The world’s biggest accountancy firm helped in falsifying documents to hide Roman Abramovich’s wealth and evade tax, BBC Panorama has found.

Accounts signed off by Deloitte in Cyprus meant assets such as superyachts, mansions and private jets worth $672m (£508m) vanished from Abramovich’s company accounts.

Deloitte also appears to have advised on a scheme to evade a huge tax bill on the oligarch’s wealth through the falsification of documents.

Barrister Andrew Mitchell KC, an expert in financial services law, said Panorama’s evidence showed the scheme was “straightforward” tax evasion and “it couldn’t be more blatant”.

Roman Abramovich’s lawyers said he denies that he evaded tax or concealed his fortune. They said Panorama provided no evidence he knew about, authorised or directed the falsification of any document and said it was legitimate to rely on advice from professionals.

Deloitte Cyprus said it “acts in compliance with applicable laws”.

The findings are being revealed following a joint investigation between BBC Panorama and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

For nearly two decades, Roman Abramovich was the most famous Russian oligarch in the UK, welcomed in London where he bought Chelsea Football Club in 2003 and bankrolled the club’s most successful period. But after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he was sanctioned by the UK government as an associate of President Vladimir Putin and forced to sell the club.

Abramovich has been reported to be living in Turkey, a safe haven for him because it did not apply sanctions. In the Channel Island of Jersey, £5.4bn of his assets remain frozen and a criminal investigation has been going on for four years.

The oligarch’s lawyers told the BBC he denies the allegations in the Jersey investigation and says it was “undertaken for political purposes”.

Our investigation has uncovered new evidence about the way Abramovich’s business empire has been run. It also raises serious questions about the integrity of some of his professional advisers.

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The evidence is contained in a leak that includes thousands of documents about the oligarch’s finances and the operations of a network of offshore companies administered from Cyprus – which used to be a tax haven popular with Russians – between 1995 and 2022.

The BBC and media partners including the Guardian, Paper Trail Media, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and the Cyprus Investigative Reporting Network – as well as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism – have been reporting on the leaked files since 2023 as part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Cyprus Confidential investigation.

In 2022, Panorama also reported on how Abramovich had made his fortune from a corrupt deal to buy a Russian state-owned oil company in the 1990s, selling it back to the government a decade later for billions in profit. He has previously said allegations of corruption in the deal are false.

The profits from Abramovich’s oil deals in Russia were funnelled into a web of offshore companies. They were administered from Cyprus by a corporate services firm called MeritServus, in Limassol, the island’s second-largest city.

An international airport in the Saudi capital Riyadh has been hit by a second strike in as many days, officials have said.

A Saudi military spokesman said a projectile had hit King Khalid International Airport on Sunday, causing a fire in one of its passenger halls. Saudi Arabia’s civil aviation authority said there had been injuries.

It comes a day after a strike on the same airport killed 13 people and injured 308 others, following similar strikes earlier this week.

The Houthis in Yemen said they were behind the attacks and warned airlines and passengers against using Saudi Arabian airports and airspace.

The group said they had targeted the airport with a mix of ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as drones in the past 24 hours.

They also attacked oil facilities and Dammam airport in eastern Saudi Arabia, their military spokesman Brig Gen Yahya Saree said.

He vowed to continue the “escalating operations deep inside Saudi Arabia”, warning that all Saudi airports were potential targets apart from those in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

The Houthis have said they are targeting Saudi Arabia over its support for government forces in Yemen’s civil war, as well as an air strike on the airport in Sanaa.

On Sunday Maj Gen Turki al-Maliki, spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition, said air defences had intercepted a missile near the airport in Riyadh, while authorities were dealing with the fire caused by an “unknown projectile” that hit Passenger Hall No 4.

US President Donald Trump has said the US would “make a decision” and “move very quickly” on whether to strike the Houthis, while UK Defence Secretary Wes Streeting suggested the UK could “potentially” provide more support for Saudi Arabia.

