a big risk. That is, the incredible dependence of US stock market growth on the performance of a handful of tech giants. The Magnificent 7 - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla - collectively comprise one third of the valuation of America's entire S&P 500.

And that market value is now more highly concentrated in a few firms than it was during the dotcom bubble in 1999, according to the IMF.

Mr Pichai points out that every decade or so come these "inflection points": the personal computer, then the internet in the late 1990s, followed by mobile and cloud. "Now it's clearly the era of Artificial Intelligence."

But as for the big question - is it a bubble?

Mr Pichai argues there are two ways of thinking about it. First, there is "palpably exciting" progress of services that people and companies are using.

But he concedes: "It's also true when we go through these investment cycles, there are moments we overshoot collectively as an industry…

"So I think it's both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this."

Now, a distinction is emerging in the markets between those businesses that rely on often borrowed money and complicated deals to access the chips that power their AI, and the biggest tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which can fund investment in chips and data from their own pockets.

Which brings us to Google's own silicon chips, or their prized TPUs.

'Restricted': inside the silicon chip lab

The lab, where they are tested, is the size of a five-a-side football pitch with a mesh of multi-coloured wires and deep blue blinking lights. Signs all around read: "restricted".

What's striking is the sheer noise - this is down to the cooling systems, which are needed to help control the temperature of the chips, which can get incredibly hot when crunching trillions of calculations.

The TPUs are designed to help power AI machines. And they work differently from other types of chips.

The CPU (central processing unit) is the primary component of a computer - essentially its brain - that performs most of the processing and control functions, while GPUs (graphics processing units) perform more specialised processing, executing many parallel tasks at once - this can include AI.

However Asics (application-specific integrated circuits), are chips custom-built for a specific purpose, for example, a specific AI algorithm. And the TPU is a specialist Google-designed type of Asic.

A core aspect of the AI boom has been the mad dash to amass lots of top-performing chips and put them into data centres (or the physical facilities that store, process and run large amounts of data and software).

Nvidia's boss Jensen Huang once coined the term "AI factories" to describe the massive data centres full of pods and racks of super chips, connected to huge energy and cooling systems.

(Tech bosses such as Mark Zuckerberg have referred to some being the size of Manhattan. The Google TPU lab is somewhat more modest, testing out the technology for deployment elsewhere.)

Stories abound of tech bros begging chip makers for hundreds of thousands of these highly engineered pieces of silicon. Take the recent dinner at Nobu in Palo Alto, where Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, the founder and head of Oracle, tried to woo Nvidia's Jensen Huang, to sell them more of them.

As Mr Ellison put it: "I would describe the dinner as me and Elon begging Jensen for GPUs. Please take our money - no, no take more. You're not taking enough. We need you to take more, please!"

It is precisely the race to access the power of as many as possible of these high performance chips, and to scale them up into massive data centres, that is driving an AI boom - and there's a perception that the only way to win is to keep spending.

The chips race - and the OpenAI storm

The terrace of the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel, a sprawling 16-acre estate near the Santa Cruz mountains that serves crab rolls and $35 signature vodka martinis, is where the big Silicon Valley deal-making gets done. It's close to Stanford University and Meta's HQ, as well as the headquarters of major venture capital firms.

There are whispered rumours about who will be next to announce customised AI chips - Asics - to compete with Google and Nvidia.

Just before I visited, something of a storm was brewing about the investment plans of OpenAI, which Elon Musk co-founded.

The firm, which started as a not-for-profit but has since established a commercial structure, has been the focus of a web of cross-investments involving buying up chips and other computer hardware needed for AI processing.

Few in the industry doubt OpenAI's phenomenal user growth - in particular the popularity of its chatbot, ChatGPT. It has ambitions to design its own custom AI chips, but some have speculated about whether it might need government support to achieve this.

In a podcast episode that aired last month, an OpenAI investor questioned how the company's spending commitments tallied with its revenues, to which co-founder Sam Altman shot back, challenging the revenue figures quoted, and adding: "If you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer. Enough."

