At least 12 people were killed and nine injured on Tuesday evening when gunmen opened fire at an informal settlement in Cleveland, east of Johannesburg, police said on Wednesday.

Police believe more than 10 suspects were dropped off in a minibus in an informal settlement in the Cleveland suburb of Johannesburg late Tuesday night and opened fire on people.

Eight men and three women were killed in the attack, according to South African broadcaster eNCAnews.

The suspects arrived in a white Toyota Quantum and entered the settlement from two access points, before fleeing in the same vehicle after carrying out the mass shooting.

The motive for the attack remains unknown.

Informal settlements in South Africa are unplanned residential areas usually made up of shacks or similar structures.

South Africa has one of the world’s highest murder rates, averaging about 60 a day.

“It is alleged that more than 10 suspects were dropped off by a white Toyota Quantum near a petrol station in Cleveland,” the police statement reads.

“The suspects allegedly entered the informal settlement through both entrances and moved through the area, opening fire on residents and community members at multiple locations before fleeing the scene in the same vehicle.”

Local officers responded to a “complaint of shooting in progress” at around 11:10pm local time on Tuesday (10:20pm BST).

This is a breaking news story, more to follow…

With some sunshine for most of England and Wales over the weekend, along with a southerly breeze, temperatures will climb to 22 to 27C, perhaps 28C (82.4F) in south-east England by Sunday.

These temperatures will be around 6 to 8C above average for early June.

Some of the warmth will extend into Northern Ireland and southern Scotland with highs on Sunday of 20 to 22C, but it will be closer to average in more northern areas with 17 to 20C.

It will also be cloudier across more northern areas of the UK over the weekend.

This warmer-than-average weather is forecast to last into next week, but to become an official heatwave temperatures need to be higher than 25-28C – depending on location – for three days in a row.

While it’s possible some areas might reach this definition, it is still a little too early to say with certainty. Not all of the weather models agree on how the high pressure is positioned through the week ahead.

Some forecast models keep it across the UK which would mean that temperatures stay in the mid- to high 20s.

Others move the high pressure away to the east and allow the westerlies from the Atlantic to move back in. This would bring a drop in temperature along with cloud and showers.

You can keep up to date with your latest BBC Weather forecast here.

The world’s tropical rainforests are edging towards collapse. But knowing how to stop deforestation isn’t enough to drive action. The challenge is aligning all the pieces of the puzzle to initiate substantial change. Now our research suggests the key is to persuade enough people to make the system tip in the right direction.

In the mid-1980s, the British fur industry collapsed in less than a decade. Famous retail stores shut down their fur departments. Fur farming was banned in 2000. By the late 2010s, even fashion houses whose heritage was built on the fur trade had gone fur free, citing consumer sentiment.

This abrupt change didn’t come because of new technology or better regulation. It came because of a shift in social norms, triggered by British fashion photographer David Bailey’s Dumb Animals cinema ad campaign. This short film featured a catwalk model trailing a fur dripping with blood and a slogan: “It takes up to 40 dumb animals to make a fur coat. But only one to wear it.” Once desirable and luxurious, fur coats quickly became taboo.

Unfortunately, a similar shift has not yet happened in how people consider tropical forest destruction.

To slow deforestation, scientists can map and monitor forests from space to the resolution of a single tree. Certification schemes have made supply chains more transparent and given consumers and regulators something to act on. Securing Indigenous land tenure produces the lowest deforestation rates on the planet.

Yet every year another patch of Amazon the size of a small European country gets cut down or burnt.

In Southeast Asia, palm oil and pulp monocultures continue to decimate its rainforests. In the Congo Basin and West Africa, small-scale agriculture, charcoal production, cocoa, coffee and mining are steadily fraying another of the planet’s vital areas for biodiversity and carbon storage.

The world’s tropical forests are all edging closer towards a catastrophic dieback. This isn’t a knowledge issue. It’s a problem about how societies change their minds.

Tipping points

When positive change happens, it’s easy to assume that evidence accumulates that things are getting worse, the public is informed, opinion shifts, policy follows, then behaviour and consumption adjust. Each step is gradual and linear. The dial turns slowly.

Except that’s not how anything important does change. Take smoking in public places, the acceptance of same-sex marriage or the speed with which electric vehicles are becoming mainstream. Nothing happens for years or decades, then everything happens all at once.

This is the nature of tipping points: thresholds beyond which a system abruptly reorganises itself and settles into a new state that becomes hard to reverse.

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UK may be on verge of triggering a ‘positive tipping point’ for tackling climate change

At the University of Exeter, we research what makes such change – good and bad – happen slowly then all at once, and how we might trigger the good ones deliberately. We’re exploring how to find tipping points that could positively protect tropical forests at our upcoming Exeter climate conference.