Saturday’s strike was the deadliest single attack on a Gulf Arab country since the war between Israel, the US and Iran began in February. The Saudi-led coalition vowed to respond, calling it a “war crime”.

Four Saudi nationals, two people from Bangladesh and one person each from the US, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Sudan and Egypt were among the dead, the Saudi civil aviation authority said.

The Indian embassy in Saudi Arabia said on Sunday that an Indian man had succumbed to the injuries he sustained in the attack.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the attacks and confirmed that a US citizen was killed in the strikes. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said he was “appalled”.

The UK Foreign Office is advising against all travel to parts of Saudi Arabia, including areas within 10km (6.2 miles) of the border with Yemen, while other western embassies have warned their nationals about travel in the region.

Houthi-run Al Masirah TV said “the Saudi enemy” had launched an air strike on Sanaa International Airport in Yemen’s capital. Saudi Arabia has not confirmed the attack and the BBC has been unable to verify this claim.

Abdullah Al-Alimi Bawazir, vice-president of Yemen’s internationally recognised government, called for “decisive actions” from regional and international partners.

Riyadh’s airport was struck on Thursday, an attack that killed three Saudi nationals. The Houthis claimed responsibility and said they had used cruise missiles to target the airport.

There were two other deadly attacks on Saudi airports in Abha and Riyadh in the two days prior to that.

Reuters

The latest uptick in violence comes after a temporary ceasefire between the Houthis and Saudi-led forces, brokered in 2022, collapsed in July.

The conflict worsened after the Houthis seized strategically important stretches of the Red Sea coast in a rapid offensive, prompting Saudi strikes. Yemeni pro-government forces later said they had secured the regions.

The Houthis currently control around a quarter of Yemeni territory and as much as 80% of the country’s population. The Iran-backed armed group hopes to eventually seize complete control.

Saudi Arabia fears this would lead to the establishment of an Iranian satellite state on its southern border.

Thirty-three people have been killed in a Russian glide bomb attack on two civilian buses in the frontline city of Kramatorsk, rescue officials say.

Another 18 people were wounded, said Donetsk regional head Vadym Filashkin, accusing Russia of targeting buses carrying passengers to kill as many civilians as possible.

Images posted by local prosecutors showed the burning metal shell of the bus along with debris and some of the victims on the road.

Kramatorsk and neighbouring Slovyansk are part of a so-called fortress belt that Russia is trying to seize as part of Vladimir Putin’s claim to the entire Ukrainian industrial region of Donbas.

Moscow is yet to comment on the latest attack. It follows a dramatic surge in Russian attacks across the country and a heavy increase in civilian casualties.

According to the UN, Ukraine saw more civilians killed by August this year than were killed in all of 2025.

In one single attack that destroyed a five-storey block of flats in Pryluky east of Kyiv early on Wednesday, 22 people were killed, including five children. Three of the children were only one year old.

UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, meeting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Thursday, said the attack in Pryluky showed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “evil intent and evil strategy”.

He announced “more sanctions on Russia, on the war machine of Putin, on the shadow fleet, on the oil companies, on the crypto, on the financing of the war” and told Zelensky the UK would stand with Ukraine “as long as it takes for you to prevail in this conflict”.

After the deadly attack on Kramatorsk, Donetsk regional head Filashkin appealed to anyone who was still in the eastern front line region to move to safer parts of Ukraine.

Given the sharp deterioration of security in the two neighbouring cities, he said all public transport had been ordered to stop. The safety of civilians was paramount, and “we have no right to risk the lives of passengers and drivers”, he said.

Moscow has often cited the “liberation” and “protection” of the predominantly Russian-speaking Donbas as justification for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It is made up of two regions – Luhansk and Donetsk – and with most of Luhansk under Russian control, the Kremlin is also aiming to capture remaining 20% of Donetsk territory still held by Ukraine.

For much of the war Kramatorsk acted as a logistics and supply hub for the Ukrainian military, however it has now come under almost daily Russian attack as its military moves closer to the east of the city.

