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The strikes are so frequent that Anna and her husband take turns in watching the sky. He does the nights, she does the mornings. “The attacks are extremely loud. The building and windows shake a lot,” she said. It is impossible to sleep. “Only when you’re exhausted, because your brain just turns off.”

The couple, and probably everyone else left in Chernihiv, spend most of their time hiding behind thick walls. “Thank God we have them,” Anna said. Their son, who is 12, rarely ventures outside. “He’s in panic. Many children are afraid of going out.”

Chernihiv, located on the banks of the Desna River, was one of the first targets for Russian troops who invaded Ukraine from Belarus, hoping to quickly reach the capital Kyiv, just 144km (90 miles) to the south. A month on, that has not happened, and they have now effectively surrounded the city.

Civilians are trapped with no running water, electricity and heating, and under relentless bombing and shelling. And like Mariupol, the besieged city on the Sea of Azov that has seen the worst of Russia’s brutality, very little seems to remain untouched.

Hospitals. Schools. A cinema. The stadium. Historic and residential buildings. All attacked, Anna said.

“They hit [sites] two times in a row. It’s obvious they do it on purpose,” she said. “Most of the city suburbs are completely destroyed.”

Olena, another resident, said the only thing still standing from the cinema was its façade. “It’s destroyed. Totally. I saw it with my own eyes”.

“In the suburbs, there were only private buildings. My friends say they are all totally destroyed,” Olena said. (The names of the civilians interviewed for this story have been changed to protect their identities as they remain in the city.)

Most days, Olena walks, sometimes for more than an hour, in search of drinkable water. She often has to endure long queues, as people bring bottles and buckets at distribution points organised by the city council. Supplies are running out, and each person is allowed to have only 10 litres.

Without electricity, the only way for her and others to charge their phones and power banks is when one of her neighbours lets them use his generator. Gas has also been cut, meaning there is no heating. “We don’t even talk about it,” she said, “because it’s now part of our routine”.

Police said the gunmen were Israeli Arab citizens. They were shot dead by undercover officers.

The Islamic State (IS) group said it was behind the attack in a statement posted on social media.

It comes days after an attacker identified as an IS supporter killed four Israelis in the southern city of Beersheba.

One of the assailants in the latest incident tried to join IS and officials are looking for connections between the attacks, Haaretz reports.

Four other people were taken to hospital after the attack in Hadera, and two others were treated at the site of the shooting.

Police said counterterrorism officers happened to be in a restaurant near the shooting and brought the attack to an end.

“Our officers managed to neutralise the assailants and prevent a bigger terrorist attack,” national police spokesman Eli Levy told Israeli TV.

The Islamic State group’s claim of responsibility is unusual – the intelligence group SITE said it was the first time it had taken credit for an attack in Israel since 2017.

Sunday’s incident occurred as Israel hosts an historic summit with three Arab League states with which it has normalised ties, as well as Egypt and the US.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said that all his counterparts at the meeting had condemned the attack. However, it was praised by the Hamas militant group which governs Gaza as a “heroic operation”.

There have been several recent attacks amid concerns that tensions are rising ahead of religious holidays.

However, his ad-libbed line at the end of what was billed as a “major speech” in Poland on Saturday – seemingly calling for President Vladimir Putin to be removed from power – may have landed the hardest.

In his speech to a crowd of assembled Polish government officials and dignitaries at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, the US president once again warned that the world was in the midst of an era-defining conflict between democracies and autocracies.

He pledged that Nato would defend “every inch” of its member states’ soil. He also promised continued support to Ukraine, although he noted that the US military would not engage with Russian forces there.

It was a confrontational, but measured, speech – well in line with what US officials, from Secretary of State Antony Blinken on down, have been saying for months.

Then, right before the “thank yous” and “goodbyes”, Mr Biden added of his Russian counterpart: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

Cue the fireworks.

“This speech – and the passages which concern Russia – is astounding, to use polite words,” Russia spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said. “He doesn’t understand that the world is not limited to the United States and most of Europe.”

And the US walk-backs.

“The president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbours or the region,” a Biden administration official said on background. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

The speed with which the US issued its “clarification” – later echoed by Mr Blinken – suggests the US understands the danger inherent in Mr Biden’s words.

Earlier in the day, the US president had called Mr Putin a “butcher”. Last week, he seemed to get ahead of his own administration’s diplomatic process by accusing the Russian leader of war crimes. In both cases, Mr Biden’s remarks prompted condemnations and warnings from Moscow that US-Russia diplomatic relations were being frayed to the point of breaking.