Many social systems, like those in nature, have tipping points. They can resist change up to a point. Then a relatively small, additional nudge – perhaps a film, a court ruling, a fall in the price of something, a critical mass of new adopters – flips a system into a new stable state that is hard to reverse.

That can be hopeful, in a way that gradual change is not, because it means that we don’t have to persuade everyone to do the right thing. We just need to persuade enough people to make the system tip in the right direction.

What the Amazon teaches us

For tropical forests, the most studied example of a deliberate tipping intervention began in 2006. Following a Greenpeace exposé called Eating Up the Amazon, the world’s largest soy traders agreed not to buy from newly cleared Amazon land. The Amazon soy moratorium worked, dramatically. Direct soy-driven deforestation in the Amazon fell from around 30% of soy expansion to under 4%. This became a textbook strategy for protecting tropical forests.

But while the moratorium was a success inside the Amazon, soy production has expanded elsewhere, including into the neighbouring Cerrado, Brazil’s vast tropical savanna, driving rapid deforestation there. Rural communities in the Amazon saw little of the prosperity that might have made standing forest the obvious economic choice. The underlying incentive structure – an economy that still pays more to clear land than to keep it intact – was never reshaped.

Twenty years on, that fragile arrangement is under serious strain. Major traders have signalled their intent to withdraw. Brazil is moving to ban the agreement outright.

Pressure is not coming from collapsed consumer concern. European supermarket chains including Lidl, Aldi and Tesco have reaffirmed their commitments. More than 70 organisations have signed a manifesto defending the moratorium.

The pressure is coming from somewhere harder to fix: China is now the dominant buyer of Brazilian soy and is not party to the agreement. The EU’s deforestation regulation has been delayed and weakened. A new EU trade deal with Mercosur (a South American trade bloc bringing together Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) expands Brazilian exports into Europe. And Brazil’s powerful agribusiness lobby has spent two decades patiently working to dismantle the agreement from within.

So a supply-chain commitment that covers one market but not another will leak. A consumer pressure that is real in Berlin but absent in Shanghai will eventually be outflanked. A moratorium that protects a forest without making it economically rewarding for people living in it will be politically vulnerable. Each mechanism is just one part of the puzzle.

The three As

By looking at the system as a whole, we can understand how preserving the forest becomes the affordable, attractive and socially acceptable option. Affordability is about finance and the supply chain. Attractiveness is about the the co-benefits to all parties. Acceptability involves shifting the cultural and political pressure – without that, the other two erode.

We can study, plan for and even deliberately seed positive social tipping points when we design solutions with a whole systems-perspective. For tropical forests, this includes new supply-chain rules, Indigenous leadership and
the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (a new multi-billion-dollar rainforest investment fund).

A concerted, coordinated push across all three aspects will turn the protection of the standing forest into the most affordable, socially acceptable and attractive option.

Cherise Chapman is helping address the decline through a new campaign that reconnects generations.

Ms Chapman, 79, who lives at Nunthorpe Oaks Residential Care Home, is part of Sanctuary Care’s Lifelong Learning Exchange — a scheme that brings older and younger people together to share traditional skills and life experience.

Ms Chapman said: “Sewing has been part of my life for as long as I can remember — there’s something so satisfying about being able to mend and make things with your own hands.

“It’s a skill that gives you real confidence and independence.

“I’m delighted to be part of the Lifelong Learning Exchange, and pass on these skills to the younger generation.”

The scheme follows research commissioned by Sanctuary Care, which found that 43 per cent of people in the North East believe sewing and mending clothes is a skill at risk of dying out.

A further 39 per cent believe writing letters and cards is disappearing.

The Lifelong Learning Exchange aims to revive these skills through one-to-one mentoring and practical advice, as well as skill guides, demonstrations and personal stories.

Louise Palmer, director of operations at Sanctuary Care, said: “Our residents hold an incredible wealth of practical knowledge.

“The Lifelong Learning Exchange is about sharing this knowledge, creating meaningful connections between generations, and ensuring essential life skills don’t disappear.

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“As part of our developing Young Persons Strategy, we are continuing to explore and evolve ways of bringing younger people into our homes to take part in intergenerational experiences.

“This includes volunteering opportunities, and school or college-led sessions with residents — creating meaningful opportunities for shared learning, connection, and community.”

According to a survey of Sanctuary Care residents, 80 per cent said they had skills or hobbies they wanted to pass on, while another 87 per cent believe traditional skills are at risk of being lost.

Many have helped evacuate ‘men, women, children that are living in fear’ as protests rage on

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A family ‘would have been beaten to a pulp’ as protestors attempted to get into their house and threw fireworks, according a resident who helped them flee.