Glide bombs in particular have been launched at Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. The bombs are fitted with winglets so they glide towards their target rather than simply fall. In late August as many as nine glide bombs were fired at Kramatorsk in one day.

Kramatorsk City Council described the strike as a “horrific crime committed by the Russian army against the civilian population”.

“Once again, the Russians have struck a location where there are absolutely no military targets,” it said.

Russia is also launching constant air raids on the capital Kyiv, with sirens ringing throughout the day.

Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko said attacks on Thursday had killed three people, with 14 others injured. Two of the eight injured are in a critical condition.

The attacks are forcing schoolchildren out of classes into shelters, shuttering businesses, and disrupting public transport.

Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, particularly on its energy grid, are causing power outages already and are even affecting the water supply. Local water authorities in the capital warned on Thursday that pressure was dropping across the city’s right bank due to power cuts.

Zelensky offered his condolences to families and loved ones affected by the latest attack and said Ukraine’s partners needed to provide “concrete action through new defence packages for the protection of Ukraine”.

Ahead of the Pryluky attack, the Ukrainian leader had warned this week of warned of intelligence suggesting plans for a major Russian onslaught, and in Kyiv families responded by heading to metro stations for shelter.

Convicted murderer Christa Pike has woken up and begun speaking from her hospital bed almost a week after authorities in the US state of Tennessee botched her execution, her lawyers said.

Pike, 50, was sent to hospital after surviving two attempts to execute her via lethal injection for the 1995 murder of a 19-year-old she met at a summer camp for troubled teens.

An independent review of what went wrong in the Nashville execution chamber on 30 September has been ordered by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee.

He has also halted executions in the state for the rest of the year.

Warning: This article contains details that readers may find distressing

How did Pike survive?

The Tennessee Department of Correction is yet to say why the execution did not go as planned, though it has defended the method it used.

Dr Joel Zivot, an anaesthesiologist advising Pike’s defence team, says it was not the case that Pike had some “special immunity” but suggested it was simply that not enough of the drug pentobarbital reached her bloodstream to kill her.

Pike was injected with a second dose of the drug, according to the prison authorities’ protocol, after the first did not kill her.

In interviews with the BBC, Zivot has suggested the pentobarbital was more likely to have spread across the tissue under Pike’s skin than to have entered her bloodstream.

“Most of the pentobarbital, instead of circulating in her body, ended up in her arms, and that’s how she lived,” Zivot said.

Pike’s medical condition of thrombocytosis, a blood-clotting condition, was highlighted in advance by Pike’s legal team as an additional issue that could scupper the process. Before the attempted execution, they had filed a legal case challenging the injection protocol.

If clots of blood formed at the injection site as a result of thrombocytosis, they would potentially have blocked the chemical from entering her veins, the lawyers warned.

As the attempted execution took place, prison officials used at least seven needles on Pike during their efforts to establish intravenous (IV) lines, Pike’s lawyers said afterwards. The woman could simultaneously be heard “crying, whimpering, and breathing loudly”.

May Martinez, the mother of Colleen Slemmer who was murdered by Pike and her then-boyfriend, told NBC the failed execution had been “a mess”.

Family handout

The Tennessee Department of Correction has defended the method it used, saying “the protocol does not allow for additional procedures beyond what was carried out”.

The state protocol does not clearly specify what should happen if an inmate remains alive after a second dose, according to the AP news agency.

After it became clear that Pike was not going to die from the two doses, she was taken to hospital for life-saving treatment. States have a legal obligation not to deny medical treatment to prisoners.

What is pentobarbital?

Pentobarbital is a potent sedative that slows down the body, including the nervous system. Doctors sometimes use it as a treatment for certain conditions, but in high doses it can also be used as a lethal injection to cause death.

Its use in lethal injections came under renewed scrutiny last year after a US federal government review during the Biden administration raised concerns about the drug’s potential for “unnecessary pain and suffering”.

The Biden government banned its use in federal executions, but that did not bind individual states such as Tennessee, which can choose their own methods.

In recent years, states have found some drugs needed for lethal injections harder to come by, because pharmaceutical companies have opposed the use of their products for such purposes.