There’s a line between condemning a nation’s leader – the sometimes overheated rhetoric of diplomacy – and calling for his removal. It was a line both the Americans and the Soviets respected even at the height of the Cold War. And it is a line that Mr Biden had apparently crossed.

“Regime change” is something powerful countries are accused of imposing on weaker ones – not what one nuclear-armed nation demands of another.

By Sunday, even some US allies were attempting to distance themselves from Mr Biden’s remarks.

French President Emmanuel Macron warned that the US president was putting ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in jeopardy.

“We want to stop the war that Russia has launched in Ukraine without escalation,” he said. “If this is what we want to do, we should not escalate things – neither with words or actions.”

In Washington, congressional leaders were also expressing concern. Idaho Republican Jim Risch, the senior Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee, called Mr Biden’s remarks a “horrendous gaffe”.

“My gosh, I wish they would keep him on script,” he said. “Any time you say or even, as he did, suggest that the policy was regime change, it’s going to cause a huge problem. This administration has done everything they can to stop escalating. There’s not a whole lot more you can do to escalate than to call for regime change.”

Mr Biden has a well-known propensity for making off-the-cuff remarks that can land him in difficult situations. They’ve derailed past presidential bids and occasionally frustrated Obama administration officials when he was vice-president. Those lines are not entirely accidental, however. They can reveal where Mr Biden’s heart lies, even if his head – and the heads of those around him – might prefer he hold his tongue.

That, at times, is a political strength, writes The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, allowing Mr Biden to authentically connect with the emotions of the American people. But, in this current moment of diplomatic crisis – when poorly chosen words can lead to consequential actions – they’re also a weakness.

“It is hard to blame Biden for giving in to his famous temper after talking to the people who have suffered from Putin’s barbarism,” Mr Nichols writes. “But the words of every world leader matter right now, and none more than those of the president of the United States.”

Mr Biden may believe that US-Russia relations are damaged to the point that they will not be repaired while Mr Putin is in power. Explicitly saying so, however, could make the immediate US goal – ending the war in Ukraine while preserving the nation’s territorial integrity – more difficult.

The war in Ukraine is not going the way Mr Putin intended so far. His army is bogged down in bitter fighting and casualties are growing. His economy is straining under the weight of economic sanctions. Russia is increasingly isolated from the rest of the world.

The situation has potential to lead to the de-escalation the US and its allies are calling for – but it also could make Mr Putin more desperate. And if the Russian leader believes his power is at stake, and believes the US is not-so-secretly making that an objective of its efforts, the turn the crisis takes from here may not be one toward peace.

The 26-year-old was one of the more than 18,000 Indian students studying medicine in Ukraine who were evacuated after the war began. Mr Kumar was in a medical school in Uzhhorod for the past six years and would have qualified as a doctor in three months.

Mr Kumar now stares at an uncertain future – he is unable to continue his studies or find a place in Indian colleges.

The dream of becoming a doctor for thousands of young Indians begins from small towns and villages. But aspirants have always far outnumbered the vacancies available at affordable government-run colleges. Private medical colleges are accessible to only those who can afford very high fees.

In 2021, over 1.5 million students appeared for qualifying exams to government colleges, but less than 6% managed to get admission.

According to Public Health Foundation of India, a think tank, only one out of every 11 candidates in 2014 got into medical colleges. Last year, the number had increased to one out of every 19 candidates.

“So you have an increase in the number of people wanting to be admitted, but the seats have not risen proportionately. As a result a large number of students look for outside avenues” says president of the foundation, K Srinath Reddy.

A farmer’s son, Mr Kumar was studying to be the first doctor not just in the family, but in his entire village.

Since he could not get admission in a government college, heading to Ukraine was the next affordable option.

“I would have had to pay nearly $150,000 (£113,000) in a private Indian medical college, but in Ukraine it cost me around $30,000 for the entire six-year course. [Still] I took a huge loan and my father had to sell some of our ancestral land [to fund my studies]” Mr Kumar said.

For medical students with a foreign degree, there is one final hurdle – clearing a qualifying exam to practice in India.

“The percentage of success in these exams have been fairly dismal” says Dr Reddy. “Between 2015 and 2018, the pass percentage was only 19%. In 2019, it went up to 25% but it came down to 16% in 2020”.

The collision, which involved one car, happened on Houston Road at about 23.50 on Saturday. Emergency services attended but the man died at the scene.

The road remains closed while officers carry out further investigations to establish the cause of the crash.

Police have appealed for information and dashcam footage.

People who saw the fire on Gruinard Island from the mainland described the scene as “apocalyptic”.

They said the uninhabited island off Scotland’s north-west coast was ablaze from “one end to the other” on Saturday evening.

