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President Joe Biden discussed national security, climate change and technology with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during a meeting on Wednesday.

“Australia and America stand ready to do the hard work, the historic work, to tackle the challenges we face,” Mr Biden said after the meeting.

The leaders also emphasised they were united against all acts of aggression, particularly those by Russia and Hamas.

Their major divergence appeared to be on how to deal with China.

Speaking in the White House Rose Garden alongside Mr Albanese, Mr Biden took a strong stance on possible conflict in the South China Sea. Chinese vessels have blocked and rammed ships in the area that belong to the Philippines.

The US president said he wanted “to be very clear” that the American defence commitment to the Philippines was “ironclad”.

Mr Albanese was more reserved, saying his approach toward his neighbour was “to cooperate where we can, disagree where we must, but engage in our national interest”.

Still, they agreed that securing the Indo-Pacific region is a high priority.

With the two leaders speaking from side-by-side lecterns, the event highlighted their countries’ alliance and teemed with pomp and circumstance, with a military band playing and senior US security and diplomatic leaders seated front and centre.

The leaders pledged to work together on finding ways “to stand with Israel” after the 7 October attack by Hamas.

Mr Biden is asking Congress for $100bn (£83 bn) to address numerous national security challenges, including Israel and the Indo-Pacific region.

Mr Albanese praised Mr Biden for working closely with Australian leaders to add a new tier to their partnership: climate change. He noted this was his ninth meeting with Mr Biden since he became prime minister 16 months ago.

He also said Aukus – the trilateral security agreement between the UK, US and Australia – would ensure “peace and security in our region”.

One year on from the horrific crowd crush that killed nearly 160 young people, Lee Ju-hyun returned to the alleyway where she almost died.

She visits regularly, determined to keep her memories of that awful night alive until justice has been served.

It was Halloween weekend, and more than 100,000 people had descended on Seoul’s labyrinth-like neighbourhood of Itaewon – a popular nightlife district – to party.

They funnelled into a narrow, steep passage from three directions, until it became so tightly packed people could not move. Some could not breathe. Many died.

Despite multiple, well-documented failings by the authorities, a year on, no one has been held responsible, leaving the survivors and the bereaved struggling to heal.

Ju-hyun can locate the exact spot where she tripped and fell to the floor as people then piled on top of her. The pressure was so great, the muscles in her legs ruptured, paralysing them, and she lost consciousness. She awoke, still trapped, to the sound of chaos.

“There were screams everywhere. Those in the crowd were screaming ‘please help me, I don’t want to die’, while those in a club who could see what was unfolding were shouting ‘please don’t die; please don’t die.'”

Gradually the screams and prayers receded.

Now much of the ghostlike alleyway is boarded up. Some of its bars never reopened. And thousands have been left haunted, either by the horror of enduring the crush, or by the loss of loved ones who did not make it.

Park Jin-sung lives with both.

He was visiting Seoul with his mother and younger sister. Intrigued by the Halloween parties in Itaewon, they decided to check them out. By the time they arrived, the alleyway was heaving and Jin-sung urged his sister to escape, while he stayed behind to look after their mother.

He held her as she struggled to breathe, creating a tiny pocket of space between them, so she could draw air into her lungs. When the paramedics arrived, he pulled her out through a gap in the crowd.

He ran around the streets and hospitals, his muscles fatigued, searching for his sister, until the police called him from the morgue. “That was when the world collapsed on me”, he said. “Initially, I wasn’t able to leave the house. I was very scared at night. A tiny sound would paralyse me.”

Both he and his mother quit their jobs.

A year on, Jin-sung is working again, and his fear and sadness have been replaced by anger.

Many of the survivors, along with the families of the bereaved, say they have still not been given adequate answers as to what went wrong that night.

An initial investigation concluded that local government officials had failed to adequately plan for the event by putting crowd control measures in place. It also found police had ignored calls from concerned attendees warning about the crowds before the crush turned deadly. The emergency services then failed to get paramedics to the site in time.

But there has been little explanation as to why such mistakes were made, especially since the authorities had anticipated large crowds – and had foreseen and documented the potential for danger.

Twenty-three police officers and government officials have been charged with criminal offences including involuntary manslaughter and negligence. Many remain in their jobs, even while their trials and investigations are ongoing.

More senior politicians and officials, including the interior minister, the mayor of Seoul and the National Police Agency have been cleared of wrongdoing.

