public opinion. but for the last year, palestinian journalists have raised concerns that their posts are being suppressed. and according to our research, something has happened. in the first comprehensive data analysis by territory since the start of the war in gaza, we analysed more than 100,000 facebook posts by different palestinian news organisations. this bar represents the average engagement per post in the lead up to the october 7th hamas attack on israel. as you can see, it fluctuates, but it's steady. and then hamas�*s attack and israel's subsequent and ongoing war in gaza became one of the biggest talking points in the world. one of the biggest talking but look what happens to the engagement on those same facebook pages. it nosedives. in fact, since that date, there's been a 77% drop in average engagement. one of the pages analysed in our investigation is the well—established palestine tv. they have 5.8 million followers on facebook and have had some posts

about the war restricted by the platform. we did the same analysis on similar news pages from israel and neighbouring arabic speaking countries, and found that engagement went up. meta confirmed that temporary product and policy measures were brought in in response to the conflict. the company admitted that pages posting exclusively about the war were more likely to see engagement impacted, but it said any implication that this was done to deliberately suppress a particular voice is unequivocally false. but according to some people from inside the company, palestinians have been deliberately suppressed. this former meta employee asked us to keep them anonymous, but shared internal documents about a change that was made to instagram's algorithm. within a week of the hamas attack,

the code was changed, essentially making it more aggressive towards palestinian people writing comments on instagram posts. they gave us these leaked documents showing an order to strengthen the precision threshold further from a0 to 25 for palestinian authors only, and this means the algorithm only has to be 25% sure a comment from a palestinian based in the west bank or gaza was potentially violating guidelines to make it less visible to other users. meta confirmed that this measure was taken, but said it was necessary to respond to what it calls a spike in hateful content. but clearly, some staff were unhappy about it. this kind of bias will affect the whole narrative. customers, regular customers, would be looking at their phones, thinking that they're seeing the truth when they're actually seeing just a very small slice, or they're being trapped in a bubble because other people were silenced. the decades long israeli—palestinian conflict continues to be one of the most difficult topics to address

for many media organisations. but what our research suggests is that when platforms are as large as meta's, even small changes can have big implications. two astronauts stuck in space since thejune will have to wait even longer to get home. suni williams and butch wilmore arrived at the space station injune and were originally due to return to earth after just one week. their initial stay was extended to february 2025 because of technical issues with the experimental spacecraft, starliner. now — following a delay in launching a new capsule to the iss — the pair won't be back until late march or possibly april. 0ur correspondent gave this update. a lot of people will be

thinking, poor butch and suni, because they were blasted off in june to great fanfare on a new rocket built by boeing and that was supposed to produce a second way of getting to and from the international space station, the other one being elon musk with his spacex, but there were a few hitches on the way, and their eight—day mission has been extended as nasa tried to work out the glitches and whether they posed a risk to the astronauts coming back, so days turned into weeks, and into months, and then all of a sudden it is not until february that they would come back. spacex, the other big private sector company, has let them down because their capsule was not ready, they were supposed to have a crew rotation but the capsule is not quite ready so they have got to wait. a major rescue operation is under way after a passenger ferry in india capsized off the coast of mumbai. it collided with a navy vessel. these are the latest pictures. at least

13 people have been killed. the navy said the boat lost control while undertaking an engine trial in mumbai harbour. it crashed into the ferry which was heading to a popular tourist destination. at least 99 people have been found. this is bbc news. for hundreds of years, residents in one town in northern canada have lived alongside their polar bear neighbours — but scientists are warning that climate change could spell danger. as the temperature rises and melts the ice polar bears need to hunt seals — they are being forced spend more time on land, bringing them closer to people. 0ur science correspondent victoria gill has been in churchill, along with a team of polar bear researchers. there's a polar bear under our tundra buggy, right now. he's very curious about us.

oh, my word! at the height of polar bear season in churchill, manitoba, conservation scientists are out on the tundra monitoring one of the most southerly polar bear populations in the world. so the polar bears are starting to gather in this area because there's going to be sea ice here first. and for polar bears, sea ice means food. the bears are waiting for the bay to freeze so they can use it as a platform to hunt seals. but as the climate warms up here, the bears are having to wait for longer. we had about 1,200 polar bears here in the 1980s. and now we have closer to about 618, so we've lost almost about 50% of these polar bears in the last several decades. and we've tied that to these bears are on land about a month longer than their grandparents were. in the long term, this threatens the survival of this polar bear population. but in the short term it means the bears here are getting hungrier. the longer they're on shore, the longer they're fasting,