He has since shared a lengthy post on X, explaining, among other things, that OpenAI is looking at commitments of about $1.4 trillion over the next eight years and why he believes now is the time to invest in scaling up their technology.

"I do not think the government should be writing insurance policies for AI companies," he said.

But he also said: "What we do think might make sense is governments building (and owning) their own AI infrastructure."

Elsewhere, there have been notable very recent falls in share prices of AI infrastructure companies - Coreweave, a start-up that supplies OpenAI, saw its shares lose 26% of their value earlier this month.

Plus, there have been some reactions in markets for perceived credit risk among other firms. And while most of these tech share prices have generally climbed higher over the course of 2025, there has been a mild dip more generally in the past few days.

ChatGPT versus Gemini 3.0

None of this has dampened the excitement over AI's potential within the industry. Google's consumer AI model, Gemini 3.0, launched to great fanfare earlier this week — this will pitch Google in a direct battle with OpenAI and its still-dominant ChatGPT for the market share.

What we don't yet know is whether it marks an end to the days of chatbots going rogue and recommending glue as a pizza ingredient. So, is the end result of all this fantastic investment is that information is less reliable, I asked Mr Pichai.

"I think if you only construct systems standalone and you only rely on that, [that] would be true," he told me. "Which is why I think we have to make the information ecosystem has to be much richer than just having AI technology being the sole product in it."

But I put it to him that truth matters. His response: "truth matters".

Nor is the other big question facing tech today dampening the enthusiasm around advancing AI's potential. That is: how on Earth to power it?

By 2030, data centres around the world will use about as much electricity as India did in 2023, according to the IMF. Yet this is also an age where energy supply is under pressure by governments committing to climate change targets.

I put this to Google's Mr Pichai, asking if it is coherent to have ambitions to generate 95% of electricity from low-carbon sources by 2030 - as the UK government does - and also be an AI superpower?

"I think it's possible. But I think for every government, including the UK, it's important to figure out how to scale up infrastructure, including energy infrastructure.

"You don't want to constrain an economy based on energy," he adds. "I think that will have consequences."

Lessons from the 2000 dotcom bust

Years ago, as a fledgling reporter I cut my teeth in the 2000 dotcom bubble. It followed a famous speech by Federal Reserve Governor Alan Greenspan about "irrational exuberance".

In that time I interviewed Steve Jobs twice, and a few years later questioned Mr Pichai's predecessor Larry Page, and commentated live on the collapse of WorldOfFruit.com.

Through it all, one lesson became clear: that even in the worst-case scenarios and the toughest of crashes, catastrophe isn't guaranteed for all.

Take Amazon - its share price slumped to $6 and its market capitalisation fell to $4bn during that crash, yet some 25 years on Jeff Bezos and his company are very much going strong. Today Amazon is worth $2.4 trillion.

The same would, inevitably, be true of companies shaken by a potential AI bubble burst.

Plus there is another looming factor that may well explain why so many in Silicon Valley - and beyond - are blind to, or perhaps choosing not to, acknowledge this risk, and pushing on regardless.

That is, the attraction of the glittering prize at the end: achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI).

This is the point at which machines match human intelligence, something many believe is within reach. Or beyond that, reaching artificial super-intelligence (ASI), the point at which machines surpass our intelligence.

But I was also told something else that was thought-provoking by a Silicon Valley figure - that it doesn't matter whether there really is a bubble or if it bursts. Step back and what is going on in the bigger picture is a global battle for AI supremacy, with the US against China taking centre stage.

And while Beijing funds these developments centrally, in the US it is a messy but productive free market free for all, which means trial and error on an epic scale.

For now, the US has superiority in silicon over China - companies like Nvidia with their GPUs and Google with their TPUs can afford to accelerate into the storm.