The Tennessee correction department has not specifically addressed an allegation from Pike’s legal team that the pentobarbital it used was “degraded”.

But the department said the lethal injection chemical had “consistently been effective”.

France has suspended the use of stun grenades for policing student protests that have swept the country, after a 15-year-old’s hand was blown off earlier this week.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said he had requested the pause until the facts of Monday’s incident in Lens had been “clarified”, with conflicting accounts offered by protesters and officials.

Several groups have complained of police using disproportionate force towards teenagers.

The disruption continued early on Wednesday with more than 500 schools fully or partially shut, and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu is due to speak about the school protests in an evening address.

Education Minister Édouard Geffray, appearing before France’s National Assembly, said 24 schools had been “set alight or vandalised” to such an extent that they would be shut for several weeks, affecting 30,000 pupils.

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets on Tuesday to call for better school conditions and in some cities tear gas and water cannon were deployed. The interior ministry said 488 people were arrested and 43 members of the security forces were hurt.

Nuñez told French radio RTL that police watchdog IGPN had opened 18 investigations to determine whether officers had been “proportionate” during the demonstrations, which have spread from high school pupils to their parents, university students and unions.

“There is a police action that raises questions for all of us within the Ministry of the Interior; it’s what happened in Lens,” he said, and confirmed the use of stun grenades was being suspended “until the facts surrounding this case have been clarified”.

The 15-year-old boy’s hand was torn off after a so-called anti-encirclement grenade was fired in unclear circumstances near the Auguste Béhal high school in the northern city near Lille.

Authorities have said he picked up the grenade which then exploded, but students have alleged he was hit directly after an officer fired.

According to the local prefect, the incident took place when police were confronted by a group of 200-250 students throwing stones and fireworks.

The stun grenade is considered a non-lethal weapon, but sends out small rubber pellets when it detonates.

“When there is suspicion of disproportionate force, there are always judicial investigations,” Nuñez said, affirming that the government was “here to protect high school students”.

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The national secretary of policing union UNSA said he was sceptical about the decision to halt the use of stun grenades, saying it had been based “on emotion”.

“We are dealing with increasingly violent people,” Jean-Paul Nascimento told FranceInfo, cautioning that without the weapon to disperse crowds there may be more clashes at close quarters. “That’s where there will perhaps be even more injuries,” he warned.

Concerns have also been stoked by the case of a 14-year-old hit in the face with a tear gas grenade last week. The boy’s lawyer said he had lost several teeth and suffered a fractured jaw in the incident at Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, north-west of Paris, and a police officer has been charged.

In a separate development, a 16-year-old suffered a serious hand injury outside a school in Strasbourg on Wednesday, reportedly while handling a mortar firework.

Prosecutors also said an investigation for attempted murder had been opened after a 17-year-old student protester complained an officer “held his head underwater” while trying to arrest him near a river in the north-eastern city of Belfort. French reports say the boy has himself been charged with aggravated assault for allegedly attacking the officer.

From next year, people who attempt to climb Mount Fuji during off-peak seasons and then require rescue by helicopter will have to pay for the service, authorities governing the northern part of the peak say.

The fee is among a series of measures Japan’s Yamanashi prefecture is introducing to deter reckless and poorly prepared climbers.

A similar fee of 8,000 yen ($51; £38) per five minutes is already in place in nearby Saitama prefecture for other mountainous areas and will be used as a reference.

Yamanashi authorities will also require those looking to scale Fuji during the off-season, which runs from early September to July the following year, to submit detailed climbing plans.

“We ask the general public to refrain from climbing during the off-season. We hope that these measures will cause people to rethink what climbing Mount Fuji during the winter is like,” Yamanashi Governor Kotaro Nagasaki said on Monday.

Officials in Yamanashi and neighbouring Shizuoka prefecture, which governs the southern part of Fuji, have seen a rise in off-season and unplanned climbs, some of which have left climbers stranded.

Shizuoka authorities say they will impose penalties on people who fail to register their off-season climbing attempts and strengthen efforts to keep climbers out of restricted areas.