The woman, who did not want to give her name, said people were trying to kick a man, his wife and their teenage daughter out of their house in the Shankill Road area as the protests erupted on Tuesday night.

‘Sporadic pockets of disorder’ broke out in a number of areas following demonstrations in response to Monday night’s stabbing attack in Belfast.

Protestors caused chaos across the city, setting fire to a bus, businesses and houses, with firefighters having to remove residents from their homes.

The woman told Sky News: “I could just see them all going into the house.

“I don’t know how I did it but I stopped every one of them from going into the bedroom.”

The woman added that the family seemed “really, really scared”.

She continued: “I just said, come out with me, I’ll help you, just come with me… I walked out with them and I could see people looking at me.”

She then shouted at demonstrators that the family were not involved in Monday night’s attack.

“We just kept walking and walked right out of the street with them and walked right around the corner.”

The woman said she believed that “definitely, something really bad would have happened” had she not intervened.

“I think they would have been beaten to a pulp,” she said.

“To be honest, I dread to think what would have happened.”

When asked about her thoughts on Monday night’s incidents she said it had been on her mind the whole day and how it highlighted riots in Northern Ireland last year.

“You’re thinking, what’s going to happen and what’s the worst that can happen?” she said.

“I don’t know but when I saw them going into that house, I just knew that something really bad was going to happen to them, only because they were foreign. I was the only person there that actually stopped it.”

A pastor who has also been helping those targeted in the attacks in the Crumlin Road area where several houses were alight condemned the violence against “innocent people”.

He told the BBC people are being forced out of their homes “because they’re black”.

Pastor Jack McKee said some of the members of his church “who have been with us for 20 years” were “getting put out of their home, had their house attacked, windows smashed, houses beside them burned”.

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“They’re good Christian people and they’re getting put out just because they’re black,” he added.

“I’m doing my best to help them, it’s as simple as that.”

He told the BBC that “obviously we’re all disgusted” after the knife attack on Monday. “But this doesn’t help anyone.”

McKee says that those evacuated will “probably” not be able to return to the area, saying that “innocent people” are hurting.

“Men, women, children that are living in fear because of what some idiot did last night.

“I’m angry and I’m disappointed that this is the response of people in our community.”

A 30-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of the knife attack and was charged with attempted murder.

He is also charged with possession of an article with a blade or point in a public place and making threats to kill. He is due to appear at Belfast Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday.

The victim of the attack, a man aged in his 40s, remained in a serious condition in hospital on Tuesday receiving treatment for serious eye, face and back wounds.

Emergency services are in attendance and the incident has been confirmed as a house fire

Police have told the public to “avoid” a busy Cambridge road amid an “ongoing incident” on Tuesday, June 9. Cambridgeshire Police said emergency services, including the fire service, are in attendance.

The public have been asked to avoid King Hedges Road for the “foreseeable future”. The fire service confirmed at around 1.30pm that the incident was a house fire.

Traffic monitoring site Inrix said: “Kings Hedges Road in both directions partially blocked, slow traffic due to an Emergency Services incident between Northfields Avenue and Campkin Road.”

A spokesperson for Cambridgeshire Police said: “Please avoid King Hedges Road for the foreseeable future. There is an ongoing incident where fire and police are attending.”

Another changeble day has been forecast for Wales on Wednesday.

A Met Office spokesperson said: “A day of sunny spells and showers across the region. Showers may be heavy and merge into longer spells of rain at times. Pleasant in any sunshine, but otherwise feeling rather cool for June in a blustery breeze. Maximum temperature 15 °C.”

People have been issued a ‘toxic or life-threatening’ alert

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A leading vet charity has urged pet owners to double-check veterinary advice found on TikTok and social media platforms. The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) has warned that online “hacks” and home treatments could be putting pets’ lives at risk.

The PDSA has seen viral clips online where owners are encouraged to give dogs ibuprofen for injuries despite the drug being toxic to pets. Cat Henstridge, a veterinary surgeon who shares pet care advice to over 400,000 followers on social media, said the golden rule is to always “run it past your vet first”.

Henstridge, who runs the account @cat_the_vet, told the Press Association: “Ibuprofen is 100% off the menu for all pets and paracetamol is very toxic for cats.” Whilst stressing that some general advice from social media for pets can be good, Ms Henstridge said “when it comes to medicines, it has to be the veterinary profession that is the first port of call”.

The 45-year-old from Sheffield added: “A lot of home and herbal holistic remedies are at best ineffective and, at worse, potentially dangerous.”