Others will surely fail, and spectacularly so, affecting markets, consumer sentiment and the world economy. The physical footprint left behind, however, containing sheer computing firepower for the deployment of mass AI technologies, will inevitably shape our economy and could well also shape how we work and learn - and who dominates the world for the rest of the 21st Century.

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The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has hinted that she is thinking of changing how policing in England and Wales is organised.

She told a conference of police leaders "the structure of our police forces, if is, if we are honest, irrational".

Mahmood said "disparities in performance" meant that policing in England and Wales was a "postcode lottery".

Some police chiefs want the number of forces to be reduced. Currently, there are 43 in England and Wales.

The government is expected to publish a White Paper on the future of policing next month.

The home secretary was talking at a conference of police leaders organised by the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC).

Last week the Home Office announced that the role of Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) would be abolished. Mahmood told delegates on Wednesday the position "had not worked".

She told the conference "I was a reformer at the Ministry of Justice. I will be a reformer at the Home Office too."

Mahmood told the delegates - mostly senior officers and Police and Crime Commissioners: "The structure of our police forces is, if we are honest, irrational.

"We have loaded critical functions like the national police air service and vetting onto local forces, drawing attention away from neighbourhood policing.

"We have 43 forces tackling criminal gangs who cross borders, and the disparities in performance in forces across the country have grown far too wide, giving truth to the old store that policing in this country is a postcode lottery."

She said the government's plans would be laid out in a White Paper due in December, saying she wanted to see "that national policing is world class without distracting local forces from neighbourhood policing".

"The detail will follow," she said. She did not stay behind to answer questions.

Some police chiefs favour a reduction in the number of forces. In July, Gavin Stephens, NPCC chair, said: "A smaller number of police forces, supported by a national policing organisation, would enable us to make decisions far quicker and maximise funding to invest in technology and our workforce."

But some local PCCs have opposed the idea of force mergers. Last week the Policing Minister Sarah Jones said the role would be abolished.

PCCs are elected officials, but elections have often had a limited turnout. The role was created by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2012.

The home secretary said in her speech on Wednesday: "I believe the position of a Police and Crime Commissioner, unfortunately, has not worked.

"Without necessary investment in creating a public profile, too many voters were unaware of the existence of the position, or its occupant."

Police forces are also waiting for the latest funding settlement which is due in early December.

Paul Sanford, Chief Constable of Norfolk Constabulary and Chair of the NPCC Finance Coordination Committee, said: "Policing is in a state of financial distress.

"We are seeing declining financial resilience across all forces."

A prominent French anti-drugs campaigner whose brother was killed by drugs criminals last week, five years after the murder of his elder brother, has vowed to stand up to intimidation and "keep telling the truth about drugs violence".

Amine Kessaci, 22, was writing in Le Monde newspaper a day after the funeral of his younger brother Mehdi, whose murder last week has been described by the government as a turning-point in France's drugs wars.

"Yesterday I lost my brother. Today I speak out," he wrote in his opinion piece.

"[The drugs-traffickers] strike at us in order to break, to tame, to subdue. They want to wipe out any resistance, to break any free spirit, to kill in the egg any embryo of revolt."

Mehdi Kessaci, 20, was shot dead last Wednesday as he parked his car in central Marseille in what appears to have been a warning or punishment aimed at his older brother, Amine, from the city's drugs gangs.

Speaking after a ministerial meeting on drugs crime at the Elysée palace on Tuesday, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said: "We all agreed that this premeditated murder was something totally new. It's clearly a crime of intimidation. It's a new level of violence."

Mehdi was the second Kessaci brother to be killed by drugs criminals. In 2020 the body of Brahim Kessaci, then 22, was found in a burnt-out car.

That murder prompted Amine to launch his association, Conscience, which aims to expose the damage to working-class communities caused by gangs.

Marseille is renowned for worsening drugs wars, and Amine Kessaci recently wrote a book called Marseille Wipe your Tears – Life and Death in a Land of Drugs.

In his Le Monde article, Amine revealed he was recently warned by police to leave Marseille because of threats to his life.