For Park Jin-sung, this is proof the disaster has not been properly investigated. He and other families are pushing for a new, independent investigation, which is currently awaiting parliamentary approval. “They’ve not held even one meeting to explain what happened and say, ‘look, we’re really, really sorry'”. Even that would have been enough to ease his pain, he said.

In the aftermath of the disaster, the government set up a trauma centre to provide counselling to survivors. Jin-sung receives a text once a week offering support, but he has not responded. “It’s run by the government, and I don’t trust the government very much, so I don’t feel comfortable going there”, he said.

For one survivor, 16-year-old Lee Jae-hyun, the trauma proved too much to bear. He was wedged in the centre of the crowd with his best friend and girlfriend, helplessly watching her lose consciousness, before he too stopped breathing. From his hospital bed, he learnt that both she and his friend had died, making them two of the youngest victims.

Forty-three days after the disaster Jae-hyun took his own life, making him victim number 159.

“He was a completely different boy after the tragedy”, his mother, Song Hae-jin, told us. “Before, he was a cheerful, talkative kid. Afterwards, he almost never spoke. He sat alone in his room, unable to sleep”.

There is no official memorial to the victims of the crush. Their families take it in turns to watch over the altar, adorned with photos of the dead, lest the authorities try to remove it; something they have threatened to do.

Hae-jin described the relationship between the families and the authorities as problematic. After the crush, she claims they were ostracised, as various authorities tried to avoid taking responsibility. In the immediate aftermath, some people even pointed fingers at the survivors and the dead, suggesting they were to blame for going out that night. Hae-jin recalled how much this upset her son.

“Ultimately it was the government and local authority that failed to serve their duty to protect lives. There has been no accountability for that at all. In order to heal, we need to clarify why this happened and who was responsible”, she said, adding that she would feel guilty until the day she died for not protecting her son.

Psychiatrist Paik Jong-woo, from Kyung Hee University Medical Centre, argues that the politicisation of the disaster and the lack of accountability have made it harder for survivors and the bereaved to recover. He created a psychological support group to counsel them, after realising very few were receiving help.

“As a society we need to take care of the victims and show them how we plan to prevent this from happening again. Then they can find comfort in the belief that lives were not lost in vain, but have made our society safer”, he said.

The government, the Seoul city council and the police turned down our requests for an interview about what lessons they had learnt and how they planned to keep people safe this Halloween. They told us this was not the right time to talk.

In a statement, the government said it was “deeply saddened by the tragedy and has been expressing its apologies and sympathies to the victims and their families at every opportunity”.

The authorities did detail some new safety measures they had introduced. Now, when three calls are made to the police within a 50 metre radius, they are automatically flagged – and emergency services are forced to work together when requested; no longer can they refuse call outs, as happened in the early minutes of the crush. Meanwhile, a new CCTV system is being rolled out across Seoul to monitor crowd densities.

However the district authority, Yongsan, which was criticised for not implementing safety measures ahead of the event, refused to answer any of our questions about what changes, if any, it had made.

Itaewon’s upcoming Halloween celebrations are expected to be a far quieter affair. Some bars and clubs have announced they will not be hosting parties. Lee Ju-hyun, however, plans to attend. “I want to show people it’s not our fault we came here to enjoy ourselves”, she said.

After spending two months in hospital, her legs have now mostly recovered, barring some pain on her right side when she stands for too long, and her initial trauma has subsided.

Though as she stopped to read the colourful notes of condolence, stuck along one wall of the alleyway, a single tear trickled down her cheek.

“I’m sad for those who died and those they left behind”, she said. “I always stop here to ask them ‘what do you need us survivors to do for you?'”

Additional reporting by Hosu Lee and Leehyun Choi.

The UK government is to charter flights to relocate Afghan refugees living in Pakistan who have been promised UK visas, starting on Thursday.

Thousands of people who worked with or for the UK government in Afghanistan and fled the Taliban are in Pakistan, waiting for relocation to the UK.

Some have been waiting for over a year, according to charities.

Earlier this month, Pakistan said it plans to start deporting illegal migrants from 1 November.

Among the Afghan refugees in Pakistan are former translators for the British army and teachers for the British council, all part of either the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme or Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy.

All went to Pakistan because the UK asked them to go to process their visas ready to start a new life in the UK.

But many of the refugees’ visas have now expired.

And according to a risk assessment document revealed in court, the British authorities in Pakistan now consider people in this group to be “at risk of deportation”.

