Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has won the country's delayed elections with an overwhelming majority, the election board said on Saturday.

The board said Mr Abiy's Prosperity Party won 410 out of 436 seats, giving him another five-year term in office.

However, a fifth of the country failed to carry out voting overall due to insecurity and logistical problems.

Polls were not held in the war-torn Tigray region, where many thousands are living in famine conditions.

Another round of elections has been penned for 6 September in the affected areas, but a date has not been confirmed for Tigray.

The election had already been delayed due to the pandemic.

Mr Abiy, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, described the vote as a "historically inclusive election" in a statement on Twitter.

A new government is expected to be formed in October. However, there are concerns about the election's integrity.

Opposition parties had complained that a government crackdown against their officials had disrupted their plans to prepare for the election.

Berhanu Nega said his party, Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice, had filed more than 200 complaints after observers in a number of regions were blocked by local officials and militiamen.

The state-affiliated Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said there were "no serious or widespread human rights violations" in stations it observed.

However, in a preliminary report the EHRC said that some constituencies experienced "improper arrests", voter intimidation and "harassment" of observers and journalists.

It also said it had observed several killings in the days leading up to the vote in the regional state of Oromia.

In May, the EU accused Ethiopia of failing to guarantee the independence of its election.

The election was Mr Abiy's first electoral test since coming to power in 2018.

He has clamped down on corruption, released political prisoners, appointed more women to the cabinet and made peace with neighbouring Eritrea, following a 1998-2000 border war that left tens of thousands of people dead.

He won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, but just a year later, he waged a military operation in his own country - deploying troops to the northern Tigray province to oust the TPLF as the region's ruling party after it seized military bases in what Mr Abiy saw as a bid to overthrow him.

The conflict in Tigray has killed thousands of people and led to mass hunger and reports of a famine in the region.

On Saturday, for the first time in two weeks, the UN World Food Programme began moving aid into Tigray. Different sides in the conflict have been accusing each other of blocking much-needed shipments.

The UN said on Friday that humanitarian operations were being constrained by the absence of essential services including fuel, telecommunications and electricity.

Extreme heat is building in the western United States, with forecasts of record-breaking temperatures in the states of California and Nevada.

It comes just weeks after another dangerous heatwave hit North America, and the region has experienced the hottest June on record.

California's Death Valley on Friday recorded a high of 54.4C (130F), with similar heat expected this weekend.

Millions of people in the US are under warnings of excessive heat.

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The White House has defended its role in helping to broker a deal that will shroud art deals by President Joe Biden's son in secrecy.

Paintings by Hunter Biden are expected to fetch up to $500,000 (£360,000) apiece at auction this autumn.

Any buyers will be kept anonymous to stop them seeking political influence with the Bidens, the White House says.

But a former White House ethics chief said the arrangement was "very disappointing".

The younger Biden's business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere have often been held up by Republican critics as a conflict of interest for his father, which both Bidens deny.

Hunter is currently facing a federal tax investigation, though he has said he is "100% certain" he will be cleared.

When asked on Friday about the White House's reported role in the art sale, press secretary Jen Psaki said: "After careful consideration, a system has been established that allows for Hunter Biden to work in his profession within reasonable safeguards.

"Of course, he has the right to pursue an artistic career just like any child of a president has the right to pursue a career."

As part of the arrangement, the buyers are supposed to remain anonymous to Hunter Biden - who is a self-taught artist - in order to prevent influence-peddlers seeking to curry favour with the US president.

"I think it would be challenging for an anonymous person who we don't know and Hunter Biden doesn't know to have influence," Ms Psaki said.

But Walter Shaub, who served as ethics chief under President Barack Obama, rejected the White House's claim that the arrangement would ensure transparency.

Mr Shaub, who was an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump, wrote on Twitter: "So instead of disclosing who is paying outrageous sums for Hunter Biden's artwork so that we could monitor whether the purchasers are gaining access to government, the [White House] tried to make sure we will never know who they are.

"That's very disappointing."

Hunter's first solo exhibition and auction is set for October at the George Bergès Gallery in New York.

The gallery describes the oil, acrylic and ink paintings as "a distinctively unique experience that have become signature Biden".

According to the dealer, smaller pieces are set to sell for $75,000, with the larger ones expected to reach half a million dollars.

The younger Biden, 51, published a memoir in April detailing his struggles as a crack cocaine addict.

Part of Gareth Southgate's success could be his willingness to turn to football outsiders to help prepare his England team. One of these advisers, former Olympian Matthew Syed, argues there's a lot the rest of the world can learn about this approach.

If there is one universal truth about human psychology, it is that we love being surrounded by people who think just like us. The Ancient Greeks called it "homophily" which means "love of the same". It was Plato who warned "birds of a feather flock together".