He attended his younger brother's funeral wearing a bullet-proof jacket and under heavy police protection.

"I speak because I have no choice but to fight if I don't want to die. I speak because I know that silence is the refuge of our enemies," he wrote, urging courage from citizens, and action from the government.

Mehdi Kessaci's murder has brought the national spotlight back on a drugs trafficking problem that French experts and ministers agree is reaching almost unmanageable proportions.

According to Senate member Étienne Blanc, author of a recent study, turnover in the drugs trade in France is now €7bn (£6bn) – or 70% of the entire budget of the justice ministry.

He said around 250,000 people drew a living from the trade in France – more than the entire number of police and gendarmes, which is 230,000. According to Le Monde, the country counts 1.1 million users of cocaine.

President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday launched a broadside against such consumers, telling the weekly cabinet meeting that "sometimes it is the city-centre bourgeoisie that is funding the traffickers".

Macron had called a special drugs summit the day before in response to Amine's murder and in order to review progress on a new anti-drugs law that was passed in June.

It sets up a special prosecutor's office dedicated to organised crime - similar to the office that tackles terrorism - which will eventually have 30 specialised magistrates.

Under the law, senior drugs convicts are made to serve their terms in isolation in a specially converted prison where it is hoped it will be harder to continue running operations from behind bars.

According to Laurent Nuñez, there is evidence that the crackdown on drugs crime is having an effect - with the number of homicides in Marseille down from 49 in 2023 to 24 in 2024.

The number of dealing points in the city had halved from 160 to 80, he added.

"The war is not won, but we do have results."

According to the author of a recent book, Narcotraffic, Europe's poison, "France is at the heart of the geopolitics of drugs. With its two major ports of Marseille and Le Havre, it has an ideal geographical position in this Europe of free movement."

Mathieu Verboud said that the growth in world production of cocaine had triggered an "explosion of supply and demand. The market has gone through the roof and so have the profits."

The sheer wealth of drugs organisations meant they had the power to corrupt everyone from dock-workers to local politicians, the author warned, a process he said was already well-advanced in countries like the Netherlands and Belgium.

Several French politicians have said it is time to call in the army to deal with drugs-trafficking and the gangs which hold sway in many high-immigration city estates.

Christian Estrosi, mayor of the southern coastal city of Nice, said: "Narcotrafficking has transformed into narcoterrorism. Its aim now is to terrorise, subjugate and rule.

"We have already successfully deployed the means to fight terrorism. It's time to act with determination against narcoterrorism."

Estrosi was referring to wave of deadly jihadist attacks in the mid 2010s, when France deployed hundreds of soldiers on to the streets of many cities where they continue to patrol.

The owner of a cocktail and karaoke bar where solo drinkers are banned says he is baffled by the furore it has caused on social media as the policy is "for the safety of all guests".

Carl Peters said the no-single-entry policy after 21:00 had been in place since the opening of Alibi in Altrincham, Greater Manchester, in 2022.

He told the BBC it was to "mitigate risk" and "protect his customers" from being "mithered" by solo drinkers.

He posted a reel on Instagram earlier this month about the policy after saying someone had accused him of discrimination. He said he was "astounded" by the ensuing criticism, describing his venue as an "inclusive and safe environment".

The ban got a mixed response from Instagram users with one commenter saying she "always feels safe in Alibi", while another described the policy as "narrow minded", adding if he finishes work late and goes for a drink himself "he has never once mithered anyone and... happy in my own company".

Mr Peters explained there were two reasons why he introduced the policy.

Firstly, if someone on their own has a seizure or an accident with no-one with them "in a late night busy bar environment, it's an absolute nightmare for us to deal with".

He said also "sometimes if you let people in on their own, the reason why they're on their own is that they've got no-one to talk to, so they start mithering other groups".

"So what we do as a venue is we just eliminate that."

He added: "Unless you're with a group and we know who you're with, then you're not coming in."

Mr Peters added he took "pride that his customers feel safe in his venue" so was "astounded" it was now being criticised on social media.

