Author: BBC

Haiti’s government has taken a key step towards holding long-delayed elections with the creation of a body which will oversee the polls. The nine-member provisional electoral council – set up on Wednesday – has been tasked with organising elections by February 2026. The last time Haitians voted someone into power was in 2016. Since then, […]

Just as crowds had gathered to mourn some of those killed in Tuesday’s wave of pager-bomb attacks, an explosion sparked chaos in Dahiyeh, Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut. A video captured the blast, showing a man lying on the ground and panicked people, some screaming, running away. All this, moments before funerals were due to […]

Five women say they were raped by former Harrods boss Mohamed Al Fayed when they worked at the luxury London department store. The BBC has heard testimony from more than 20 female ex-employees who say the billionaire, who died last year aged 94, sexually assaulted them – including rape. The documentary and podcast – Al-Fayed: […]

The murder of Olympic runner Rebecca Cheptegei by her former partner has reignited calls for stronger action against femicide in Kenya. The 33-year-old Ugandan died days after being doused in petrol and set alight by her ex-boyfriend at her home in Trans Nzoia county in western Kenya. This is not an isolated incident. Kenya has […]

The FBI and the US Postal Department are investigating suspicious packages received by election officials in 17 states. Federal investigators said they were collecting the packages and that some contained “an unknown substance”, though there were no reports of injuries. They were sent to secretaries of state and state election officials across a swathe of […]

Hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs has been denied bail after pleading not guilty in a sex-trafficking case. A New York federal judge remanded the musician in custody after prosecutors argued he was a “serious flight risk”. Mr Combs, 54, was arrested on Monday evening, accused of running a criminal enterprise from at least 2008 that […]

Thousands of supporters of Ghana’s main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), have been protesting nationwide to demand an independent forensic audit of the country’s voter register. Party officials say they have identified errors in the electoral roll for December’s nationwide poll that require correction. The election authority says errors that were previously identified […]

Somalia may be one of the poorest countries in the world and beset by violence, but it is “fixable”, according to its top climate official. The country has been torn apart by more than 30 years of overlapping conflicts – including an Islamist insurgency, a civil war, and a series of regional and clan confrontations. […]

Starvation in war-stricken Sudan “is almost everywhere”, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has told the BBC’s Today programme after visiting the country. “The situation in Sudan is very alarming… the massive displacement – it’s now the largest in the world, and, of course, famine,” director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. He said 12 […]

Warning: This story contains distressing details from the start. Dominique Pelicot, the 71-year-old man accused of drugging his wife to sleep and recruiting dozens of men to abuse her for over 10 years, has admitted to all the charges against him in his first testimony since the trial opened on 2 September. Referring to the […]