The island was used for germ warfare experiments during World War Two.

It was declared free of Anthrax by the Ministry of Defence in April 1990.

Kate Gearing and her daughter Nessie were at their home in Aultbea when they saw a glow in the sky, around 20:30 on Saturday.

They could smell the smoke in the air from their house which is about five miles from the island.

They got into the car to investigate, and drove along the coast until they saw the fire, which they said you couldn’t miss.

Nessie took pictures from the area around Gruinard beach.

The 25-year-old described the scene as “apocalyptic,” and said it looked like “hell fire”.

“There was a string of flames around the whole circumference of the island,” she said.

Kate said the island off the north west coast was lit up by flames from one end of the island to the other.

The most distressing thing about the scene, Kate said, was the noise of birds, which she thinks were nesting on the island.

“We could hear birds crying, screaming, and then suddenly there was silence – but the flames went on, it was awful.”

She said thankfully the island is far away enough from shore not to be a danger to the mainland.

The pair returned on Sunday, and said there were no obvious flames by the afternoon. However, there was still some smoke hanging in the air.

Kate, a retired GP, said: “The island is pretty black now. There’s just a few trees left standing, along the shoreline.”

“I’m just hoping there aren’t any anthrax spores left around anywhere,” she added.

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service said the island did not fall under its remit because it is uninhabited.

Earlier this week it issued a warning that the risk of wildfires was “very high” in central, southern and north-east Scotland.

It urged people to to think twice about using naked flames outdoors.

Anthrax is a lethal bacteria, especially when inhaled, and it proves fatal in almost all cases, even with medical treatment.

Gruinard had long been uninhabited when, with World War Two on a knife edge, the government tasked scientists with finding a way of harnessing anthrax as a weapon – fearing the Nazis had developed a biological bomb.

They had to find a testing site that was remote, uninhabited and isolated but accessible from the mainland.

Rumours began to spread on the mainland when sheep, cows and horses began dying strange deaths.

The facts about what happened remained a mystery until the declassification of an MoD film 50 years later.

It showed sheep being put in exposure crates facing the anthrax cloud.

The film shows a small blast set off by remote control and then white powder moving on the wind. Within days all the sheep were dead.

The experiment was deemed a success and the scientists returned to Porton Down – but the anthrax remained.

In an attempt to rid the island of anthrax spores, Porton Down instructed the heather be set on fire.

It remained off limits and it was not until 24 years after the experiment that the warning signs even mentioned Anthrax.

Porton Down experts checked the soil but the anthrax spores were “surprisingly resistant to degradation”.

In 1986, Gruinard was again a hive of activity as teams of scientists, vaccinated against anthrax and dressed in protective clothing, prepared to return the island to its natural state.

They sprayed the soil with seawater and formaldehyde and it was again tested at Porton Down.

Finally, on 24 April 1990, the MoD declared Gruinard anthrax free.

Customers in South Scotland, Merseyside, North Wales and the South West of England will see the daily payments double from April.

Those in London and the East of England will see increases of less than 60%.

All consumer bills include a standing charge; a fixed daily payment covering the costs of supply and other levies.

The regulator Ofgem caps them for consumers on standard default tariffs in England, Wales and Scotland, although the cap varies by region.

Standing charges are not the biggest part of an energy bill, but they are set to rise by more than £71 a year on average in April.

Jeehan Saleh and Hesham Hussain told the BBC the wide regional differences were unfair at time when energy bills are soaring.

They say they “weren’t shocked” when they learned that standing charges where they live in Garston in South Liverpool would rise by double that of other areas.

“Surprise, surprise, Liverpool again isn’t it,” said Hesham.

“It’s always us being hit the hardest,” added Jeehan. “There’s people in poorer areas where we work who are choosing between food bills and energy bills. Thankfully we’re not in that position but it’s not too far from home. You’re already feeling it in so many areas, this is just another hit.”

The standing charge has always varied depending on where you live, due to different costs to supply homes with power in rural or more remote areas.

However, research has shown that the increase this spring varies disproportionately in different parts of Britain, when comparing standard variable tariffs for electricity paid for by direct debit.

Analysts told the BBC that local distributors and suppliers are moving charges which were once part of a consumer’s unit price for energy (which now has a tight upper limit on it) over to their standing charge. They are also increasing standing charges to the maximum level for each region, which means a big jump for some places.

The average increase – of just under 20p per day – will add more than £71 a year to a standard electricity tariff. But in North Wales and Merseyside, the South West, the Midlands, South Scotland and South Wales the rise will add over £80 a year. In London less than £30 will be added.