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US President Donald Trump has urged Republicans in Congress to vote to release more files relating to Jeffrey Epstein - a sudden reversal in his position after having previously opposed efforts to make the documents public.

Trump had been facing a potential revolt after a growing number of Republicans signalled they would vote in favour of releasing the files despite his opposition.

While the measure is likely to pass in the House of Representatives on Tuesday, it is far from certain that it would pass in the Republican-controlled Senate.

And even if it does pass in the Senate, it remains unclear when the files could be released and whether they would satisfy ardent campaigners.

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives is expected to vote on a measure that would compel the justice department to make publicly available "in a searchable and downloadable format" all files pertaining to Epstein within 30 days.

Procedural votes and debates are expected to begin at 10:00EST (15:00GMT) and continue for many hours.

Several victims of Epstein are also expected to spend the day on Capitol Hill, to advocate for the bill's passage and to hold news conferences with reporters.

The releases could, in theory, also include files pertaining to imprisoned Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as people - including government officials - mentioned in the case. It could also include internal justice department documents.

The vote will come just two days after Trump wrote on Truth Social to encourage Republicans to vote for the measure. In the post, he argued that "we have nothing to hide".

The measure is likely to pass. Even before Trump's post, some House Republicans had made clear they were willing to break ranks with the president and House Speaker Mike Johnson to vote in favour.

Should it pass, it still faces an uncertain future in the Senate, which is under no obligation to even pick up the measure.

It remains unclear whether Senate Majority Leader John Thune will do so - but the Republican is under enormous pressure from both sides of the US political spectrum.

He had previously suggested that while he was "not hearing" much desire from fellow Republicans to push for the release of the documents, a successful House vote could change that.

"I just hope John Thune will do the right thing," Kentucky Republican Representative Thomas Massie told ABC News over the weekend.

Another Republican, Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, only told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the Senate will "take a look" at the bill if it passes the House.

"We'll see what it says," Barrasso said. "We all want accountability and transparency. But to me, this it not about the truth. It's not about justice."

"This is about an attempt by the Democrats to make President Trump a lame-duck president," he added. "And I'm not going to aid and abet them in their efforts to do that."

Only after the Senate passes the bill would it head to President Trump, who has said he would sign it into law.

Speking to reporters on Monday night, he said Republicans had "nothing to do with Epstein". "It's really a Democrat problem," he claimed. "The Democrats were Epstein's friends, all of them."

Trump went on to argue the Epstein scandal was a "hoax" distracting from "the greatness of what the Republican Party had accomplished over the last period of time".

There are obstacles to the files being released even if Trump signs the bill.

The text of the document that will go before the House, for example, notes that the attorney general could withhold or redact portions of records that contain personal information that "would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy".

"Simply letting anything out could reveal a lot of private information that's not relevant or appropriate for public consumption," Jonathan Entin, a constitutional law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, told the BBC.

"There may also be some issues about law enforcement techniques that the justice department might not want to be out there in the public domain," he added.

The proposed House bill also notes that the justice department can hold back any documents that "jeapordise an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, provided that such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary".

That could potentially lead to delays, given that President Trump said in his post that he would be calling for an investigation into Epstein's alleged links with prominent Democrats, such as Bill Clinton and Larry Summers "to determine what was going on with them, and him".

"That's a potential hurdle," Prof Entin said. "If, in fact, this is a serious investigation, presumably the prosecutors will not want everything out there while they're sorting out whether they bring charges."

Doing so, he added, "might create some prejudicial publicity about targets of the investigation" that could ultimately lead to intense litigation if any indictments are brought.

For those who have campaigned for the release of the files, anything short of full disclosure is likely to spark further questions and even outrage.

"I believe the country deserves transparency in these files," Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican now in a public row with Trump over the files, told CNN on Sunday.

"I have no idea what's in the files. I can't even guess," Greene added. "But that is the question everyone is asking is - why fight this so hard?"