Catherine Burke, a PDSA vet, said: “Animals process medications very differently from humans. Something safe for people can be toxic or even life-threatening for pets.”

Ms Burke said she can understand that social media offers pet owners “quick help” but this comes with a risk as these viral clips often “make medical guidance appear far simpler and safer than it really is”.

The PDSA is concerned how quickly “misinformation spreads online” and has encouraged pet lovers not “to try home treatments seen online without first checking with their vet”. It added: “What works for one animal in a short video may not be safe for another, and similar symptoms can have very different underlying causes.”

The charity is urging owners to contact their vet directly if they are concerned about their pet’s health, rather than using social media trends or often unverified online tips. Ms Burke added: “Following these viral tips can delay pet owners from seeking proper veterinary care, where early treatment can make a significant difference to health and wellbeing.”

The PDSA is the UK’s leading veterinary charity, with 49 pet hospitals across the UK. The charity has a dedicated Pet Health Hub where expert advice can be found.

Locals say it is like ‘football match traffic’ at peak times for the church

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Frustrated residents say traffic issues caused by worshippers attending Kingsgate Community Church are like facing “football match traffic” each week.

People in Peterborough have said they are in favour of the church providing regular services and creating a sense of community. However, they say the associated traffic makes navigating the area a challenge before and after peak service times.

“As a local resident in the vicinity of the Kingsgate Community Church, I find it frustrating and a burden on the roads and surrounding area of the amount of traffic every week associated with the services and meetings at Kingsgate,” said a local resident who asked to go by Lou.

“The traffic disruption, noise, pollution and ever increasing numbers is something that needs to be addressed for the benefit of the whole community.”

Kingsgate Peterborough, in Parnwell, is the founding and largest hub of the wider Kingsgate network of churches, which includes campuses in Cambridge and Leicester.

The congregation first moved into the 84,000sq/ft Kingsgate facility in 2006. Since then, it has grown to megachurch status, regularly attracting between 1,000 to 2,000 worshippers to its most popular services.

Lou said: “Sundays, in particular times between 8:50am and 12:45pm, are causing a nuisance with queuing traffic to get in through the morning causing a lack of flow for local residents.”

Lou said she and her fellow residents resent the fact that they often have to tweak their own journeys and social activities to fit around church service times. “We shouldn’t have to adapt what we want to do around what’s going on at the church or then get caught up in traffic unexpectedly,” she said.

“At times it feels like you are dealing and coming across football match traffic issues on a weekly basis throughout the year.” She continued: “They are a good community church with various valuable projects and I do not hold bad will against them. But this has been going on for years and nothing changes, just at times gets worse.”

Labour councillor Sam Hemraj, herself a Parnwell resident, represents the East ward where Kingsgate Community Church is. “For residents living in Parnwell, around Parnwell Road and Oxney Road area – it is a nightmare at times,” she said, describing local Sunday morning traffic as “horrendous”.

She added: “I’ve had other residents complain about it, [and] even my husband says ‘I’m not leaving now because we’re going to get stuck in that traffic’.”

Like Lou, Cllr Hemraj was keen to highlight that, away from the evident traffic issues, she regards the church as a great asset for Parnwell. “What they do, community-wise, is fantastic,” she said. “They help a lot of vulnerable people in the community.”

Kingsgate Community Church acknowledged the popularity of its services, saying “more people than ever” now attend its weekly Sunday morning services, and that it was fully aware of the issues this brings.

“We understand the frustrations expressed by some residents… and would welcome the opportunity to engage directly with members of the local community,” a spokesperson told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS).

The church said it is “grateful to be part of the Parnwell community” and that it is looking at ways to help to alleviate some of the challenges residents have become frustrated with.

They continued: “Proactive work is ongoing to manage increasing traffic both on and off the Kingsgate site. This has included carrying out traffic surveys, working with local businesses to utilise other car parks, and enlisting traffic management consultancy support.

“We are continuing to explore all potential options for longer-term measures to address the impact of traffic on local roads, in liaison with the relevant authorities.”

Residents have also suggested a number of measures the church might consider implementing in order to help resolve the issue. These include staggering church service times, bringing in shuttle bus services, and establishing more than one exit and entry point.

Cllr Hemraj believes a change in local infrastructure may well be the only truly effective way to comprehensively resolve the issue in the long-term, and that she would be pushing for that in her official capacity. “This [issue] is on my agenda,” she confirmed.

“I think that the only way to alleviate [the traffic] is an improvement to the road. There were talks about extending Parnwell Way but it goes down to the [council] funding. I think… that road needs two lanes.”

The councillor said that she would be reaching out to Peterborough City Council’s Service Director for Infrastructure and Highways, James Collingridge, to discuss potential solutions.