Recent government figures show that around 3,250 men women and children on the UK’s relocation schemes are living in guest houses and hotels in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.

While in Pakistan, they have no legal access to work and their children are not allowed to go to school.

Initially many thought they would be in Pakistan for a few weeks.

Documents released in court revealed how many face longer waits in part due to instructions by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, banning their accommodation in hotels in the UK in all but extreme cases.

Instead, longer-term accommodation was to be found. An email released in the documents stated that this “should represent an overall net saving to the taxpayer”.

Over the past few weeks the BBC has spoken to people on the UK’s relocation programmes; many said they are afraid to leave their hotels.

According to official sources in Pakistan, the UK government is now planning on chartering several flights over the course of the next few months, until December.

The officials have said the first of these flights starts on Thursday.

The UK government has not said how many people will be onboard the first flight or how many are expected to be relocated before 1 November deadline.

The BBC understands that the government has decided that those on the relocation programmes will no longer need to be matched to so-called “suitable accommodation” before they arrive.

There was some hope, but also confusion about the news of the flights.

Jamal, not his real name, worked as a translator for the British army, and said he had not heard anything from the British authorities.

“Hopefully everyone will move soon, no one knows who is first, who is in the middle, who is last,” he told the BBC.

Mahfouz, also not his real name, worked delivering projects for the UK government.

“I am just concerned what will happen if my family will not be on one of those flights until the end of December.

“My wife is pregnant and if we don’t travel soon we may have to wait into next year,” he said.

Those on the UK schemes are becoming increasingly nervous about the 1 November deadline.

Several told the BBC on at least two occasions where they had heard of police raiding accommodation and detaining people on the UK relocation schemes, who did not have the suitable documents to hand.

Even though they were released, it has left many frightened they could be sent back to Afghanistan.

The Taliban government has declared an amnesty for those who worked with international forces.

However, many people we spoke to talked about living in hiding before they left Afghanistan for Pakistan, scared, they said, of what might happen to them.

Some felt that by following the UK authorities’ directions and leaving Afghanistan they had put themselves at increased risk.

Qasim – not his real name – worked with the UK authorities.

He said: “Before we left Afghanistan, our lives were in 50% danger. Now they are in 100% danger.”

The UK authorities’ risk assessment also acknowledges that things may change after 1 November.

The document states that they have stood a “reasonable chance of success” of securing release, if notified in time of someone on the scheme’s detention.

But that “it is very difficult to judge we would be successful in every case if it were to happen frequently beyond 1 November and we were not informed or the eligible person didn’t have the documents with them.”

A UK Ministry of Defence spokesperson did not comment on the flights but said the UK had brought around 24,600 people from Afghanistan to safety, including thousands of people eligible for the country’s Afghan schemes.

Additional reporting by Gem O’Reilly

India will resume visa services for Canadians after they ceased in a major diplomatic row in September, India’s High Commission in Ottawa says.

At the time, India said the move was due to “security threats” disrupting work at its Canadian missions.

But the suspension came amid a serious dispute over the killing of a Sikh separatist on Canadian soil.

Ottawa accused India of being behind the killing – an allegation New Delhi has called “absurd.”

On Wednesday, officials said they will resume issuing some visas after reviewing the security situation at their missions, and in light of recent Canadian measures which they did not name.

They added in a statement that “further decisions, as appropriate, would be intimated based on continuing evaluation of the situation”.

Services will reportedly resume on Thursday, and will apply to entry visas, as well as business, medical and conference visas.

Entry visas are specific to “persons of Indian origin” and their spouses and children, according to the website of Toronto’s Consulate General of India. They also apply to immediate family of an Indian citizen.

It is unclear if the resumption of services will apply to Canadian tourists, who would require a specific tourist visa.

Relations between India and Canada reached historic lows after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada was investigating credible allegations of India’s involvement in the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist leader shot and killed in Surrey, British Columbia, in June.

Police at the time described it as a “targeted killing”, but no suspects have yet been identified.

Mr Trudeau has urged for India’s cooperation with the ongoing murder investigation, while stressing that Canada is not looking to escalate the rift with India.

Canada recently withdrew dozens of its diplomats from India, after the country threatened to remove diplomatic immunity for them.

India has said Canada had many more diplomats in Delhi than India has in Ottawa, and has demanded parity ever since the row between the two countries erupted.

But the Global Affairs website, which lists the Indian diplomats in Ottawa, suggests they had about the same number.

Twenty-one Canadian diplomats remain in India.