Google's ultra-private CEO Sundar Pichai is showing me around Googleplex, its California headquarters. A walkway runs along the length of it, passing by a giant dinosaur skeleton, a beach volleyball pitch and dozens of Googlers lunching under the hazy November sun.

But it's a laboratory, hidden away at the back of the campus behind some trees, that he is most excited to show me.

This is where the invention that Google believes is its secret weapon is being developed.

Known as a Tensor Processing Unit (or TPU), it looks like an unassuming little chip but, says Mr Pichai, it will one day power every AI query that goes through Google. This makes it potentially one of the most important objects in the world economy right now.

"AI is the most profound technology humanity [has ever worked] on," he insists. "It has potential for extraordinary benefits - we will have to work through societal disruptions."

But the confusing question lingering over the AI hype is whether it is a bubble at risk of bursting - as, if so, it may well be a spectacular burst akin to the dotcom crash at the start of the century, with consequences for us all.

The Bank of England has already warned of a "sudden correction" in global financial markets, saying "market valuations appear stretched" for tech AI firms. Meanwhile. OpenAI boss Sam Altman has speculated that "there are many parts of AI that I think are kind of bubbly right now".

Asked whether Google would be immune from a potential bubble burst, Mr Pichai said it could weather that potential storm - but for all his starry-eyed excitement around the possibilities of AI, he also issued a warning: "I think no company is going to be immune, including us."

So why, then, is Google investing more than $90bn a year in the AI build-out, a three-fold increase in just four years, at the very moment these suggestions are being discussed?

The big AI surge - and the big risk

The AI surge - of which Google is just one part - is, in cash terms, the biggest market boom the world has seen.

Its numbers are extraordinary - there is $15 trillion of market value at Google and four other tech giants whose headquarters are all within a short drive of one another.

Chipmaker turned AI systems pioneer Nvidia in Santa Clara is now worth more than $5 trillion. A 10-minute drive south, in Cupertino, is Apple HQ, hovering around $4 trillion; while 15 minutes west is $1.9 trillion Meta (previously Facebook). And in the centre of San Francisco, OpenAI was recently valued at $500bn.

The purely financial consequences of this trend are significant enough.

The value of the shares in these companies (and a few others outside Silicon Valley, such as Microsoft in Seattle) have helped cushion the US economy from the impact of trade wars, and kept retirement plans and investments buoyant - and not just in the US.

Yet it comes with a big risk. That is, the incredible dependence of US stock market growth on the performance of a handful of tech giants. The Magnificent 7 - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla - collectively comprise one third of the valuation of America's entire S&P 500.

And that market value is now more highly concentrated in a few firms than it was during the dotcom bubble in 1999, according to the IMF.

Mr Pichai points out that every decade or so come these "inflection points": the personal computer, then the internet in the late 1990s, followed by mobile and cloud. "Now it's clearly the era of Artificial Intelligence."

But as for the big question - is it a bubble?

Mr Pichai argues there are two ways of thinking about it. First, there is "palpably exciting" progress of services that people and companies are using.

But he concedes: "It's also true when we go through these investment cycles, there are moments we overshoot collectively as an industry…

"So I think it's both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this."

Now, a distinction is emerging in the markets between those businesses that rely on often borrowed money and complicated deals to access the chips that power their AI, and the biggest tech companies, such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which can fund investment in chips and data from their own pockets.

Which brings us to Google's own silicon chips, or their prized TPUs.

'Restricted': inside the silicon chip lab

The lab, where they are tested, is the size of a five-a-side football pitch with a mesh of multi-coloured wires and deep blue blinking lights. Signs all around read: "restricted".

What's striking is the sheer noise - this is down to the cooling systems, which are needed to help control the temperature of the chips, which can get incredibly hot when crunching trillions of calculations.

The TPUs are designed to help power AI machines. And they work differently from other types of chips.

The CPU (central processing unit) is the primary component of a computer - essentially its brain - that performs most of the processing and control functions, while GPUs (graphics processing units) perform more specialised processing, executing many parallel tasks at once - this can include AI.