They did not announce a helicopter rescue fee.

Mount Fuji’s official climbing season runs from July to early September, with about 200,000 hikers attempting the summit each year.

Climbing outside of those months is highly discouraged although permitted up to the fifth of ten stations.

However, most mountain huts and toilet facilities are closed off season. The weather and trail conditions also tend to be more severe.

Rescuers have recovered two bodies from the site of an avalanche that struck a climbing group camping in the Nepalese part of the Himalayas.

Around a dozen people are still thought to be missing after a sheet of snow fell on the base camp of Himlung Himal peak on Manang district on Sunday morning.

The group of Nepalese nationals, including climbers and support staff, had been sent ahead of foreign climbers to prepare the camp and fix ropes.

Forecasts showed there was heavy snowfall around the 7,126m (23,380ft) peak in recent days, which lies on Nepal’s border with Tibet.

Poor weather has hampered rescue efforts, with helicopters and rescue teams initially unable to reach the site.

Bibhuti Chand Thakur, of Himalaya Holidays Trekking, told news agency AFP that at least eight members of his expedition team had been reported missing. The exact number of climbers still unaccounted for remains unclear.

A rescue team consisting of experienced mountaineers was rushed from the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu, via helicopter.

That effort is now expected to continue on Monday due to the thick snow and bad weather, local media report.

The Nepalese team had been sent ahead of foreign climbers to prepare the camp, manage the route and fix ropes on the mountain.

Nepal’s mountain districts have seen persistent rain and snow in recent days, creating treacherous conditions for the country’s economically important climbing tourism industry.

Climbers were forced to leave Mount Manaslu, the eighth highest peak in the world, earlier this week due to the rising threat of avalanches.

The latest death of Nepalese climbers comes less than two months after six lost their lives on Broad Peak in Pakistan, including renowned British-Nepalese mountaineer Nirmal Purja.

It also comes as efforts to recover bodies continues on the Nepal-Tibet border, where more than 6,000 people are still missing after a massive flood and landslide in August.

More than 1,400 people are confirmed to have died after a glacial collapse in the Himalayas sent vast quantities of water and debris careering down the Trishuli River valley, sweeping away settlements.

Extreme weather events have also affected other parts of Asia in the past week.

Extreme weather in the neighbouring Indian region of Uttar Pradesh has killed more than 50 people, officials there said.

Meanwhile, a flood emergency disaster has been declared across Bangkok because of heavy rainfall since Thursday, with people being urged to stay at home or move to higher floors.

Earlier this week, a deadly typhoon that battered Tokyo, triggering landslides in neighbouring prefectures that killed four people.

Typhoon Dujuan was the latest in a series of storms in the Pacific, made more intense by the “super El Niño”, an area of warmer sea water that facilitates the formation of powerful storms.

A woman from Kenilworth who started a travel firm giving solo travellers the chance to travel with others says it has now grown to have 15,000 members across the UK.

Emma Hickman, 47, started the firm ‘Travel Buddies Holidays’ 12 years ago after splitting from her boyfriend at the time. She said her daughter had a baby, and she was left feeling “isolated and lonely”.

Hickman said she wanted to go out and enjoy herself, but friends and family were either not in the same circumstance, could not get time off work, had families or different financial situations.

“When I split up from my partner, I was looking for ideas for social groups and that is what made me create the travel club,” she said.

Emma Hickman

The first trip was to the Lake District with 10 people, and now the firm takes groups of people to different destinations around the world. It even has international clients.

“One time a guy went on a cruise in Greece but couldn’t swim, but all the girls taught him how to, and he sent me an email saying thank you,” she said.

Hickman added that the firm is “really beneficial to so many people for many reasons”.

“I think a lot of people [think] if they get divorced, or their partner has an affair, or passes away, it’s very easy to feel that you are very isolated and have the whole weight of world on your shoulders – but then you find out that everyone has something going on.

“It’s a case of coming together, encouraging each other and supporting each other.”