and the longer they might need to start looking for alternative sources of energy and food. and sometimes those sources are us. that poses a particular challenge for churchill and the team of rangers who run its polar bear alert programme. i came down this trail and i caught him up on this deck. it was testing the door. what did you do? so at that point, you haze them, right? you use your vehicle, horns, cracker shells, and you chase them in a desirable direction, which in this case would be away from town. this is a place that takes pride in setting an example for how humans can coexist with these big predators. everyone here that we've spoken to is very aware of it all the time. and, uh... should we go? i can hear cracker shots over there. that means that they may be moving a bear. there's a bear there. it's crossing the road. get in the car! we heard crackers going off,

and now the polar bear alert team are moving around. so we're going to get back in the car. so you can just see it through the trees there. we could see the polar bear alert team's quad bikes and their trucks moving the bear along. while a loss of sea ice threatens the survival of churchill's polar bears, it could also open up the bay and the town's port for more of the year. the new marine observatory here, that opened just this year, is carrying out experiments that aim to better understand what winter conditions on the bay will be like in the future. the bay is open water, essentially, on average, about five months a year, and it's on the trajectory to become all year round. and my colleague right there, he's actually working specifically on improving the projection of ice conditions to facilitate, to help make better decisions on the shipping season.

this is a town preparing for a future without sea ice in the bay. the town's mayor, mike spence, says that could present opportunities. what do you think this place could look like in ten years time? it will be a bustling port. the future looks bright. the fate of the polar bears of the polar bear capital of the world, though, depends on us and whether we can rein in rising temperatures and preserve the ice that they depend on. we can keep arctic sea ice in the north and protect the species as a whole. sea ice is so much more thanjust frozen ocean. it really is, it's a garden. it's a platform. it's access to food. it's life, really. victoria gill, bbc news in churchill, manitoba. now it's time for a look at the weather with ben rich. hello. it's been a pretty blustery day across many parts of the uk. some more windy weather to come over the next few days. 0n the satellite picture you can see one curl of cloud,

one weather system sliding away, but another one hurtling in from the south—west, bringing some heavy rain, some more brisk winds and then as that weather front clears through, well, we will continue to introduce some colder air from the north—west. so as we go through the rest of the evening, some quite windy weather for a time through the english channel coast, on the southern flank of this weather system, that's sliding away eastwards. staying windy through the night in the north of scotland and with that colder air digging in, we will start to see some wintry showers. particularly cold across the northern half of the uk, but even further south, not as mild as it was last night. and then into tomorrow, well, that weather system clears away. we are all into these cold north or north—westerly winds, brisk winds, gusts of 40mph or more, quite widely. one or two showers in these western and northern parts, some of those wintry over high ground. top temperatures of five to nine degrees, but when we factor in the strength of the wind, it will feel a little colder than that. now another change on friday, we see another frontal system pushing in from the west.

a band of cloud, some outbreaks of rain pushing quite erratically southwards and eastwards. some slightly milder air tucked in with this weather system — for a little while, at least ten or 11 degrees — and then into the start of the weekend, a deep area of low pressure approaches the north of scotland. see all the isobars, all the white lines here, squeezing together. we are expecting some very windy weather indeed. the north and the west of scotland, the north coast of northern ireland, likely to see gales. gusts could reach 80mph, so that could disrupt some pre—christmas travel plans. a real rash of showers, some wintry ones over high ground in the north. briefly, a bit milder down towards the south. but on sunday we're all back into the cold air. it's going to be very windy — widely gusts of 40, 50, 60mph, lots of showers, some hail, some sleet, some snow mixing in over the hills. and yes, it is going to feel quite cold out there. but then as we approach christmas, things should calm down. high pressure is likely to build. it is likely to turn largely

dry by christmas day and we're expecting things to feel very mild.

live from london, this is bbc news. a warning from the united nations that unless syria gets urgent support — it could plunge back into violence. the conflict isn't over yet. we need immediate humanitarian assistance, but we also need to make sure that syria can be rebuilt. a criminology student is found guilty of murder and attempted murder after stabbing two women on a beach in bournemouth. a suspect�*s arrested following the assassination of a russian general in moscow and more details about the killing are released. and — a close encounter with the king of the arctic —

we visit the polar bears struggling to cope in a warming world. hello, i'm lewis vaughanjones. the un's special envoy to syria has warned that unless the country gets urgent support, it could be plunged back into conflict. geir pedersen called for "free and fair elections" in syria and urged humanitarian assistance to the country more than a week after the downfall of president assad. there are a few challenges. one is that the conflict isn't over yet. yes, there is stability in damascus, but there are challenges in some areas. and, of course, one of the biggest challenges is the situation in the north—east. we need immediate humanitarian assistance, but we also need to make sure that syria can be

rebuilt, that we can