However Asics (application-specific integrated circuits), are chips custom-built for a specific purpose, for example, a specific AI algorithm. And the TPU is a specialist Google-designed type of Asic.

A core aspect of the AI boom has been the mad dash to amass lots of top-performing chips and put them into data centres (or the physical facilities that store, process and run large amounts of data and software).

Nvidia's boss Jensen Huang once coined the term "AI factories" to describe the massive data centres full of pods and racks of super chips, connected to huge energy and cooling systems.

(Tech bosses such as Mark Zuckerberg have referred to some being the size of Manhattan. The Google TPU lab is somewhat more modest, testing out the technology for deployment elsewhere.)

Stories abound of tech bros begging chip makers for hundreds of thousands of these highly engineered pieces of silicon. Take the recent dinner at Nobu in Palo Alto, where Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, the founder and head of Oracle, tried to woo Nvidia's Jensen Huang, to sell them more of them.

As Mr Ellison put it: "I would describe the dinner as me and Elon begging Jensen for GPUs. Please take our money - no, no take more. You're not taking enough. We need you to take more, please!"

It is precisely the race to access the power of as many as possible of these high performance chips, and to scale them up into massive data centres, that is driving an AI boom - and there's a perception that the only way to win is to keep spending.

The chips race - and the OpenAI storm

The terrace of the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel, a sprawling 16-acre estate near the Santa Cruz mountains that serves crab rolls and $35 signature vodka martinis, is where the big Silicon Valley deal-making gets done. It's close to Stanford University and Meta's HQ, as well as the headquarters of major venture capital firms.

There are whispered rumours about who will be next to announce customised AI chips - Asics - to compete with Google and Nvidia.

Just before I visited, something of a storm was brewing about the investment plans of OpenAI, which Elon Musk co-founded.

The firm, which started as a not-for-profit but has since established a commercial structure, has been the focus of a web of cross-investments involving buying up chips and other computer hardware needed for AI processing.

Few in the industry doubt OpenAI's phenomenal user growth - in particular the popularity of its chatbot, ChatGPT. It has ambitions to design its own custom AI chips, but some have speculated about whether it might need government support to achieve this.

In a podcast episode that aired last month, an OpenAI investor questioned how the company's spending commitments tallied with its revenues, to which co-founder Sam Altman shot back, challenging the revenue figures quoted, and adding: "If you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer. Enough."

He has since shared a lengthy post on X, explaining, among other things, that OpenAI is looking at commitments of about $1.4 trillion over the next eight years and why he believes now is the time to invest in scaling up their technology.

"I do not think the government should be writing insurance policies for AI companies," he said.

But he also said: "What we do think might make sense is governments building (and owning) their own AI infrastructure."

Elsewhere, there have been notable very recent falls in share prices of AI infrastructure companies - Coreweave, a start-up that supplies OpenAI, saw its shares lose 26% of their value earlier this month.

Plus, there have been some reactions in markets for perceived credit risk among other firms. And while most of these tech share prices have generally climbed higher over the course of 2025, there has been a mild dip more generally in the past few days.

ChatGPT versus Gemini 3.0

None of this has dampened the excitement over AI's potential within the industry. Google's consumer AI model, Gemini 3.0, launched to great fanfare earlier this week — this will pitch Google in a direct battle with OpenAI and its still-dominant ChatGPT for the market share.

What we don't yet know is whether it marks an end to the days of chatbots going rogue and recommending glue as a pizza ingredient. So, is the end result of all this fantastic investment is that information is less reliable, I asked Mr Pichai.

"I think if you only construct systems standalone and you only rely on that, [that] would be true," he told me. "Which is why I think we have to make the information ecosystem has to be much richer than just having AI technology being the sole product in it."

But I put it to him that truth matters. His response: "truth matters".

Nor is the other big question facing tech today dampening the enthusiasm around advancing AI's potential. That is: how on Earth to power it?