‘I have met friends for life’

Hickman said she has met friends for her life, her mum is one of the tour leaders and her daughter works in their office in Kenilworth.

She even met her now-husband in March 2023 on one of the group holidays in Jordan.

“A lot of my clients do say that they are happy travelling solo but the hardest part they find is eating on their own in restaurants in the evenings – we arrange group meals every evening and people can come along if they want to.”

Hickman said people have made new friends on their holiday trips and go away together.

“One of the loveliest comments from my members was a lady who said it was like travelling with friends you didn’t know you had,” she added.

Emma Hickman

The firm runs tours with around 12 people per group as well as a tour leader.

“Experiences are much better shared, there is certainly a need for it and it has been an absolutely wonderful journey,” she added.

It’s 10pm and bitterly cold in Hanle.

Strong winds sweep across this remote village in India’s Himalayan Ladakh region, but no one seems to mind. Dinner is over, yet, instead of bed, many people are gathering outside.

The reason is above them.

At 14,764ft (4,500m) above sea level, Hanle is known for its exceptionally clear, dark skies. Wrapped in thick jackets, woollen caps and gloves, tourists and visitors gather to see the Milky Way and look through telescopes at planets, the Moon and distant stars.

Among them are four young women: Palzes Angmo, Tsering Dolker, Tsering Yangdol and Padma Chamchot.

They are Hanle’s astro-ambassadors, trained to guide visitors through the night sky.

By day, they cook meals, clean rooms and look after guests at their family-run homestays. By night, they set up telescopes, trace constellations with laser pointers and explain what visitors are seeing in the dark skies.

These women – all in their late 20s – grew up watching these stars, but it was only a few years ago that they learnt to study them through a telescope.

“The sky here has always been twinkling like this,” 28-year-old Dolker says.

The difference today is that people travel hundreds of kilometres to see what locals have long regarded as an ordinary part of life.

BBC Marathi

Hanle’s remote, high-altitude location, dry air and lack of light pollution make its skies prized by astronomers. The cold desert offers suitable observing conditions on around 260 nights a year.

Hanle is also home to the Indian Astronomical Observatory, run by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, and is a major centre for astronomical research. In 2022, it became India’s first Dark Sky Reserve, helping protect its pristine skies from artificial light and putting Hanle on the astronomy tourism map.

Visitor numbers have since surged: from about 3,000 a year five years ago to nearly 30,000 in 2024-25, according to government figures.

As visitors grew, so did opportunities for locals.

In 2022, the Ladakh administration and Indian Institute of Astrophysics trained 24 young people from Hanle and nearby villages in astronomy. These four women were among them.

Over 15 days, they learnt to identify stars, planets and constellations, navigate the night sky, operate telescopes and photograph the Milky Way on their phones.

Becoming astronomy guides was never part of their plans. They were nervous when they first handled the equipment, fearing they might break something. Gradually, they learnt how it worked and grew confident using it.

Angchuk Dorje

Four years on, they are confident astronomers, with evenings beginning around 9pm.

They position telescopes for the night’s planets and constellations before guiding visitors from local homestays.

They show them the Moon’s craters, Saturn’s rings, Vega – the brightest star in the night sky – and other planets, using laser pointers to trace constellations and objects visible to the naked eye.

Then comes the Milky Way. At 11pm each night, the village switches off its lights, plunging Hanle into darkness as visitors scramble to photograph the now-brilliant galaxy.

“When people look through the telescope and capture a photo alongside the Milky Way, they experience immense joy. We also help them with their mobile phone settings so they can capture the Milky Way,” Padma Chamchot says.

It often starts with helping one visitor take a picture and ends with a long queue. The women take pictures for their own social media too, comparing notes on the stars and other sights they captured that night.

BBC Marathi

But by day, life is more ordinary.

Hanle has few hotels and no resorts, so visitors mostly stay in family-run homestays, often extensions of their homes. Chamchot’s family runs one too.

“Taking care of guests, cooking meals, cleaning rooms, and managing household chores fills our day,” she says.