In some ways, this is the story of the England football set-up for the last three decades, the squad run by a true "footballing man" advised by other "footballing men". The idea is that if you get knowledgeable football chaps in a room, you will maximise the amount of knowledge - and thereby find a way to win matches.

This is why when Sir Clive Woodward - a world-class rugby coach - was appointed as an assistant coach at Southampton FC a few years ago, there was uproar. "But he's a rugby person", football insiders said in horror.

"If Harry Redknapp - the coach of Southampton at the time - needs advice, what is wrong with, say, Tony Pulis or David Pleat (both English based football coaches)? They are experts on football!"

The curious thing about these arguments is that they are, on the surface, persuasive. It is true that Pulis knows more about football than Woodward. But do you see the problem? Redknapp already knows what Pulis knows. They were each socialised into the assumptions of English football: a way of setting up tactically, diet, recovery, you name it. They are, if you like, intellectual "clones".

If you put Redknapp, Pulis and Pleat in a room - all good footballing men - you would have high individual knowledge, but you would also have collective uniformity. You would have an echo chamber. They would reflect each other's assumptions back to each other. It would be comfortable, chummy and consensual. It would also be monolithic and non-creative.

This tendency is a problem that extends beyond English football. When the CIA was founded in 1947, it hired brilliant analysts, but they also happened to look similar - white, middle-class, Anglo Saxon, Protestant males.

The recruiters, doubtless subconsciously, were influenced by homophily. As the academics Milo Jones and Philippe Silberzahn put it: "The first consistent attribute of the CIA's identity from 1947 to 2001 is homogeneity in terms of race, sex, ethnicity and class background."

The same is true of many of the big tech firms such as Google which, a decade or so ago, wondered why innovation had dried up, despite hiring so many brilliant software engineers.

They then realised that they were hiring people from similar universities who had learned under similar professors and had absorbed a similar range of concepts, heuristics and models. They were "clones" of each other. Only when they started looking beyond their usual horizons, reaching out to different universities and social networks, did things change.

Gareth Southgate, the England head coach, has followed a different approach, opening himself up to new ideas from the outset.

One source of these ideas is the FA Technical Advisory Board, an eclectic group that has been advising on performance in regular meetings since 2016.

Members (all unpaid volunteers) include Sir Dave Brailsford, a cycling coach, Colonel Lucy Giles, a college commander at the Sandhurst Military Academy, the Olympic rower Kath Grainger, Manoj Badale, a tech entrepreneur, the rugby coach Stuart Lancaster and David Sheepshanks, mastermind behind the St George's Park national football centre.

At first, football insiders were horrified by this group, with negative articles appearing in the British press. We are not "footballing men". But this is why the group is capable of offering fresh insights on preparation, diet, data, mental fortitude and more. This is sometimes called "divergent" thinking to contrast it with the "convergence" of echo chambers.

"I like listening to people who know things that I don't," Southgate told me. "That's how you learn."

Southgate has also assembled a diverse group of coaches in Graeme Jones, Chris Powell and Martyn Margetson - individuals who have deep but very different experiences of the game. And, just as importantly, he's keen to listen to them: the moment England score, the celebration is curtailed so that Southgate can gain the input of Steve Holland, his assistant.

These diverse coaches are not rebels in the sense of seeking to disrupt the team. Rather, they are rebels in the sense of injecting fresh thinking which helps everyone perform better.

The tragedy is that people in echo chambers often don't even realise they are trapped. This is a point made by the novelist David Foster Wallace, who tells a story that starts in a fish tank. "There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'"

Wallace's point is that when we are surrounded by people who think the same way, we can overlook the obvious. Classic examples include Blockbuster, which missed the opportunities of the internet despite dominating the movie rental business, and Kodak, which was so fixated on print photography that it never took the opportunities afforded by digital.

The CIA missed an entire series of threats due to its clone-like recruits. A few more rebels could have changed everything. It wasn't until after the 9-11 attack that the CIA started to broaden its intake.

Of course, diversity shouldn't be pursued frivolously. If Brailsford, Giles, Badale, Grainger et al were advising not on football performance but how to design the Large Hadron Collider, they would be ineffectual. Introducing outsiders for the sake of it rarely works. The key is to bring people together whose perspectives are both relevant to the problem, and which are also different from each other. This maximises both "depth" and "range" of knowledge - leading to "collective intelligence".

The England football team haven't won the Euros, and there's a long way to go. But the power of diversity is beyond dispute, central to the strategies of many of the most cutting-edge institutions.

Echo chambers may be comfortable but they are inherently self-limiting. In the post-pandemic age, with the world changing faster than ever, it is diversity that unlocks the key to success.

Matthew Syed is author of Rebel Ideas: the Power of Diverse Thinking and represented Great Britain in table tennis at two Olympic Games