By 2030, data centres around the world will use about as much electricity as India did in 2023, according to the IMF. Yet this is also an age where energy supply is under pressure by governments committing to climate change targets.

I put this to Google's Mr Pichai, asking if it is coherent to have ambitions to generate 95% of electricity from low-carbon sources by 2030 - as the UK government does - and also be an AI superpower?

"I think it's possible. But I think for every government, including the UK, it's important to figure out how to scale up infrastructure, including energy infrastructure.

"You don't want to constrain an economy based on energy," he adds. "I think that will have consequences."

Lessons from the 2000 dotcom bust

Years ago, as a fledgling reporter I cut my teeth in the 2000 dotcom bubble. It followed a famous speech by Federal Reserve Governor Alan Greenspan about "irrational exuberance".

In that time I interviewed Steve Jobs twice, and a few years later questioned Mr Pichai's predecessor Larry Page, and commentated live on the collapse of WorldOfFruit.com.

Through it all, one lesson became clear: that even in the worst-case scenarios and the toughest of crashes, catastrophe isn't guaranteed for all.

Take Amazon - its share price slumped to $6 and its market capitalisation fell to $4bn during that crash, yet some 25 years on Jeff Bezos and his company are very much going strong. Today Amazon is worth $2.4 trillion.

The same would, inevitably, be true of companies shaken by a potential AI bubble burst.

Plus there is another looming factor that may well explain why so many in Silicon Valley - and beyond - are blind to, or perhaps choosing not to, acknowledge this risk, and pushing on regardless.

That is, the attraction of the glittering prize at the end: achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI).

This is the point at which machines match human intelligence, something many believe is within reach. Or beyond that, reaching artificial super-intelligence (ASI), the point at which machines surpass our intelligence.

But I was also told something else that was thought-provoking by a Silicon Valley figure - that it doesn't matter whether there really is a bubble or if it bursts. Step back and what is going on in the bigger picture is a global battle for AI supremacy, with the US against China taking centre stage.

And while Beijing funds these developments centrally, in the US it is a messy but productive free market free for all, which means trial and error on an epic scale.

For now, the US has superiority in silicon over China - companies like Nvidia with their GPUs and Google with their TPUs can afford to accelerate into the storm.

Others will surely fail, and spectacularly so, affecting markets, consumer sentiment and the world economy. The physical footprint left behind, however, containing sheer computing firepower for the deployment of mass AI technologies, will inevitably shape our economy and could well also shape how we work and learn - and who dominates the world for the rest of the 21st Century.

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The death of an Oasis fan who fell from height at a concert at Wembley Stadium was a "tragic accident", a pre-inquest review has heard.

Lee Claydon, 45, from Bournemouth and known to his family by his middle name Clive, fell from an upper level at the end of the show on 2 August.

At Barnet Coroner's Court, Det Sgt James Raffin, of the Metropolitan Police, told the hearing it was no longer being treated as a criminal case.

"We do not suspect any third party involvement," he said. "This, from everything we have seen, was a tragic accident."

Mr Claydon had been drinking but a toxicology report revealed "no concerns", the officer told the court.

He said the force had also ruled out the possibility of suicide.

Det Sgt Raffin added: "From a police point of view, I would say our investigation is complete."

The officer said he was aware the family had concerns over the "circumstances on the night" and that he would pass these on to officials at Brent Council.

The father of three was pronounced dead at a Wembley medical centre at 22:38 BST, an initial hearing in September was told.

The preliminary cause of death was given as "multiple bodily injuries".

The fall happened during a run of stadium shows for the rock band's sell-out Live '25 reunion tour - their first since splitting in 2009.

Oasis previously said in a statement: "We are shocked and saddened to hear of the tragic death of a fan at the show."

Mr Claydon's father, Clive, paid a tribute to his son, describing him as a "lovely bloke" and a "hard-working family man".

Senior Coroner Andrew Walker said the full inquest would take place on 26 February.