“From nine in the evening, we begin setting up the telescopes for the night’s stargazing sessions.”

Their families’ homestays remain the main income source, but the women earn about 25,000 rupees ($260; £193) a month from astronomy, charging 200 rupees a session. Income dips during the harsh winter, when few tourists visit, but the earnings have given them greater financial independence: they no longer need to ask their parents for money.

“We can save our earnings and spend them on things we want – including new phones,” Padma says.

For the astro-ambassadors, the transformation has been personal as much as financial.

“Before taking on this work, we lacked confidence,” they say.

However, the growing popularity of Hanle comes with risks. The same tourism that supports local livelihoods could also threaten the darkness that makes Hanle unique.

BBC Marathi

Visitor numbers have surged, fuelled partly by social media posts about Hanle’s night skies and its location on the route to Umling La, which is among the world’s highest motorable mountain passes. But more tourists also mean more traffic, construction and artificial light – all threats to the darkness they come to see.

Sonam Jorphail, a senior engineer and head of outreach at the IAO, says tourism is creating jobs and driving development in Hanle, but growth must be managed to protect its dark skies.

“They bridge the gap between the science community and common people – locals and visitors,” Jorphail adds.

But longtime residents say Hanle’s night sky is already changing. Padma’s father, Dhuntup Chamchot, in his 70s, remembers when the skies were even darker.

“Back then, when the weather was good, people would often sleep outdoors under the open sky,” he says.

The young women often take their families stargazing too.

“We frequently show the night sky to our families through the telescope. They enjoy looking at it now,” says Yangdol, one of the astro-ambassadors. “If one of us takes even a single day off, the families ask why the telescope was not set up,” she jokes.

The women say they have no desire to leave Hanle or its dark skies. They hope for advanced training and better telescopes and eyepieces to enhance visitors’ experience.

Four years ago, the equipment was unfamiliar; now, they are building a future around the stars.

Pope Leo XIV has issued a warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) at the start of his four-day visit to France.

The pontiff cautioned against “losing our humanity amid a paradise of machines” in wide-ranging remarks to Church and state officials at the Élysée Palace, following an hour of talks with President Emmanuel Macron.

Leo made a similar warning earlier this year when he spoke of the need for AI to be “disarmed” in the first major teaching document of his papacy.

In his May appeal, he mentioned the slave trade in relation to AI, suggesting that the world was in danger of normalising the exploitation of people once again.

The highpoint of Leo’s visit to France is set to be a giant Mass attended by more than half a million people in Paris on Saturday, for which an altar has been built on the Place de la Concorde and a large area around the Champs-Élysées sealed off by police.

Large crowds are expected throughout the trip, reflecting an enthusiasm that the Church attributes to growing spirituality among the French and other Europeans.

He was greeted at Orly airport early on Friday by Macron, with the pair expected to deliver a speech later in the day in Metz.

Crowds were meanwhile gathering along a route to the Notre Dame, where the pontiff will later be driven in his popemobile.

The president will not be at any of the Pope’s Masses, largely to avoid breaching France’s strict separation of state and religion.

On Friday, Macron hailed Pope Leo’s visit to France as a “great honour”, stressing that French secularism “in no way negates religion”.

Leo said that “authentic secularity” should not exclude religion “from the public sphere or from education”.

In recent years, French politicians have often invoked France’s brand of secularism to justify bans on religious symbols, including Muslim women’s attire, in public spaces and schools.

EPA

The Champs-Élysées Mass will be attended by Macron’s wife Brigitte and Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu. Several candidates for next year’s presidential election are also due, including Marine Le Pen of the nationalist right, centrists Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, and conservative Bruno Retailleau.

There were reports of tensions between Macron and the Vatican team sent to make arrangements, with the president allegedly frustrated in his wish for a more ceremonial aspect to the visit.

This was dismissed this week by Élysée officials, who said it was customary to offer a visiting head of state – which the Pope is – a range of high-profile events, such as a cavalry escort down the Champs-Élysées. But they said it was never expected that the Pope would actually take the offer up.